In case others had the same question-- Hi Dianne-- I contemplated the exchange of more than just hippis because lets face it-- if you have these bulbs as a passion, chances are you grow something else, too, that is a passion. So trade whatever you want. I personally have NO hippi bulbs up for trade this time around as this year no one is getting a repotting (therefore no babies are being separated from the mom bulbs). It hasn't been the best year for my bulbs so few babies have been grown. So what I need from you is your contact email, your list of what you have to offer and try to be specific about the bulbs you seek. You always have the option to add on the all-encompassing tag of "or any other bulbs I don't have" to your list. But specifics is best. Once I have it on the spreadsheet you'll get a link to the file that is hosted on my Google account and you'll be able to see everyone else's trades, too. Have a good day-- Ryan

From Rocco's website: Mama's Meat Balls 1/3 cup chicken stock 1/4 yellow onion 1 clove garlic ¼ cup fresh Italian flat-leaf parsley, chopped fine 1/2 lb ground beef 1/2 lb ground pork 1/2 lb ground veal 1/3 cup plain breadcrumbs 2 eggs 1/4 cup Parmigiano-Reggiano, grated 1 tsp red pepper flakes 1 tsp salt 3-6 cups of Mama's Marinara or your favorite marinara sauce ¼ cup extra virgin olive oil 1. Place the chicken stock, onion, garlic and parsley in a blender of food processor and puree. 2. In a large bowl, combine the pureed stock mix, meat, bread crumbs, eggs, Parmigiano-Reggiano, red pepper flakes, parsley and salt. Combine with both hands until mixture is uniform. Do not over mix. 3. Put a little olive oil on your hands and form mixture into balls a little larger than golf balls. They should be about ¼ cup each, though if you prefer bigger or smaller, it will only affect the browning time. 4. Pour about 1/2-inch of extra virgin olive oil into a straight-sided, 10-inch-wide sauté pan and heat over medium-high flame. Add the meatballs to the pan (working in batches if necessary) and brown meatballs, turning once. This will take about 10-15 minutes. 5. While the meatballs are browning, heat the marinara sauce in a stockpot over medium heat. Lift the meatballs out of the sauté pan with a slotted spoon and put them in the marinara sauce. Stir gently. Simmer for one hour. 6. Serve with a little extra Parmigiano-Reggiano sprinkled on top. Serve alone or over spaghetti (in which case, you will need 6 cups of marinara). Yield: Serves 4 as antipasto or over spaghetti Mama's Marinara My Mom's sauce is my favorite--we call it the Mama sauce, and once you make it you will understand how it can become the backbone for so many dishes. Of course, you'll need it to make her famous meatballs, but it is also a great sauce to braise meat in, serve with eggs, or turn into a creamy tomato sauce. 3 cloves garlic, crushed 1/2 yellow onion, peeled and chopped fine 3 tbsp olive oil chili flakes to taste 2 28-ounce cans tomato puree, Red Pack brand if possible 1 28-ounce. can crushed tomatoes, Red Pack brand if possible 1 tbsp tomato paste, Red Pack brand if possible 1 tsp sugar 1 cup chicken stock red pepper flakes to taste salt to taste 1. Cook the garlic and onion in the olive oil in a sauce pot over a medium-low flame, about 10 minutes or until garlic is tender and onions translucent, not brown (this is called "sweating" because it will draw out a lot of moisture and flavor). Add the chili flakes to taste. 2. Add all the tomato products. Pour the chicken stock into one of the 28-oz cans. Fill it the rest of the way with water and add that and the sugar to the pot. Stir and bring to a simmer. Taste and season with salt and cover. Simmer the sauce for about 1 hour. The sauce should be fairly thin, but not watery and very smooth. Uncover and simmer for 3 minutes if it is too thin for your taste; add a little water if it seems thick. Tip: Broiling Chicken This is my favorite 5 ingredient/5 minute dish. It's the perfect combination of flavors, tastes amazing, and cooks underneath the broiler. Let it burn! That charred flavor is an important part of the dish. Yield: Serve 6

Carla, Carla, Carla. So it was YOU who called the lawn police on me!!! Why...you ask? Why would I grow my lawn 32 inches tall? It started with this picture. That is St Augustine grass growing in pure sand in the dunes at Port Aransas, Texas. The area is the dog walk area next to a condo complex. All they have done there is mow. It's had no fertilizer or irrigation water since the late 1980s. You can see how the grass has escaped from the mowed area into the dunes. I measured that dune grass at 32 inches tall. It has survived many prolonged periods of severe Texas drought and seemed to thrive. Being an inquisitive kind of guy, I wondered what it would do in my yard. I lived in a fairly restrictive area of San Antonio, but I bought a house in George West, TX on one acre in 2011. George West is 100 miles closer to the coast than San Antonio, but on the edge of serious Texas desert. With such a small town I figured nobody cared about what I might do to the lawn. The house and yard were set back 100 feet from the street, so someone would really have to be staring at it to be offended. It seemed perfect to conduct an experiment. The experiment was to see how long I could go without watering if the grass got up tall like that. I stopped mowing in October and only watered the grass where it was stressed. By February 2012 one part had grown up to 32 inches. That part was in the shade all day long except for an hour at sunrise. Here's a pic from that time frame. Just outside the shady area several hundred square feet of grass was struggling to come back from the dead where a sprinkler failure went unnoticed for months. It was also full sun for most of the day, so it had to deal with a lot of heat stress. After about a year of moderate success I got notified that I needed to mow it down to 18 inches. They used the amorphous term, manicured, which did not appear in the city ordinance on weed control. I used a string trimmer and took it down in the front where they could see it. Surprisingly, mowing grass down to any height does make it look like it was manicured. As long as it is all the same height, they seemed to be happy. I'm certain people came to measure it. A year after that I got notified again that it had to come down to their new 12-inch limit. Ok. I think it was clear they were targeting me, because I could go anywhere in town and find clear violations where weeds had grown up to 30 inches or higher. So I mowed it down to 12 inches. All while this was going on the grass was spreading and getting much closer to the road. By the time I sold it was only 50 feet from the street and very dense. I trimmed it down every week to 12 inches. One of the interesting things about this is that I appeared before the city council to talk about what I was doing. One of the councilmen raved on about how nice his lawn was without water and he mowed it every week. I visited his house and he was living with a weed patch. At least I had no weeds at all. My dog and I walked through the grass all the time without encountering a snake or rat or anything. When the grass is that tall, anything moving through it looks like gophers, so I'm fairly confident it was just the lawn growing there. Another council person claimed that my lawn was breeding mosquitoes. Clearly she knew nothing about mosquito biology. My yard was dry as a bone at the surface, because it never got watered (except for rainfall). Mosquitoes need pools of standing water to breed. Here's another picture of my dog walking through the grass. You can see the tops of her ears and tail. To summarize how this turned out, tall grass needs much less water than short grass. Even after I started mowing it down, I never watered it. I'm thinking that 12 inches is a sweet spot for St Augustine. If you go lower than that you might have to water it between long dry spells. Also my St Aug was green 12 months of the year and never showed any sign of going dormant in the winter. When I sold it the new owners immediately mowed the lawn down to 2 inches. Well, they tried. The riding mower either broke or bogged down so they stopped (and just left the machine there). I explained to them that if they took it down slowly it would survive. They just mowed it anyway. It's no longer St Augustine. It's weeds. It turns out the people who were complaining about my letting it grow up tall all knew the lady who built the house and garden. She was apparently one of these fastidious gardeners - one of the "GET OFF MY LAWN" people. Seriously! Since I was not keeping the lawn in her memory, they complained about it. Now it looks horrible by any standard.

Suspense is not my favorite reading, I don't know her work, but I like her approach to it, I am sure she didn't have to go into gruesome details in order to keep the readers attention, I like that.