andthen

Awwww

cute!

LOL...Our chapter is mostly made up of commercial nurserymen, rather than "home gardeners" , so we always have our meeting at the end of winter, when they are not busy out in their fields. The peonies are mostly still underground at this time of year, so no pictures to show.

The show's presentation was on hybridizing, and I'm still the only person out here on the West coast that's doing any of that. Now that I've been hybridizing for about 12 years, my seedlings are just getting big enough to flower, and I *am* getting some interesting things. The word that I'm getting some good results is slowly leaking out, but since there's still only one existing plant of most of them, and they are only in bloom for 10 days or so....it's still this kind of mysterious rumor. Some people have seen pictures...some people have heard about the pictures....

It's all pretty fun, I must admit.

This spring I'll be seeing a whole new batch of things for the very first time, so I'll try and post some pictures here.

As I'm finding, a lot of people tend to keep mum about what they have ( until they've officially named and registered them, been able to propagate them to the point where they have a bunch of plants of them) so it will be an SG horticultural exclusive !

Thank you for your words of support.. as always

I can't wait to see the photos!! I'd love to see the progression of how they grow... but you may not want to divulge your secret talent

I need to get into gardening again... this past year has just been so rough I haven't been able to. Although I love it, it kind of brings back bad memories of when I would garden all day and night after work on massive amounts of adderall and rum. I can get past that mental block if I try hard enough. But then theres still the money! Rawr! I am going to move to Mars.

Here's hoping she finally wakes up and realizes what she's doing to herself, deciding it's not worth it anymore to do that.

Oh I bet that is draining.. you put up with it for quite a while. I am glad you got her to go. I think she will end up thanking you

Keeping you and your friend in my thoughts.

Abruptly no word from her in the last couple of days, so hopefully she's come to her senses, and has made it to the hospital.

Made her promise to leave my contact info in a note to her father, in case things go bad.

It seemed like the least I could request for myself.

I've dealt with people who are in abusive relationships before, and that part of things can be just about as frustrating as anything I know. If she were to give this guy the dump, her situation would be *so* much better, but like so many other abused women, she just can't give the guy up.

Even when the guy is in jail for long stretches, he finds ways to manipulate her from there, and his thug "friends" on the outside manage to keep her terrorized.

While she's without the meds she needs now, the suggestion that I pay for them did not come up this time, and I didn't offer either. Mostly because I know it's to late for oral meds to help her, and the only thing that will actually get her to the hospital and back on IV antibiotics ( Which I believe are the only thing that will save her life now ) is if someone around her panics at her condition and drags her there.

She's a mess in a bunch of other different medical and psychological ways too.

It's hard to be harsh with someone when they are at death's door, so right now all I'm doing is chatting when she wants to chat, and then waiting to see what happens.

I suppose she could somehow spontaneously get better, but I've read enough about drug-resistant pneumonia to doubt that that's going to happen.

So all I can really do now is wait.

Speaking as a woman who has been in abusive relationships before, I know that my ex starting to lay hands on me in front of my son was my wake-up call. And hitting my son. Part of the problem though in an abusive relationship is that the abuser makes her think that she's not worth it without them. (And a lot of the time, not worth it with.) I hope that things get better, but even if they don't, I'm here if you want to talk.

Its an awful situation she's in but she got herself in it and in the end she'll have to get herself out. Helping her with money, even though she resists at first, is just enabling her and she's not getting the boot up the ass she needs to wake up.

It's hard but sometimes we need to step back and say nothing, I've had to do it with family and it sucks but with some people the only way to be there is by not being there.

Yes, I understand about letting her suffer the consequences of her actions. There's absolutely no talking sense into her, so what else is there to do ?

It's just that the particular sorts of consequences she is looking at (medical ones) generally seem to involve her dying.

Which is a harsh way to ask someone to get the message.

Sigh...

The weather is quite crazy this year.

That's one determined honey bee!

When we had the big one here.....a bunch of years ago.....you could see the thing for several months. People watched it get bigger and bigger, but it was kind of cool to watch it slowly get smaller and disappear too, knowing just how far out there it was heading , and how many long years it would be until it returned again.

Thank you I'm certainly looking forward to exploring the site, and being part of the community...there's so much here, it's fantastic!

Eep! I just realized what was meant to be a reply to your comment on my blog ended up here...and didn't make a whole lot of sense. Whoops! Total noob...oh well. Regardless, thanks for your kind comments, and hope the apple pies turned out well!

Yes, if you have a birdbath, or even just want to make something like this out of a bowl you have laying around, stop and check at the feed store. The heater I have just looks like a funky spiral of heater wire, wrapped in some heavy aluminum foil. While you are there, pick up a 50 lb bag of millet. Really cheap, and you just scatter it around on the ground and particularly under shrubs that give cover.

It doesn't take much to get a thing like this going in the wintertime. The water is really the thing here.

My mom always puts a heater in her bird bath in the winter. The cardinals love it!

happy birthday!

Aw, I missed it. Happy day after balloon by your picture day!