The rose garden at Lincoln Memorial University is no more. Massive losses from RRD due to tolerance of RRD infected multiflora in an unkempt (and unsprayed) field immediately upwind led to lack of bloom. The garden, which according to 'legend' was laid out to remind folks of Lincoln's face in profile as it appears on a penny, is gone, the hillside was regraded and the entrances to LMU changed. Gage Park in Burlington Ontario, below their segment of the Niagara Escarpment, had a huge loss of roses. We only saw it when many, many had been removed. Of the remaining roses, a number of the Hybrid rugosas were covered with small witches' brooms and other distortions. I think they replanted it. The corner of Brooklyn Botanical Garden (IIRC se corner of the area in back of their wooden structure has been replanted. I know of some other gardens that had problems, but they didn't have the disease pressure. Longest eradication was the removal of miles of infected multiflora along a river in southern Nebraska. Saddest was the eradication of three acres of roses in North Platte Nebraska that had comprised Glen Viemeyer's cold hardy breeding program. His asssisstant who still lives in North Platte remembers the day the roses were burned. Viemeyer searched for help in finding out what the problem was. Several well known rosarians told him it was herbicide. He fired back testy letters (I have copies of the correspondences) explaining that he knew what herbicide damage looked like as he had been one of the first people to work with that particular herbicide and what he was seeing in his roses was much, much worse.

From OP: "She pointed to the table and chairs and I went to speak and noticed a bassinet in the corner of the kitchen. I immediately lowered my voice, apologized if I was too loud and sat down. I asked "Babysitting the Grands today?" She walked toward the bassinet and with her finger motioned me to come over. Soon as I got to the bassinet she put her index finger to her lips and did the 'ssshhhh' very quietly. She pulled the blanket away and told me she wasn't babysitting but his was her baby, Joey and that Joey's sister was napping in the other room. Long story a bit shorter --- she showed me Joey's sister, dressed in a really soft, fluffy sleeper, sucking on a pacifier." This is a person blurring reality and her "collection" You don't have to be quite (finger to lips shhhh) if they're dolls. Bread, wine bottles and grapes are not exclusive to vinyards. In fact I have all three here in my little rental hovel and normally have all three in my own home, and we don't grow grapes. We have friends who do own a vinyard, and gosh darn it, they have the same three items in their home. Now to blur reality with fantasy you would need to offer your guess a slice of plastic bread, or maybe sniff the air and wax poetic over the scent of the plastic bread, but just having it sit around isn't blurring reality. Much like doll collectors who have dolls on display. They are enjoying the beauty of the dolls. If they then take them down and have a tea party with them (and they're over the age of say 12) they're having some issues with reality. Now off subject...Organic...DANG YOU!!! Did you beat me to something? :oP I have two of the lovely chocolate ribbed coverlets for my master bedroom. I love them...but must admit, the cats do too and they're getting furry :( I'm going to have to buy something else (but it will be seffra! cuz you've ruined me for anything else). Now I'm going to go talk to my sheets! :oP Back to your regular (goofy) programing ladies!

I also think that the current floor looks fine with the granite. The darker colors in it are similar, but I guess you are focusing on the background being whiter rather than gold. Your cabinets may look better with the current floor. At this point, because the cabinets are in, you could go ahead and finish the kitchen and live with it for a while before deciding whether you still want to replace the cabinets. When we bought our house, it had a tile floor in the kitchen which we had taken out to replace with wood. Demoing it didn't damage our cabinets. I don't think that its terribly unusual to replace the floor with cabinets in place. The flooring company at the time treated it as business as usual. That time, we did engineered wood which was floated over the smoothed out mortar base in the kitchen area. When we remodeled our kitchen, 5 years ago, we kept the flooring. It had recently been refinished. We knew that we wanted to remodel the family room to take out the big rock hearth and we weren't ready to do it at the time. Because the existing fireplace and hearth cover about 4' by 10', it made more sense to replace the floor after we removed that. We're just about to start the family room part of the project which will include replacing the floor in the kitchen, family room and breakfast room. This time we're doing hardwood so they will be doing a full demo of the floor in the kitchen area around the cabinets to replace it with a plywood subfloor so they can nail down the hardwood.

Jennifer, The first time I saw a BP truck at our Wal-mart, which was just last week, it was only delivering wooden shipping crates of BP onions, but then it was back this week delivering a few cool-season herbs and veggies. I'm thinking of those poor little plants right now because our OK Mesonet station is showing a current temperature of 20 degrees and that's pretty much borderline too cold for some of the plants I saw yesterday, especially given how small they are and the fact they are in small containers and not in the ground where soil temperatures could help insulate them from some of the effects of the cold. I hope the garden center employees covered up those plants last night or moved them indoors. While the very early transplant arrivals often do not freeze or have damage at 20 degrees, sometimes they do....and sometimes the damage is invisible and can result in later problems like early bolting or buttonheading of brassicas....and no one links that bolting or buttonheading in March or April to the fact that the plants were exposed to excessively cold temperatures while on the garden center shelves in late January or early February. I'm sorry your mom has the flu and wish her a speedy recovery. I hope whatever you're fighting is not the flu and that you can successfully repel those germs. I carry hand sanitizer in my purse, not that I am obsessive about it, but I hate touching anything in a grocery store at this time of the year for fear that flu and cold germs are lingering everywhere. I wash my hands constantly, and I do not understand how/why people would use a public restroom facility and not wash their hands. I just don't get it. Rebecca, Well, spinach is really cold hardy. Perhaps dew and/or frost have left enough moisture behind to induce germination. We're in severe drought, are awfully dry and have tons of tiny little green things sprouting everywhere now. In fact, the OK Mesonet's Relative Greenness for our county went from 11% last week to 21% this week, which surprised me, but then when I looked at the ground closely, I could see all the tiny green sprouts popping up in fields, and clearly the program (satellite? radar?) that calculates Relative Greenness for each county is 'seeing' that greenup as well. Are any of y'all allergic to cedar (which actually is juniper, but I cannot win that battle on getting people to correctly label it)? Because it is pollinating down here already and everyone who is allergic to it is having allergy symptoms already, including Tim and I. Just yesterday I was looking at cedars in our neighborhood and commenting to Tim how heavily they're covered in pollen, and Fran and I noticed the same thing while out at wildfires in northern Love County a few days ago. A lot of folks who recovered from the flu now thing they are having a relapse or have caught a cold or whatever, and I just wonder if what's actually happening is they are allergic to the cedar pollen. Nancy, We all are so proud of Amber. She's just an awesome person and her students are so lucky to have a teacher who loves them and works so hard to teach them. Everything she does is always for them and about them, so when she was named Teacher of the Year, she was totally surprised because she doesn't think about stuff like that---her focus is completely on her kids. The riding mower is dead.....or dying. It is around 16 or 17 years old and gets used a lot since we mow about 2 acres regularly. I think it really needed to be retired 3-5 years ago, but Tim is a cheapskate who doesn't want to spend the money to buy another one, so he keeps fixing it and keeps it limping along and just barely working. I just kinda wish he'd go ahead and buy a new one and have something reliable. Weekends are too short as it is and he doesn't get much mowing done if half the weekend is spent chasing down parts and fixing the mower. Jen, I bet it was a nice day to go to the dog park. Our dogs spent a lot more time outdoors today in their dog yard than they usually do in the winter, and they were so thrilled that it was mild, sunny and warm. They were exhausted by the end of the day which I always think is a good thing as it does cut down on how energetic they are in the evening. I think Tigger is the perfect name for a dog! I assume the planters you're planting are your winter sowing? Have fun finishing it up. Nancy, That bermuda grass is such a nuisance, and it creeps into the east end of my garden every year in late summer once it is too snaky for me to hand-weed it out. Johnson grass does the same, and it essentially is bermuda grass on steriods. Since I don't use chemical herbicides and since the presence of the rattlesnakes and copperheads makes weeding too risky after a certain point, that sort of invasion just cannot be avoided. It drives me mad. Even if I could hand-remove it, I'm willing to bet that at some point the summer weather would get too hot and I'd decide I wasn't going to spend all that time out in the heat removing it. I'll be removing all of it this week (I hope) that I can as long as the wind stays down and I am able to spend more time at home in the garden instead of being away at fires. I think on Mon and Tues, the wind will be low enough that I'll be home in the garden. I'm not so sure about Wed and Thurs because the stronger winds are expected to return then. I have been watching for snakes this week on the warmer days because last January they came out here in southern OK on the warm winter days. A little girl in the Austin, TX area was bitten by a rattlesnake at Longhorn Caverns State Park a few days ago on a warm, sunny day when the family was excited to get outdoors and have fun after being cooped up by cold weather, and that certainly caught my attention. Undoubtedly it generally is warmer in Austin than it is up here at this time of the year, but not necessarily that much warmer, so I took her mom's warning about snakes being out to be a serious one. I think your soil will be fine whether the stuff is broken down enough or not. We have gazillions of things that sprout and grow just fine in some pretty awful dense, red clay.....although I'd never expect my precious garden plants to survive and perform well in that stuff. It is merely that as the soil gets better via amending, the plant performance improves year after year. I've always been in it for the long haul---not expecting to totally turn around the soil in 3, 5 or even 10 years, but just dedicated to continually improving it slowly over time. There's places in my garden that probably never get as much compost as I'd like, but the plants grow well there anyway. I do look at the improved soil now and have trouble remembering how truly awful it was in the beginning---but all I have to do is dig down maybe a foot to get beneath the area of improved soil and there's my reminder of the awful red clay we started out with. We only eat out about once a week, something made easier by the fact that it is pretty much too long of a drive to go anywhere that we'd really like to eat, and eating out usually is restricted to the weekend anyway since Tim's long commute makes his day incredibly long as it is. By the time he walks in the door at night, he's been gone 13 or 14 hours and going out to eat is not on his list of things he wants to do....and I don't blame him. I am hoping for a better week this week than last week when we had fires virtually every day. Having said that, we're off to a bad start, with the fire pagers going off for a vehicle in the roadway on fire about a mile from our house around 4 a.m. this morning. I am sure there's tons and tons I do not understand about motor vehicles, but I just do not understand how you're driving up the road at 4 a.m. and all of a sudden your car or truck bursts into flames. That must be a terrifying moment when you realize you're in a vehicle that is on fire. So, now that I am up and wide awake, there's no way I can fall back asleep. Tim, by contrast, can crawl back into bed after something like that and be asleep and snoring in 5 minutes. I wish I could fall back asleep like that, but it just doesn't happen---once I'm awake, I'm awake to stay. This is useful in summer because I just go outdoors at the break of day to get into the garden early and beat the heat, but not so useful in winter when it is cold outdoors. Dawn