Once I make a decision, I do not like to think about any sacrifice I have made. However, when I sprayed, I grew: Mr. Lincoln, Veteran's Honor, Christian Dior, Europeana, Olympiad, and another red I cannot remember now. I had a white circle in the middle of my front yard with Prairie Star, and many flowers inside the circle. Then in front of the house, I had Europeanas and Olympiads. Possibly I had about 7 reds together after a circle of about 10 Prairie Stars. I liked that effect, and now that I do not spray, there are not large roses that have that drama. I do not want to spray, and I want to grow roses, so I learned to dismiss those roses that needed special care, and learn to really love the older roses that had a different (but safer) drama. I miss the old, but love the new. When I see the words, Veteran's Honor, I have fond memories, but now I think of Cramoisi Superieur, Ducher, and my very special SDLM's -- about 9 or 10 of them. I also miss those days when the children were at home, but appreciate their lives now, and have moved on to a different type of lifestyle. I guess this is TMI, but we can always appreciate what we don't have. This is a nice thread for us to dream about what we had, and think about what we now have. Sammy

Wow....all of you can come visit Northern CA and we'll put you to work immediately! - Oxalis pes-caprae is shooting up everywhere - I was sick most of January and just finished pruning the roses back. They've got new growth all over and I even salvaged three beautiful Double Delight roses to make a bouquet with our purple bearded iris that are out now. Actually, out here roses are evergreen. They might lose most of their leaves, but they keep blooming and growing, albeit more slowly. - The calla lilies are starting to flower - Nasturtiums are leafing out everywhere, including in every compost pile where I heaped the dead leaves. I spent two hours yesterday with a shovel turning the small piles into fewer bigger piles. - I had my gardener come over to discuss which plants I wanted pruned back or taken out, because I need to get a few new plants in before what little winter rain we've gotten, stops completely. - I'm picking Meyer lemons twice a week and trying to find people to give them away to, because we should only have planted one for our two-person household. Instead we got enthusiastic and planted three, and it's looking like a good harvest year so that's about 200 lbs. of lemons, way too much for us to use up by ourselves! The only easy months are August and September, when things slow down and all I have to do is water twice a month.

I'll miss our very bright and cheery Cape Cod home which we've decked out south Florida-style with lots of colorful plants and light green paint with white trim. Our house makes us SO happy when we're inside but alas it doesn't so much when we look around and see that we're the only ones keeping up our house. Walks around the neighborhood have become so much of a downer. Our new house is a 20-minute walk to the white sand beaches of the Gulf and the neighborhood is so quiet you could hear a pin drop. It's a tiny old beach house and it's just itching for our cottage touches. I can't wait to see what we'll do with it, so I'll miss our house but look forward to trying out some new landscaping! Jane

I've heard of threads disappearing before, but this is the first time I've encountered disappearing individual messages. Usually it's the mysterious double post, not missing posts. I think some of the weirdnesses that happen are from when people have postable coding errors in the HTML they put in their messages, which leak their open tags into the rest of the page. That's why other boards use BB code instead.