I sincerely hope to hear from you and I really effing hope it's for the better,

courage....

You will be missed.. Big holiday?, work, trip? health?

In truth, a combination of factors. I'll know a whole lot more about the health-wise angle after tomorrow. Will be glad to have that day behind me. Also, yes, some travel, though not until the first of the year. And just an interruption in my daily schedule until late January. Thanks for inquiring.

+oM

Good luck to you, Tom. Happy holidays and hurry back - we will miss your contributions.

Well, this just stinks. I hope everything goes well and you don't get mowed down by a lot of ignorant but well meaning prairie enthusiasts while absent, that the travel part is fun and especially that the health matter goes well.

I also hope I'm still around when you get back after surviving my piss being boiled, a case of rabies from a hackberry bite and falling off a ladder. Hopefully its not too late for rabies shots. Learning from the dog next door, I'm now considering digging a hole under the fence with a bottle of Tree-b-Gone in hand so thats one danger out of the way.

Seriously, good luck and hope all does go well. We'll miss you.

Much thanks to you all. I really appreciate your kindness and concern. Martha, I may well take you up on that offer, but first, I need to get through the next couple of days. Did a CT scan this morning, and of course, now I'm enjoying the wait for results!

+oM

Tom, We appreciate all your contribution here, as well as the great attitude you have. Will keep you in my prayers. Hope to see you back soon!

Thanks Joe and all. So, first the good news! It appears I don't have lung cancer. Yes, that is quite a relief. And while I'm not a true user of tobacco products these days, my past is, shall we say, a very checkered one. Not too many nooks and crannies of existence I haven't explored! Smoking a cig would be the least of it. So we'll just leave it there.

I do have some challenges ahead of me in the health department. Not sure who said it but whoever it was, they were a genius, in coining the phrase "Getting old isn't for wimps"! At 59, I'm getting my first tinge of the meaning behind that sentiment.

Other than that, it does appear I'll be able to continue more or less in my usual fashion here and elsewhere. Going to be down in SW Florida next month and I hardly ever touch a computer when down there (don't have a smart phone) so things will be tapering off for a bit. But otherwise, doing well, thank you.

+oM

hooray hooray, hooray...and I'll say it again, hooray! Have a great time in the sun - loafing, idling, meandering and generally slacking off. And have a bloody good Crimbo without the big C hanging over your head. As for checkered pasts - they make you the interesting tolerant person you are today - no regrets.

Cheers, Suzy - look forward to intensive grilling after the holidays...re.flooding, ditch management etc. etc. because I am fairly certain that my current method (ignoring it) is going to smack me round the head one day very soon.

Good news Tom

PHEW, glad you dodged that bullet.

I never travel with a computer and am still toting a dumb phone, being the luddite that I am. I like being out of touch and on the road. It is absolutely liberating.

Tom, that is really good news!! And I'm sure you must be hugely relieved and can now enjoy your time away without that hanging over your head. As they say, getting old is hell but sure beats the alternative!!

Most of us of a certain age that grew up in the 60's and 70's have a checkered past :-) It was part of the culture of the time. When I look back at that time, it's a bit of a wonder some of us are still here at all - LOL!! Personally, I attribute my own checkered past and less than ideal habits......some of which remain with me today.......to be the reason I am as healthy as I am (if nothing else, it is a good justification to continue). Seldom ever get colds or the flu and no serious health issues other than the usual aging infirmities - the eyes are going, teeth need more attention and the stamina and energy level of previous years has dwindled. I can still get down on my hands and knees in the garden when necessary but it gets harder and harder to get back up!!

Can relate to all of that, gal! Including generally being very healthy and spry. This has been the major health happening for me going back, well...oh yeah, there was that other thing too.....oh never mind! But for the most part, have had really good health "metrics" as they say. Don't doubt I've put some wear and tear on quite a few parts by now though!

+oM

GOOD GOOD NEWS! I've known that feeling of terror followed by relief.

I have to wonder how we ever survived our youth which lacked being barraged by prescription drug sale ads, extensive health education, miracle fast fix cures, plastic surgery, eternal youth potions, special interest groups, unhealthy habits and the lack of supervision but oh what fun it was. Kids these days are so over protected, seems everywhere and everything presents danger. For example, whenever the subject of poisonous plants comes up I do an eyeball roll but then I grew up in a very small town in the 50's and 60's. I wouldn't trade my childhood memories with kids today for anything, not even youth. I'm still as active as I ever was, don't feel any different than I did 20 or 30 years ago and refuse to give into the age deal. Its going to have to drag me down into the pit unaware but I believe you really are as young as you act and its best to not dwell much on age. As for smoking--for crying out loud--who didn't smoke back then? I'm so sick of the endless anti-smoking rhetoric taken the extremes of third hand smoke warnings. We've come to be seen as a generation of people to to look back at in disgust who should now suffer having a guilt complex hanging over our well deserved heads. I refuse to apologize.

I can remember when it was still OK to flirt in the workplace without legal action being taken back when I was a draftsman for oil and gas companies and we all knew what was ridiculous and what was serious. I am becoming more interested and attracted to studying history than ever before, so many ideas seem so repetitively unpalatable, self absorbed and impossible to swallow these days.

Oh yes.......times have changed :-) My mom smoked and drank (just a single evening cocktail or two) all through her three pregnancies and none of us developed birth defects or fetal alcohol syndrome (although my older brother IS a bit strange but we attribute that to other factors - LOL!). If a woman tried that now, the pregnancy police would be on her like white on rice!! And I remember walking unaccompanied into town for the free Saturday kids matinees at an early age without fear of kidnapping or pedophiles lurking behind every corner. Also used to ride my bike all over hell and highwater without concern. Now kids are not even permitted to walk to school without adult supervision!

I also remember a few episodes from my college days that presented some personal judgment options that would be considered major no-no's in this day and age. And maybe for good reason, all things considered, but today's kids are so protected and coddled and kept away from many real life experiences that they are growing up without developing good judgment, seldom encountering any situations that would require it until adulthood. No sense of personal responsibility..........

But I digress and this is all a bit OT. Progress and modern living is not always a positive improvement..........:-))

Sure wish I could find one point to disagree with above! But I can't. In particular, the way so much of today's youth is shuttled from one planned activity to another, then another, with nary a moment of self-actuation ever allowed to creep in....I really worry about what we're creating.

Was at a workshop of an invasive plant coalition a while back. Great meeting. Towards the end of the session, things turned to "what must be done" to get today's kids interested in the outdoors, in nature, so that they would someday care about all the things that are happening. One after another thoughtful person got up and told the group about how "we must take the kids out" into nature, how "we must accompany them in various activities to whet their appetites for all this stuff. Finally, I had had enough and gave my interpretation-that we simply must make wild areas accessible to kids, and for gawd's sake, let them be! We played in the woods and fields every day. Our moms never knew where we were until supper time! This is how you learn-by goofing off on your own with your friends, not by always having some dumb adult bumbling along!

One final item-a friend who I'd not seen in years suddenly popped back into my life some time back. He'd married (I knew his wife from way back too) and they and their son now lived on a "wooded lot" here in this town. I visited and we had a great time reminiscing and all. When I commented on the nice woods out back, they informed me that "Mason"-not the boy's real name-was never allowed to go out there. You know...poison ivy! Needless to say, my head quietly exploded...er..imploded. Did not want to create a scene, but that was just about the dumbest little sentence I'd ever heard. I asked-'is there any poison ivy out there'? Of course, neither of these adults had any idea. What a world.

+oM

OH god POISON IVY. Isn't plant identification a good lesson to teach a child in a moment like this? Man My mother let us run wild in the jungles of Siricha Thailand and the streets of NYC. Maybe a bit too much , but I am here with health mostly in check, wielding my 16" chainsaw with glee, hanging off of rocks, hiking and other activities consumed with risky sharp things.. And YES , I was a bad girl during the 60's and 70's and 80's..... Slow learner here. Kids are Nature deprived and common sense deprived because they have never had to weigh the possibilities in front of them. Knowledge comes from incremental damages. I seem to have lived fine with cobras and Krates in the vines outside the Bangkok house. And I survived all those street gangs in in South Philly. I deal with snakes and spiders that can do way more damage than poison ivy. That couple is raising a wimp. Have you heard about this movement that is sweeping the colleges, where the creation of "Safe Space" is more important than Free Speech. Google "Social Justice Warriors". Yale was brought to a standstill because a professor said that he didn't see that his job included policing Halloween costumes. It is full of young adults "catastropisimg" over details. They can not respond accordingly to really minor affronts. Really weird. I personally think that this could blow up into a red Guard kind of movement.

Aw heck GG, I think you are dead on concerning the topic. I know the feeling of sitting in the doc's office knowing the doctors and nurses would subtly let me know I deserved whatever it was I was fearful of befalling my guilty head. Yep, I smoked, I've sat there feeling guilty, dreading having to make the admission to the doc in front of the nurse and knowing by golly I deserve it, cruddy person that I am. Just listen to the TV ads on second hand smoke turning guilty people into social pariahs who deserve to die. I know judgmental looks when I see them.

We get endless messages a hundred times a day that put excessive focus on prevention as if each and every single bad possibility can be avoided if only we educate correctly, are very cautious and take the necessary steps to prevent each possibility. Its the reason there's so many rules, so many prescription drugs being dispensed, new regulations, prohibitions, health warnings and the mountain of bureaucracy we are being buried under and why kids don't venture anywhere in nature unattended and wouldn't know a garter snake from a rattler. Its why people become paranoid if the berries on a certain shrub could possibly poison their grandkids in future or the neighbor kids. They don't want to be a murderer so they dig out any possibility or like Tom indicated, forbid entrance into some woods. Back in the day, we were not dumb enough to eat berries off a holly or chew on most types of plants.

We did like to eat those sour tiny pickle looking things on sour clover coming up in the weedy yard however and suck the nectar out of honeysuckle flowers. Its a wonder we lived into adulthood.

We used to play in the tall grass at the farm and pretended all kinds of things. When it rained we lit up with excitement because that meant tadpoles in the puddles. We hunted and caught garter snakes, box turtles and horny toads in the alleys and picked up any other interesting critter we'd find. We caught jars full of fireflies. We planted castor bean plants and were fascinated that they had poison seeds, that and the size was the cool part of that. We searched for 'pink' along creek banks to know which were branches of Tamarix trees so we could make fishing poles to catch perch but it was more fun to net minnows or crawdads. Next door there was a rock hound and we followed him around while he told us about all the different rocks, the whole yard was piled with rocks to play in.

I agree Tom, no telling what kind of generation is being raised when it comes to appreciating nature.

Yes, I too was a child of nature and disappeared into the woods for hours, with my parents having no idea where it was I went. I survived fine, and I can tell one snake from another and poison ivy from other things (unlike many of my peers).

Yes, I guess wild childism is old school now :(

dBarron, it is not Old school it is child cruelty now and a basis for bringing the parents in to be castigated by the child police for criminal child neglect. We are raising future criminals, don't ya know.

And the sad thing is, it is not really the kids' fault, although they are the ones that will grow up with the lack of adequate decision making skills.........it's the parents! I seriously worry about the intellectual acuity of many adults of a 'middle' generation - younger than us but old enough to produce offspring. Despite whatever high priced educational opportunities they may have received, a dumber bunch of citizens is hard to imagine!! As the current political climate would indicate. OMG!! I despair for the future of this country if these buffoons lacking even basic common sense have their way. But of more immediate impact is what their ignorance (or fear, which generally comes from ignorance) is doing to these kids.........besides creating another generation of fearful dummies. Why is it that the more information we have at hand, the stupider we all seem to get (using the royal 'we' there!)?? We see it all the time on these forums, with folks asking the most basic gardening questions that could be answered with a lickedy-split Google search. I mean, they must have found the forums somehow..........cannot they do even simple research themselves or must everything be hand delivered or spoon fed?

As an example of the lack of smarts, my stepdaughter's mother - admittedly several bricks short of a load - had a fit when I took the little one, then of school age (she's about to turn 25), for a ride in my old Fiat Spyder with the top down. She was convinced that riding in the open air was going to give her a cold or otherwise make her sick. I mean......really????

And yes, I am making broad generalizations - some of those referred to
above are certainly sharp as tacks - but the general dumbing down of
this country is sure obvious to me. I see clear evidence of it on the news every day.

Don't hold it against me but I still can't discern poison ivy from some other similar looking vines. I never got 'woods-wise' and don't know much about the flora and fauna in wooded areas in general, I'm as dumb on this as anyone, besides, for some reason I don't like to go into such places, its too dense looking and I always feel paranoid like something will drop down on my head or crawl down my shirt or I will just get lost and tangled up in a thicket of thorny, vining undergrowth which always seems to growing thick in wooded places around here. Its probably my luck I've brushed against P. I. but haven't been exposed enough times to break out in a rash but at least I don't freak out at the sight of a snake, spider or a bug not to mention mice. I definitely know a black widow spider when I see one or a brown recluse spider. Black widows really do look dangerous and I don't think anyone would fail to know what it is when they finally see one no matter how many black fuzzy spiders they've seen and wondered whether or not it was a widow in the past. I've found a few black widow spiders here in my yard and used to work for the Park Dept in Ponca City where brown recluse spiders inhabited the bathroom. Brown recluse are fairly harmless looking and don't instill the instinctive primal fear on sight like a black widow does.

What we are seeing more and more is an attempt to monetise nature with 'forest schools' and other nature deprivation initiatives - kinda sad but when the majority of children are growing up in an urban environment, exposure to nature often has to be 'managed'. The statistics for child abductions, even road accidents have largely held steady for the past 40 years and yet parent's perceptions are often, through no fault of their own, completely skewed. I certainly can sympathise with parents of young children and am pleased I no longer have to negotiate the pitfalls of modern life with youngsters in tow. I will say though, I do not have a pessimistic view of youngsters - they are not the ones coming out for the idiot Trump for example...and since this generation is likely to be worse off than their parents (something of a reversal which has not occurred in over a century of 'progress'), I feel they will be forced to have their wits about them or simply fall under the wheels of the life wagon.

Wow, def. touched a nerve here! Great thoughts everybody. Tex, your open plains background and upbringing have shaped your attitudes and understanding of wooded country-no fault in that. I might have difficulty identifying some poisonous (or so-called poisonous) plant species in your area. Doesn't make me a dummy, nor does your relative lack of experience with the plant I mentioned make you one. It's just down to what set of experiences and so on we had and were exposed to earlier in our lives.

As to the various generations' attributes, I'm torn between bleak pessimism and guarded optimism when it comes to "the millennials". I do like that these people-as a group-are far less hung up on race, sexual orientation, and a handful of other innate human attributes than probably any other previous generation. There's reason for hope there. But I'm also right there with Gal, wondering about the parents of all these people, instilling fear at every turn. I thin it is that fear that will be our undoing. Take the San Bernardino massacre, a most heinous occurrence. Yet it has zero chance of upending us, destroying our country, ending ur way of life, any of the pablum you hear coming out of various fools who think they should be the president of this country. Utterly out of proportion to the actual threat. Since that happened, hundreds-perhaps thousands of Americans have been shot to death. But to hear these idiots on TV tell it, we've never had our backs against the wall like we do now. Such nonsense, yet it is driving the policy debate.

The couple who wouldn't let their boy play in the woods out back are, IK'm afraid, of the same age class as I am. They did come from a more urban background and it is that factor I think that has driven their utter estrangement from nature. I was lucky to have grown up where and when I did. But what's the use of "being lucky" if later, all you see around you is ignorance?

In fact, it has been my own generation and perhaps the ones immediately following that called for "tough on crime", for "truth in sentencing" and all the rest. Really, the biggest bunch of babies and hypocrites I've ever seen. It's as if nationally, we've suffered some kind of mass amnesia, forgetting all the things we ourselves were doing just the other year. So dumb. And all of this fear-based crap is what we've got now for a society. I can't come right out and say it but some of the things I've heard people right around my own age saying are just too stupid to believe. In a way, I think of it as, when we were young, there were the people that seemed cool but they were just there out of peer pressure or doing what they perceived as what you should do. Then there were the true believers, the actual trailblazers, the folks who actually lead us all to innovation and new ways of thinking about things. But you mostly don't gain any advantage by being one of these folks, your head tending to get used as a battering ram to open doors for those too timid to do the work themselves. But in general, I've got very mixed feelings about where we're headed. One thing of real concern though is this estrangement from nature. It's going to do no good to have little "preserves" where future people can look at the collection of trees or whatever. The battle will already be lost by that time.

+oM

I'll delete it off if you guys think its in bad taste but the similarity was instantaneous and has been locked in my head since the beginning.

Imagine a world where the two most powerful persons were Putin and Trump. It ain't funny at that point! We're a non-serious country, yet one in which many hold very tightly to opinions that, in the clear light of day, can easily be shown to be hogwash. But no amount of lighting will illuminate a world where eyes are largely closed.

+oM

A good read 'Amusing Ourselves to Death'. I re-read it every three years or so and it fits the current direction things are taking in the upcoming election. Another good one is 'The Death of Common Sense'. I also like 'Why Johnny Can't Tell Right From Wrong'.

If for no other reason than the titles, I'm going to search out those books at the library :-) Sounds like they might offer a thought provoking break from my usual mystery/thrillers or gardening books!!

I have no issue with Trump speaking his mind - he is entitled to his opinions. What I object to is the manner in which he does so. He is beyond rude, he is bullying and he is bigoted. I could never vote for ANY candidate that openly called his opponents stupid, fools or liars and labels entire ethnicities as rapists, thieves or terrorists - that is just not the way it is done!!

And he may be a successful businessman but that is a very long shot away from being a world leader. We need to hold ourselves and this country to the highest possible standards and he is heading in the absolute opposite direction and if he succeeds in his candidacy (God forbid!!), he will take this country right down the tubes. He knows nothing about foreign relations - that's patently obvious from his rhetoric - and "diplomacy" is concept he has failed to grasp.

I guess politics is a topic best left out of the regular gardening forums (ever visited the Hot Topics forum - yowza!!) but if that man manages to succeed and gets elected, I'm moving to Canada. Or Belize. He terrifies me.

Speaking of childhood dangers -- I remember walking up the street when I was about six to see a copperhead one of the neighborhood kids had caught in the woods nearby. He was older but I doubt more than twelve or so. The snake was in a glass container of some kind -- maybe a goldfish bowl -- with a flat rock on top. There were a bunch of little kids around but no parents anywhere, which was typical of that neighborhood at the time (anyone see the movie "The Ice Storm"?). The real dangers around there were more from the kids than the wildlife. Another kid up the street was trying to make cherry bombs out of gasoline-soaked red Missouri clay.

I didn't learn my lesson about poison ivy/oak until I was 30, after having it seven or eight times, usually bad enough to need steroids. Have you taken the poison ivy quiz?

http://birdandmoon.com/poisonivy/

Wow woodstea, I can't ever remember seeing a copperhead, the poison snakes we saw most commonly were water moccasins (cotton mouth) except probably some of those we saw swimming were probably just brown water snakes. Still if it was a big snake and especially if you saw it swimming, it was a water moccasin in our minds. Bull snakes were seen fairly often and its sad, people often killed them when they were found in the garden. I even saw my grandmother kill a couple. They do look a lot like rattlers (except for the tail). Now that I think about it, maybe she was concerned the snakes would get at the chickens. Who knows, she wasn't much for words beyond "you kids stay back".

Our most dramatic neighborhood kid-find was a giant red headed centipede and it was a really big one too, it filled the whole jar and was really mad and moving a lot in there. A boy came up and hands the jar to me saying "hey look at this" and I toss-dropped it the minute I had it in my hands and saw the vicious looking black and red monster inside, it was huge, shiny black-blue with big bright yellow legs. The jar landed on the grass & didn't break --- boys loved doing stuff like that to girls. Events like this would bring the whole neighborhood of kid-dom together. They were important happenings.

I caught a black widow spider a few years ago, put it in a jar and proudly took it up and down the block to show all the kids, its what we used to do with stuff like that. They loved it and others later came by to see it, nothing changes with kids.

When you think about it, the really dangerous critters looked the part and kids just knew what was not to be just casually picked up or played with by instinct. We don't give kids enough credit these days, I don't think.

My mom , when tired of us, used to say, "why don't you kids go outside and play on the double yellow line". Well, I take things very literally and that always puzzled me. I didn't get it. We lived in the center of Philladelphia and it was an ally way without any yellow lines. A couple of years later , I got it.