Amen! Time is precious and one should learn this earlier in life, as opposed to later. Definately learn it, even if it is later. Kids think older people have plenty of money as well. I have seen that picture with an old lady who used to live near my mother. Her g'kids were always hitting grandma up for something, and of course she loved giving it to them. Problem was she qualified for food stamps and my folks who were not spring chickens used to go over to her house to repair things and mow lawns, so she wouldn't have to spend what had to do her the rest of her life on those expenses. I am not retired per se, but semi I guess. I have wound down my business to just over a bedlam level. I am also caregiving my elderly mother, more for companionship than necessity. That gives me just a few hours a day to do my own obligations. I won't give up my gardens, chickens, orchard, cooking or anything else what brings me particular pleasure. I just signed up for a university class, and started a quilt I'd wanted to make most of my life. IOW time is very, very precious and I try to use it like I do my money. How can I get the most use out of it, and enjoy it to the max?

Your clematis pictures are wonderful, Carol, thanks! If anyone should spill coffee on their keyboard (not the computer itself), the thing to do is to immediately - as quickly as you can move! - unplug it from the back of your computer. Then immediately wipe up all the coffee you can externally, and take the keyboard to the nearest sink. Get warm water flowing there, and rinse the keyboard over and over, angling it in different directions each time. Eventually, with all the shifting around, you'll get to the point where you'll imagine that every spot on the inside of the keyboard has been rinsed and rerinsed well. At that point, hold the keyboard on end, let it drain as much as it's going to while you stand there, and take it to lean against a wall where there's an air conditioning/heating outlet that can blow dry the keyboard. If you don't have that kind of central heat and AC, then get out a fan and direct it onto the keyboard. (Don't use anything with very hot air like a hot hair dryer for this.) After about half a day, flip the keyboard to the other end, and continue letting the fan push air into the keyboard through all the crevices around each key. After a day or two of this kind of treatment, it ought to be dry inside, so you can plug it back in then. Guess how I know this??? Not once, not twice, but maybe half a dozen or more times is my spilled-coffee keyboard record. Anyway, this method has never failed to work for me - every time. I've used this method on the older kind of Mac keyboards and the newer slimmer boards as well. Under no circumstances use the keyboard for even a single stroke once the coffee is inside; doing so might result in an electrical short and then the keyboard will be kaput. Oh, and yes, I have a backup keyboard for those spilled coffee times. Any coffee lover needs a backup keyboard! Or any lover of tea or whatever. I spilled a hot lemon spiced concoction the other day, and was just lucky it didn't spatter onto the keyboard, but ran all over the carpet instead... I've never spilled coffee on the inside of a computer, other than once on a Powerbook where the keyboard part was the only part affected and I could remove it to treat it separately. (You must have been doing something out of your desk chair to accomplish that feat? It sounds horrible!) I've done some installations on the inside of some desktop Macs and don't see why you couldn't (probably) do a cleanup there right away too, as soon as you've had the coffee spill. Try to ground yourself when you do anything inside your computer, and then just touch a metal part of the case before touching anything else on the inside. Take out the battery first before doing anything else. Then if you've managed to spill coffee on the hard drive, that's the spot you want to go to as soon as possible, in case it's still on the external case that holds the hard drive and hasn't run any father yet. (The hard drive will be the thing inside a largish metal box with sizable cables going into and out of it.) The reason to do it yourself, even if you don't mind paying someone else, is that you're better off if you can dry and rinse, rinse and dry the wet spots yourself, before they start to eat into the tiny wiring on the inside of your computer's external housing. And you could use several clean sponges for the "rinse" in the case of a computer spill; no need to hose it down. You'd need to allow a couple of days for it to dry, but if you have some pressurized air to direct at the spill locations, you can speed this up. If the battery also got some spillage on it, be sure to wipe that clean too. (Do pay attention to which direction it is headed on which end so you can put it back properly.) None of the above about going inside the computer's box applies to a computer like an iMac or other all-in-one kind of upright flat computer. They'd be exceptionally hard to spill coffee on the inside of them, though. Best wishes, Mary

I am a University of California Cooperative Extension Master Gardener in Sacramento, and it's a great program, dedicated to promoting Integrated Pest Management, efficient irrigation (critical in our drought), growing edibles, and water efficient landscapes. Our MG coordinator doesn't emphasize roses because she feels that is what the American Rose Society does with their consulting rosarian business. However, I've capitalized on the fact that four of the UC Davis "Arboretum All-Star" landscape plants are roses - three of which are OLD roses - Iceberg, Perle d'Or, Mutabilis and Pink Gruss an Aachen, and worked to integrate roses with our program. We've planted PdO, Mutabilis and White Pearl in Red Dragon's Mouth in our MG demonstration garden, and I've been invited to speak a couple of times to them about the cemetery garden and a talk that I give, "Old Roses for Modern Landscapes." Without my influence, and a couple of other MGs who are also involved with the cemetery, I'm not sure there would be any awareness of or interest in old roses, but we've been able to make a difference. The amount of awareness and acceptance of roses by the MG programs is really variable. The Calaveras County MG Demo garden has a whole section of found old roses (many of which we also have in the Sacramento cemetery), thanks to a couple of devoted MGs and an interested coordinator who has even come along on rose rustles. In Denver, however, the wonderful roses in Fairmount Cemetery were torn out by the MGs and replaced with a modern water-efficient landscape. Phooey. Grasses and perennials. Not really much more efficient, and much less appropriate to a historic cemetery. Interestingly enough, quite a few commercial landscapes are planted with roses in Northern California. Not Knockout, but other shrub/ground cover roses, and lots of Iceberg. Every In and Out Burger is required to be landscaped with Iceberg per the corporate headquarters! There are miles of banksiae along the freeways. In home gardens, though, they have the bad rap of requiring too much water and too much care. That's why having them on the UCD list is so important. It's incumbent on us to educate and advocate. I do it every single day because I am so passionate about the beauties of the old roses and our cemetery garden! Anita

For any of you who may grow 'Hermosa' on 'Fortuniana' rootstock: It is unique, in my experience, in that it forms an imperfect graft union. The plant grows beautifully for 3-4 years, then one day, completely without warning, in a wind storm, it snaps off cleanly at the union and rolls away like a decorative tumbleweed, leaving a stump of 'Fortuniana' behind. Because of that, we always try to keep a back-up plant in the greenhouses, as an emergency replacement. Of course on its own roots it would not do that. But I put it on 'Fortuniana' since it makes such a nice plant for those few years. I know of no other rose that has that weird habit.