The gift of gab is most certainly a trait common to most gardeners, especially when it involves their particular interests. Start talking to me about my gardening interests and I will bore you to tears. :-) The main reason for my original post is that I ended up in a few trades where I got the impression that feelings got hurt because of poor communication. I simply did not understand completely what they wanted or were offering, and may have gotten a bit curt in my emails. When 6 emails have gone back and forth and I still do not know with certainty what is going on, I admit I start to lose patience. It is just a seed trade after all. I feel like dropping the whole thing but I do not want to hurt any feelings by doing that. So I plod through it until it is completed to their satisfaction. And yes, my emails do get long winded at times. But my experiences have taught me to spell out every detail regarding what is expected of me and my trade partner. One reason I do this to get it recorded in the back and forth email correspondence so either trade partner can refresh one's memory at a glance of what has been discussed or agreed on. The second reason is to reduce the amount of back-and-forth emails (this has worked well). The third reason is to help inexperienced trade partners so that they have a fun, hassle-free trading experience with me. I now must stop for I am again being rather garrulous. ;-) Thanks for your comments, NancyPlants and Sue. My goodness - I posted the original comments back in November. Seems like ages ago...I can't seem to stop talking...winter storm watch for Sunday...got my impatiens seeded...maple syruping season starts in a couple of weeks...dishwasher broke down yesterday... -Tom

Hi, Someone told me about "myrecipes.com so I emailed to ask if the entered recipes could be kept private. Here is their reply: "If you enter personal recipes in your account, you can mark them Public or Private. Also, your account is password protected. So recipes you save from our site--and your own personal recipes--cannot be touched by anyone else. Thank you for using MyRecipes.com" Have any of you tried this site? One requirement is that if my computer crashes I won't lose everything (Yes that happened about 15 years ago and I still have nightmares) Thank you for all the suggestions. I am in my 70's and can work a computer ok, but cannot make it dance and jump, so I want to keep it simple. Monica

First, just go up to the right hand corner and log out. You will them see a way to log in or Join now. You will need to use a different email address than the one tied to your existing member name. Once you are all set up with your new name, you can then contact GW via the Contact Us link found at the bottom of any page, and ask that your old member name be deleted. Things will probably have to go through the overnight batching (or something like that) before your mew member page will come up via a search. hth. Sue

Yes...I had trouble back in my earlier days on GW and despite my reporting the offender to Spike, the unsolicited, nasty ems and stalking persisted for a long time...even though the offender was banned from that particular forum. Thus, I gave up posting in the GW forum that I attended on a daily basis and permanently blocked my em address from all GW member contact. It was a rather unnerving experience. It spoiled my participation to the point that I left GW altogether for a few years. Today, I've found that if I'd like to privately communicate with a particular KT member they usually have published their em address and I use their contact info...making sure that I put the fact that I'm a KT member in the subject line of the email in the event that they may not want to make personal contact outside of the KT forum. Then, if they accept my em, they have my em address from my communication...and we can go forward from there. I'm pretty "seasoned" when it comes to computers so my experience was not from lack of computer knowledge/protocol. I later learned that the offender had a reputation for this type of behavior but that didn't lessen the bad taste the whole experience left in my mouth. Today I err on the side of caution. Anne