Hi Everyone, I have been 'offline' after a major computer crash...but like a weed, I'm back! The weather is 'iffy' for Sunday. Looks like rain but Sat looks good....I am hoping the weather does what it has been doing to date - not following the forecasts!!! Calagary has sun all week and quite often we get their weather by the weekend - so I am not giving up hope. What do folk want to do? We need to make a firm decision on FRIDAY EVENING - I WILL POST ON FRIDAY for the weekend. All of those attending - please email me through my members page - I would like to make a distribution email to everyone for Friday evening so people know exactly what is going on. I will also supply my phone number via email only to registered members so you can call me if you are not sure what is going on. RAIN OPTION WOULD BE TO HAVE THIS ON SATURDAY IF THERE ARE ENOUGH PEOPLE INTERESTED. (You would have to go on without me! Sniff....) Please email me this week so I can ensure everyone knows the details. Cheers, McPeg

> I'm trying to tell my girls that I need emerald green, the color of pastures and fields. They think I should be "pastel". Pah. What do kids know? That pastel thing does seem to be something we go through and grow out of. I guess it takes a real woman with a certain experience like thee and me to handle strong colours! Do you know, a jewel-like green was what I had originally in mind when I went fabric shopping before I fell for that red.... >> I love the way you did just what you wanted and made your wedding your own. There's aplace for tradition, I suppose, but we should all make our own traditions as we feel comfortable doing. Indeed. And we did follow many traditions. But for us it was important to think about the origins of them --- why they got to be traditions and whose traditions they are. In many cases some things that people think of are long and important "traditions" turn out actually to be pretty recent, at least in the context of how long folks have been getting married! (The white dress thing was started by Queen Victoria, for example. And the couple processing *together* as we did turns out to in fact to be a very old tradition; in fact, even the current official Catholic ritual (don't know about any other denominations) gives several options, NONE of which calls for the groom waiting at the altar while the bride's father "gives" her away. But I LOVED exchanging rings --- the symbolism of eternity in the circle is lovely. And we had a unity candle, a lovely newer Catholic tradition. We wanted a toast (who couldn't use all the good wishes anyone can offer them?) but R. doesn't like champagne that much and a good one was beyond our budget, so we toasted with the local apple cider, available in both alcoholic and non-alcoholic versions. And so on. >> Elery thinks we should write our own vows. I wonder if "you're only second in my heart to my horse" is appropriate. (grin) After all, he IS working on that number one spot..... Hee, hee. Well, I think it is very good to keep him working on it! After all, he who is #2 tries harder. ;-) Vows are one place where we surprised ourselves. I am a professional writer and editor, and assumed that of COURSE we would write our own vows. But as we looked at the standard Catholic version, we found that it said pretty much everything we wanted to say. So we did end up going with "tradition" there, though I have heard some very lovely and meaningful own-written vows, too. We did draft a few words for when we exchanged rings, for which DH's first suggestion was [deep, menacing voice] "I have you now, bwah hah hah hah." I think he was a bit startled when I called his bluff and started to write that down.... ;-) I know you will do things just right for YOU, when the time is right. (Wondering if you can involve the backhoe somehow....?) ;-) Zabby

How weird the timing of this post is, to me. We've owned our house for four and a half years, and two weeks ago I got a knock on my door in the middle of the afternoon. I answered, to find a very drunk young man (mind you it was only one o'clock!) swaying there, asking who the h%!! GAVE me my house!?! I politely informed him that nobody gave me my house, I bought it four years ago. He went on and on about how it should have been given to him and how he was going to get a lawyer and take my house away, because the house that he HAD been given was "not as good" as this one....blahblahblah. This guy did not scare me, he does not have the power to take my house away, and had already been to several lawyers who told him so. A bit of history: I bought my house in 2003, before which it had sat on the market for seven (!!) years. When I bought it, I was told only that this one and another house across town had been left to my seller as part of an estate. Then a few months after papers were signed, my husband and one of my boys went to a yard sale down the street and they were told that the original owner had died and instead of leaving his house to family, he left it to the guy across the street (which is who I bought it from.) They said there were hurt feelings over this, and that there were several family members that would not visit them because they would have to pass my house. I thought that was really weird, to be brought up like that, but I never heard another thing about it. Until now. This guy was yelling and cussing in front of my children (which I was finally able to shut down) but I sat out there and talked to him for a few minutes, mostly because I felt bad that somebody would ruin their life over the greed and jealousy over what amounts to not being given a present! I mean, obviously everything had always been handed to him, because in talking to him, he had no idea what it meant to work for what you have. He was driving a brand new black Corvette, which he left running for the entire half an hour he was here, drunk off his butt, going on and on about how much money his family had, and that he should have been given my house. I did mention that my house was on the market for seven years before I bought it, and if he had really wanted it, he could have bought it during that time. He yelled "Why would I need to BUY it, it was already paid for?!?" I mean, the entire concept simply escaped him, and I thought what a waste! He was no older than 25, and that's stretching it, I think. To be that bitter and that useless of an individual really saddened me. It made me glad that we don't have much money to just hand our children all that they want, they will have to have work ethic. The sense of entitlement coming from that useless young drunk was just astounding.

Hi Spatz, thanks for reminding me of the variety, I would love some seeds from Jaune Flamme, I have just been to visit my mum and I'm pretty sure I can scam a bit of space in her garden for some more varieties, though i haven't really told her that yet, ha ha - I managed to get her to grow a broad bean cover crop without having to reveal my sneaky 'surrogate' tomato patch plan *snickers loudly*. I was wondering if I could trouble you for some seeds of some cherry varieties as well? I was going try a few different coloured cherries in pots this year. I was just looking at Finbars recipe above and noticed the cavalo nero reference, now I have been looking for seeds of this for a while and was talking to the woman at the market who grows heritage seedlings and she informed me that cavalo nero is more often sold as lacinato kale, which I have had seed to all along! Can anyone confirm this for me? I did an internet search, from this I learnt that Cavalo Nero is most definately a type of kale but I'm still not sure if it is actually Lacinato. cheers, mudlark