I've had good experience ordering hummingbird plants from Plant Delights although I buy salvias from Colonial Creek Farm. I'm basically in the same geographic zone as you. The small salvias I planted in spring grew robust, three feet tall and three feet wide. I'm trying to have them stay in the ground this winter hoping they will survive under mulch, sheltered by a fence. I do not have unheated space to overwinter. If they don't survive the winter I will try grow lights next year. I sure hope we don't have a harsh winter.

This is from the front jacket: As our story opens, a horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. As Jacob explores its abandoned bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that Miss Peregrine's children were more than just peculiar. They may have been dangerous. They may have been quarantined on a deserted island for good reason. And somehow-impossible though it seems-they may still be alive. I almost finished the book last night. The first half of the book is much better than the last, but I still want to know what happens in the end and will have to take it to work with me to read on my breaks tonight.

kathy t - I think that's a fabulous idea. My mother died nine years ago -- one week after 9/11. And just yesterday, as I was walking up the stairs to my bedroom, I thought "I should call Mom." If only I could. We held a memorial service for her in my brother's backyard a month or so after she died. My niece worked with a friend to put together a wonderful video of my Mom's life with pictures of her and my dad, all six of her kids, her 13 grandkids, and two great-grandkids. She also included some music that meant something to all of us. It was truly amazing, and I've watched it many times. This is a quote from C.S. Lewis, that I may have gotten from RP, that really sums up how I feel about the loss of my mother: "With my motherÂs death, all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like AtlantisÂ" C.S. Lewis And as Edna St. Vincent Millay put it: "The presence of that absence is everywhere."

Yes, Oly, there is that side too and I'm sure I was thinking about that side too as I read it. I think while reading it, and again, it was a long time ago for me as I read it when it first came out, whatever faults there may have been in the storyline, the idea that two women loved and wanted the same baby, and knowing one was going to have to let go, is what made it a sad story for me personally. I don't even recall how it ended but in this moment, just thinking about my own family having bonded with a baby who was not biologically ours, I can't imagine life without her so definitely I could feel for both sides of the story.