Souvenir de la Malmaison would be my first choice since it's beautiful, fragrant and a great rebloomer. It forms a handsome bush which for me has been almost disease-free and has tolerated a lot of heat here. Will you be ordering from the Antique Rose Emporium? They have the largest own-root roses (as they claim) and should give the best results. The five I ordered from them recently are all doing very well. Ingrid

I colored the Mapei premixed grout/adhesive with just basic red acrylic paint. Just a couple of drops. I grouted the heart for big sis first, and then added more grout to my dark pink mix to make a lighter pink for the baby frame. I have used other colors for different grout, and the paint seems to work well, except for black or shades of gray. To get a decent gray, you need too much paint, and then the grout is too watery. For that, I use Rit dye. For the pearls, I popped them in the grout, waited a bit for the grout to harden, pulled them out, and then E6000'd them after the grout was dry. Otherwise, I've had the experience of pearls falling out, which is not good. Also, it is darn hard to grout around pearls.

This is probably something like offering you a bottle of water when your/their basement is flooded, but ... ... quite likely they already have one of those books of maps, about a foot by a foot and a half, that includes the maps of the whole of the U.S. and Canada, as well as individual pages of states or parts of such, cities, etc. Are you adept with fingers, parts of brain, etc. which has meant that you've developed handicraft skills to enable you to make something smallish which they could carry with them, e.g. a wall hanging, "This is the home of Elena and Harry What's- their-name" ... or something like, "We're happily retired ... but busy: spending our kids' inheritance". Can't think of anything more relevant, at the moment. ole joyful

I just received a gift today, a pet supplement that seems to be some kind of practical joke that I have not taken well! I thought it might be a random promotion gone wrong, but Amazon told me it was sent by a person and not a company. They would not give any more details. The only option left that I can see is to deactivate my Amazon account and return any future Amazon deliveries to me unopened, with 'not known at this address' on them, because I will know that they are not something I have ordered. I asked the Amazon chat help person to send this comment to the sender so they don't bother sending me anything else via Amazon. I also asked them to share it with Amazon management but they didn't say anything about that. There is no option to block gifts, i.e. to only received deliveries from Amazon that you have ordered. They need this option in case someone is being harassed, which, in this case, I believe I am. It should be relatively easy to block orders not from your own account, but they said they can't do this.