I wanna see some damn booties! (w/o crack, thank you very much). I suggest using the cable ties electricians use to keep his hands off his feet for the picture... good to see that even the world's most perfect baby gets crabby every so often. :) Sue, my own bout with Lyme involved the worst headache I've ever experienced. It was relentless and went on for a few days. I described it to my boss thusly, "my teeth hurt". It was then that I KNEW something was really, really wrong. You need to be on anti-biotics again! and you really need to keep on alert and follow the directions to the letter. LD is nothing to take lightly; it's absolutely insideous because it's so often misdiagnosed or not fully treated. I'm sad that your summer has been so curtailed by it. But, as all gardeners know, "there's always next year"! I know your open day will be a huge success. You worry too much, sistuh! Yes, Wendy! I would definitely be "up" for a Nutmeg State cruise. Lord knows I need to get the hell outta Dodge before the snow flies, lol. And I DEFINITELY could use the laughs. Yoo-hoo... Saucy? The preliminary layer of new driveway entrance gravel has been spread and it's QUIET here. I can even hear birds chirping. I have one final coat of paint to apply to one of the "man doors", but I'm tired, it's very warm, and I don't feel like it! I have to pay the remaining (mondo) bill for building supplies tomorrow. GULP. I'm growing increasingly irritated by the electrician who has been grossly unreliable about returning phone calls, but he gets one more shot before we find someone else... there're plenty of people looking for work right now... . You'll laugh at me, but we've taken our first tentative step into the world of "automation". Our mortgage is taken care of on the agreed upon date... not check writing, it just "happens". It worked fine the first time... we'll see how the next payment goes... . One down, 179 to go... but we are "rounding up" and paying one "payment" to principal every year. LOL An employee of the ambulance company that transferred Mum found the missing hearing aids in the car they used, after my paniced call to them. I have his name and the address of the company and will have his thank you in the mail tomorrow. It's my chore to write my letter of complaint this weekend, e-mail it to my brother, and have it looked over by the attorney before sending it formally. What is so exhausting is the blase attitude that "UTIs are routine", and that we "expect too much" from the facility; that the care given in a home environment is always better. HUH? jeez, we did it for "free"... they're charging 9K/mo.. Please, my friends, tell me I'm not being unrealistic when I expect that Mum will be free of UTIs, instead of having one every 2 1/2-3 weeks! Is the world really upsidedown and I'm the only one who missed the memo? If I performed as abysmally at work I'd have been fired 7 1/2 yrs. ago. When I screw something up I take responsibility and I FIX IT. I change the way I perform the operation. Is this mindset peculiar to tradesmen, people who work in fields where errors and mistakes are more easily "tracked down"? Right now, though, I want to go outdoors, enjoy the late summer warmth, and look at the devastation and dream about how I would like it to look... You're good, true, and loyal friends. You make me smile and even chuckle when all around me seems so glum. I thank you for that and hope to return the same in time.

An update: Having spoken to a couple of professional growers with extensive experience in aloe culture, I showed them pictures of my plants and was told that mine are indeed a.p., in spite of one plant showing an offset. Phew! In addition I believe it is possible to tell whether a young plant is a lefty or righty, as follows. (I'm told that if you hold your left hand over the center of the plant with thumb pointing straight down, cup your fingers a little, and if the spiral pattern matches the arc formed by your fingers, the plant is a leftie. A right hand spiral is defined by the same technique with the right hand and fingers.) Having defined that, if you look closely at the structure of a leaf on a mature plant, you should see that one edge of the leaf is a simple, sharp "V" shape, while the other edge of the leaf is a sort of flattened/"blunt" angle. A cross section of the leaf would show that the leaf has an outline defined by 4 angles, resembling a single-edged blade. If you are looking at a leaf on the nearest side of the plant, a "sharp" angle on the left edge of the leaf would indicate a right handed plant, as defined above, and vice versa. I think this differential can be observed on plants as small as 4" (~10cm) diameter. Anyway, this is a minor detail, but I enjoyed figuring it out, assuming I got it right. If my observations are wrong, let me know! I attached an article on a.p. culture that was very interesting--great pictures too! Thanks, --Rick in CT Here is a link that might be useful: aloe polyphylla culture and pictures.

Hi :) I'm from Vidin, Bulgaria, Southeastern Europe. Does anyone here still have some free seeds of anything succulent or whatever? :) I really like having exotic and very-strange-looking plants. Here's my address in any case... Borislav Levashki 94 Tsar Alexander II 3700 Vidin Bulgaria You could send me a post card if not... :)

Izzrd,m I'll keep my eye out for hercules. As you said though, I suppose for now if I want the quick trees I should just go with Goliath and any head that falls I can use for another tree. I'm going to be doing the landscaping at a lot of friends and family houses so the more cuttings and fast growing plants the better. I like my little Aeonium" factories". They just keep popping out heads and the more I just keep propagating into new plants ;-) Amazing garden Hoobv. Wow I'd love one like that some day. I had read that the plicatilis has lots of issues with growth, like they get a lot of black lower leaves and prone to rot. Has this been the case with yours? What area of SoCal are you in? Cactuscharris- for some reason I'm not able to purchase the plicatilis on that site, not sure if it's a gliche or if they're just out of that particular plant!!! Cool I was searching google and there are some variagated forms of the aloe trees!! Very cool.. ...so many succulents, so little time (and money!)