Dang! What the heck happened to my apostrophes and ellipses in my post? Annoying! It looks as though I'm getting my parents, two of my cousins and my aunt. I called the cousin who invited everyone to give her a hard time and she sheepishly asked me if I was mad. I assured her I was the opposite of mad, but reserved the right to tease her about this forever. Plans (what few I'm making) are coming along nicely. When it was just my one cousin, I was going to make our "traditional" Easter fare: rabbit, baby carrots, and roast potatoes made to look like Easter eggs. But that's a dinner for only a few people. So I thought about lamb, but my dad caught wind of that and every time he's been in the background when I'm talking to my mom or one of my siblings on the phone, he bellers (goodnaturedly but seriously) "Tell Shelly if she cooks lamb, I'm not coming!" This is pointless, as I discussed it with him some time ago and agreed to let him cook a ham with his favorite glaze on our grill's rotisserie. My mom, in martyr mode, asked if I could have some peanut butter or cottage cheese on hand for when they arrived Friday night. (She's the only Catholic in the bunch... as though I'm going to cook meet and callously hand her a jar of PB and tell her to knock herself out!) I laughed and told her not to be silly, that I'd cook fish. She informed me my dad won't eat it. I told her I'd make it anyway. I plan to have a couple steaks on hand and my dad complains about anything he can go out back and grill his own dang dinner. Sheesh! When did he get so picky? Every day I'm checking on the progress of my bulbs and my hope is that they'll be blooming for my aunt when she comes. She's a serious gardener and since we're a couple zones higher, I look forward to previewing Spring for her. I'm not sure what we'll be doing the whole weekend, but one thing is certain: All the neighbors on our street will be able to hear us laugh from the moment they arrive until the lot of them leaves. :o)

Notice the navel on the end. If the same your plant should have that. Here is a link that might be useful:

None taken. I frequent several of the gardening forums and really enjoy them. Sooo... I started looking around for forums that my best friend would enjoy. She does not garden but there are other forums that might suit her, plus she is single. I keep hoping that she might meet someone in places other than bars because she is such an outgoing person with so many other interests. I have sent her this link several times and told her that you guys seem pretty interesting. I don't know if she has checked it out yet or not.

A BURNT-OUT CASE SBS TV showed the docudrama Lamumba two nights ago, on the evening of 30 July 2010. I had never really got a handle on the events of the historical crisis associated with the legendary African leader Patrice Lamumba, events which took place when I was in my mid-teens. Lumumba is a 2000 film directed by the award-winning Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck(b. 1953). It is centred around Patrice Lumumba in the months before and after the Democratic Republic of the Congo achieved independence from Belgium in June 1960. Raoul Peck's film is a coproduction of France, Belgium, Germany, and Haiti. Lumumba dramatises the rise and fall of Patrice Lumumba. In late October 1959, just days after I joined the BahaÂi Faith at the age of 15, Lumumba was arrested for allegedly inciting an anti-colonial riot in the city of Stanleyville where thirty people were killed. He was sentenced to six months in prison. His name was just a news item on the distant periphery of my life, immersed as I was in a smalltown culture in the 1950s, in Ontario Canada. The plot of this docudrama is based on the final months of the life of Patrice Lumumba in his role as the first Prime Minister of the Congo. His tenure in office lasted two months until he was driven from office in September 1960. Joseph Kasavubu was sworn in alongside Lumumba as the first president of the country, and together they attempted to prevent the Congo succumbing to secession and anarchy. The film concluded with the army chief-of-staff, Joseph Mobutu, seizing power in a CIA sponsored coup.-Ron Price with thanks to SBS TV, "Lamumba," 30 July 2010. All of this got me back into Graham Greene who went to the Belgian Congo in January 1959, just before the Congo crisis broke out, with a new novel already beginning to form in his head by way of a situation involving a stranger who turned up in a remote leper settlement for no apparent reason. While Greene was writing A Burnt-Out Case in 1959 in the months leading up to and after I became a member of the BahaÂi Faith. This novel is one of those in the running for the most depressing narratives ever written. The reader only has to endure for a short time the company of the burnt-out character whose name in the novel was Querry. Greene had to live with him and in him--in his head--for eighteen months. Greene wrote that: "Success as a novelist is often more dangerous than failure; the ripples often break over a wider coast line. The Heart of the Matter(1948) was a success in the great vulgar sense of that term. There must have been something corrupt there, for the book appealed too often to weak elements in its readers. Never had I received so many letters from strangers, perhaps the majority of them from women and priests. At a stroke I found myself regarded as a Catholic author in England, Europe and America -- the last title to which I had ever aspired. This account may seem cynical and unfeeling, but in the years...