No, don't use a towel..get a coffee filter, easier to handle..and put your seeds in it. Drop the whole thing into a shallow dish like a custard cup and cover with water. Let them soak there until they show some white bits. I pour off the water the next day and pour fresh water over them, but I use the same filter. I've had some in a filter for a week or more, and they are still good to go. But they are no longer in water, just the damp filter. In that case it's like a damp towel. But I'd start them COVERED in water for more than a couple of days. I'm sure you'll have great success as I did, unless the seeds are old. And you will know in a couple of days, I promise you. I just noticed looking at that pot, the new leaves make it look like dragon flies hovering..and I have it with the most beautiful little day lily tuft. Even now they are gorgeous to me! Just get a well draining good potting soil. You can set them out in the ground if you want once they have rooted well, but pots are so much easier to control, imo.

I didn't know my paternal grandparents. My grandpa died several years before I was born, and my grandma when I was a baby. I did know my maternal grandparents and have lots of memories. They loved to garden. The house that I remember them living in most of my life had the yard totally surrounded by mostly peonies and iris', but also tulips, ferns, and a bed of old fashioned mixed perennials. They also had a vegetable garden and a row of gooseberry bushes. I think this is where my love of gardening comes from :-) Grandpa played Slap Jack with us kids. If you don't know what that is, it's a card game where the dealer turns over one card at a time. Everyone stays ready, and if the card is a Jack, tries to 'slap' it. The person who slaps it first, wins the pile of cards. The person who wins the most cards, wins the game! Grandma made jam out of ripe gooseberries. She's the only person I ever knew who did anything with them other then make green gooseberry pie. Her cooking specialties were applesauce cake and divinity, which she made in HUGE amounts every Christmas season. She made them for all the kids (6) and grandkids (17) but not the greats (30+) every year. She'd stir up a huge batch of cake. She used applesauce as one of the 'wet' ingredients, but if she didn't have enough applesauce it didn't matter. She's just substitute some canned pears, or maybe even some tomato juice. Didn't matter what she used, it always ended up tasting like applesauce cake and was always good. And then after she poured out enough cakes from her batch of batter, she'd start adding more flour and would end up with a batch of applesauce cookies too! My mom was born in 1917 weighing only a little over 2 pounds. She was born at home and it was a miracle she lived, back in those days. I remember Grandma telling how she was up, holding on to the back of a chair, and sweeping the kitchen when Mom was only a week old. Someone stopped to visit and told her she was going to regret doing that. Grandma was in her upper 70s or maybe 80s when she was telling this story. I remember her saying she was still waiting to see when she was going to regret it!!! Grandma collected salt and pepper shakers, so she always received a lot of them as gifts. She used to put the name of the person who gave her a gift on the bottom of the item, saying 'you'll get this back some day'. We, being young, would say 'Oh Grandma...' and she'd say 'Well, I'm gonna die someday, you know!' Grandpa had emphysema. He smoked only briefly, as a young man, but somehow he ended up with emphysema. He was on oxygen full time, and confined to bed when I was in my last years of high school. When I married, at 18, he decided he was going to get himself well enough to 'walk' me down the aisle. He did it too! My mom pushed him, in his wheelchair, oxygen tank and all, and he walked me into the church and down the aisle! What a miracle! There are so many stories, but I'll stop here. I loved my Grandma and Grandpa. I still do.

REVISITING BRIDESHEAD Revisiting Brideshead was televised last night.1 I had seen this 11 part series on television back in the 1980s or early 1990s after it first came out in 1981. I had not read the novel, Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder by English writer Evelyn Waugh which was first published in 1945. In 2015 I had the pleasure of seeing the 2008 film version.2 I wrote about the TV series and the film after I had retired from my 50 year life-experience as a student and in paid employment, 1949-1999, and after I had seen the series a second time in Australia. The Flyte family who lived at Brideshead symbolises the English nobility, and Waugh's marvelously melancholy elegy brings that nobility to life. One reads in the book that Brideshead has "the atmosphere of a better age." Viewers, millions, enjoy the opulent and aristocratic edge, the glitter and gloss, the grandeur and the glamour of this wealthy family estate, and of a time in our history now quickly dying-out, if not long gone. In this one house, as one reviewer put it, is a fading, a dying, empire; or is it just sublime real estate. For many, in the millennial and generation Z, I can just about hear them clicking on the remote and uttering a now familiar word, a word especially familiar to people like me who retired after more than 30 years in classrooms: borrrring! There's room for more than one Brideshead in this far less glamorous day and age, though, room at least for the baby-boomers and for the silent generation among the viewing public, with the glitter and gloss of society now often tarnished beyond repair in our complex 21st century.-Ron Price with thanks to 1ABC2, 11:55-12:45, 19 & 20/9/’11, and 2ABCTV, 8/2/'15, 10:05-11:30 pm. 1981 was a bad year in the UK with 2 & ½ million out of work and a list of bad news to fill all those English heads to the top.1 There was nothing like this bit of escapism from the real world into a nostalgic, a romanticized past, homoerotic suggestiveness, Evelyn Waugh’s WW2 vision.2 I’ll let all you readers find out what it all meant to Waugh, to his critics & to modern viewers whose views are available for us to see on that new source of info: the internet, the world-wide-web.3 1 See Wikipedia for all the bad news in 1981. 2 Waugh wrote in the preface to the 1959 edition of the book that he was appalled by his book, and that he found rereading it distasteful. I was only 15 at the time, and had read none of Waugh. I lived in Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe, had just joined the Baha’i Faith, and was in love with sport and at least 3 girls. The plot of the book was set in 1943-1944, in the months when I was in utero. 3 I was particularly interested in Waugh’s defence of Catholicism, his critique of secular humanism, and his emphasis on the many forms of conversion that take place in peoples’ lives. Ron Price 20/9/'11 to 12/2/'15. ------------------------------------------------------------- BRIDESHEAD REVISITED Part 1: In the six months between December 1943 and June 1944 the novel Brideshead Revisited was written in England. In those same months I existed in utero on the other side of the Atlantic in Canada. When Evelyn Waugh, the author of this novel, wrote his preface to a revised edition of the book in 1959, and Fr. Ronald Knox published his biography of Waugh in that same year---I was 15 and had just joined the Baha’i Faith, and was in the middle of my adolescent baseball and ice-hockey careers. By my 20s my sport-playing days had ended, although I have remained a Baha’i all my life. Waugh converted to Roman Catholicism in his late 20s and remained a Catholic although, as Martin Stannard the author of a two-volume biography of Waugh noted, “he struggled against the dryness of his soul”1 In the end, this is a common experience for believers of all Faiths and non-believers of all philosophies alike, especially in our troubled-age. Stannard saw Waugh as “the greatest novelist of his generation.”2 Part 2: Waugh saw this novel, Brideshead Revisited, as his magnum opus but, on reading it later in life, he found what he called its "rhetorical and ornamental language.....distasteful."3 Readers with the interest in this film and this novel should surf-about on Wikipedia and other internet sources for all sorts of bits-and-pieces of information and analysis.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Martin Stannard, "Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh(1903–66),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, 2007; 2Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903-1939, and Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years 1939-1966, W.W. Norton & Co., NY., 1987 & 1992, resp., V.2, p.492; and3 Wikipedia. Part 3: Without Christianity you saw civilization doomed or, as you put it in your conversion: “it islike stepping out of a Looking-Glass world, where everythingis an absurd caricature, into thereal world God made, and thenbegins the delicious process ofexploring it limitlessly.”1..Thisis perhaps the most succinct &sufficient description of processin the act of conversions that everwere written in that 20th century.Waugh's own conversion from the"absurd caricature" of what mightbe called ultra-modernity to thatreal world of Catholic orthodoxywas greeted with astonishment bythe literary world and it caused asensation in the media. Do thosewho have watched Brideshead inthese last 30 years know of this?I did not until today and, wantingto know something about how thistelevision series and film came intoexistence in those last twenty-fiveyears: 1981 to 2007, I learned thatthere was much to learn with a littleresearch and reading, and not evenreading E. Waugh's book at all.......Part 4: “Today we can see it on all sides as the active negation of all that Western culture has stood for. Civilization - and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe - has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity and, without, it has no significance or power to command allegiance. The loss of faith in Christianity and the consequential lack of confidence in moral and social standards have become embodied in the ideal of a materialistic, mechanized state. It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it rests." Waugh concluded the above press statement on his conversion by saying that he saw Catholicism as the "most complete and vital form" of Christianity. The article from which the above is taken was written by Joseph Pearce and it appeared in Lay Witness a publication of Catholic United for the Faith, Inc., an international lay apostolate founded in 1968. Ron Price 14/7/'11 to 12/2/'15.

All these points are extremely valid-styles and trends aren't born in the emptiness..they're vastly influenced by social circumstances, different geography (climate, culture), and whatnot. That's what partly makes them so interesting-they speak of so much. But I didn't even pay attention to the size of beds discussed while reading..I grew up in a big city(not in the US), and beds weren't even used that much where I lived-most people had daybeds or sleeper sofas or futons because yes, double function and presentable look through the day are important when you live in an apartment... And then I changed countries, and cities, and apartments..it was a very transient life:) I still went through the cycle of "rebelling" and "new acceptance"...I just had less time and opportunity to explore it with all the moving and all... But the apartments were kinda the same)) Sometimes bigger sometimes smaller. Sometimes rented sometimes owned. Had nothing to do with my preferences for brown vs painted, or with ornate vs streamlined... Had to do, in the end of the day, with what, out of everything I saw and experienced, I still find or start to find-beautiful.. And I can tell you-the more things you're exposed to-the more chance you'll start, at some point, finding them beautiful too.. You did once when you were a kid. Right? Every snowflake, every leaf were beautiful to us. So it comes back to you again. At some point. It is this feeling of appreciation..newly found. It will be the same for millennials as for hundreds of generations before them. Some people are born more nostalgic, some-more perceptive to beauty, some are more artistic than the others. There will always be personal differences. Yet the main cycle of life stays the same. You grow up with a sense of wonder. And if you're lucky you never loose it. In any case, even if you lost it a bit, with life and all-the wonder will get to you later. It will find you again. How it will look like is not so relevant. I daresay-it will look like so. many. different. things.