Funnily enough, I too, have an idea for next year's bookmark exchange. It's all thanks to the sister I visited at Christmas. She's very crafty and decided to make some bookmarks while I was there. If I don't forget...I am going to utilize one of the designs she made (and gave to me) for the next exchange. Sheriz6, I like your idea for storing bookmarks and am going to look for something similar in which to store mine. Right now, they are in various locations around the house. I want to gather them all together so I can select just the right one for whichever book(s) I happen to be reading at the moment.

The boycott of Ender's Game does raise the issue of how to reconcile your response to a work of art to an artist's behavior. Card's opinions, however, are hardly a secret. He has not just been a recent opponent of same-sex marriage. He has been publicly expressing views against gay people for years. If there is any censorship against Card it must be coming from the movie studio, since his views are clearly going to hit them in their pocketbook. I know of some younger readers who found Ender's Game to be a book with Fascist overtones. Card, however, seems to take any dissent to his views as religious persecution, which to me is like having your cake and eating it too. Even if I was interested in SF, he seems like such a paranoid, neurotic person, I think I would rather just skip his books. It reminds me a bit of all those German opera singers who joined the Nazi party before WWII. After the war, most of the great opera houses would not hire them. Just because someone is an artist doesn't mean that they are absolved from the facing the consequences of their behavior or politics.

Book club and authors - first we pick a place we'd like to go, then we do some research on a local author. We look for someone who lives there, uses that location as the setting for a book, and is not a bestselling author. Bestselling authors are not terribly interested in meeting a group of middle aged women from California, though I do think the group met someone fairly well known before I joined, which was about 8 years ago. This group has been established for quite a number of years. Anyway, when we find a likely prospect we write to them and ask them if we can take them out to lunch to talk about their book. Sometimes they say yes, and those are the ones whose books we buy, read, and then go to visit. We have had wonderful discussions with a number of authors, none of whom are famous. There are some accomplished writers out there producing well-crafted books that do not become well known. Anyway, it ends up being a mutually enjoyable experience, and along the way we explore a city we might otherwise never have seen. It is fun!

Packing peanuts tend to make water perch in the soil above the "drainage layer" and are something of a nightmare at repot time, so I'd discourage you from using them. The ballast you need should allow a continuous column of soil that goes all the way to the bottom of the pot. Notice, in the picture above, that the PWT is the same ht in every picture. No matter if the soil was 12" deep or 12' deep, the PWT would be the same ht for a given soil. Also note how the volume of soil is reduced in C and D, reducing the volume of saturated soil considerable. If you build a ballast system in the bottom of the pot so there is only a VERY small amount of soil that CAN support perched water, you can eliminate it almost entirely. If you go too far and eliminate that soil column that extends to the pot bottom, you don't get the benefit because that causes the water to perch. If you pot up now, you don't want to mix the media in the pot because you'll have parts of the soil that are too wet and parts too dry. Your main purpose for the repot is to use a little science to get rid of the excess water retention until next summer when you can bare-root/repot with little concern about the plant's recovery time, which is an issue now. Yes - the soil I use for my trees is very gritty, which is prolly why people started calling it the gritty mix. The dime is about the same size as your dime. In many ways, it doesn't matter much how you implement the concept of using materials of larger particles to eliminate the limitations imposed by saturated soils, and pumice is a useable component. I probably have 50 ficus trees, and none show any evidence of oedema or any other symptoms of too much water in the rhizosphere, and I water most of them daily in the summer - not particularly because they need it, but because I can w/o concern about over-watering. This is a ficus a week after I defoliated it in July of '14. You can see the soil ...... It grew a lot before I took it in for the winter, so I pruned it back before it went indoors. This is the tree in spring, this year and here it is after defoliation and ready to grow some more I'm not sure where to find soil ingredients in Canada. Fir bark should be easy to find, but you must be careful that you don't buy a product that was ponded in salt water. Quartzite or cherrystone is mined in MN, but I don't know if it crosses the border into Canada. Look for the grit component at rural feed stores or grain elevators that cater to rural populations that raise fowl, and don't use crushed shellfish because of the salinity and high pH. Al