My sentiments too, Thank you all for the information that you have shared with me and all the others. I love reading this forum and I have learned so much. When I need to know something, I look here first! You guys are all awesome. A special thanks to "Fruitnut" too, I have enjoyed all the beautiful pics that you have displayed especially these last ones of your greenhouse! So Merry Christmas to all and a very happy new year in the garden, greenhouse, orchard, farm area, etc! LOL.

Merry Christmas to you , Euan , too and to all others from the Forum Wolfgang

Inky, you are very modest with your main wish, the movie. We rented it, maybe you can buy it. We enjoyed it very much! With the books I wish the same, but I will spent the whole February in Costa Rica, nothing to worry about, just travel from one gorgeous beach to the other, swim and read. I pass the brain transplant, I am happy with the one I got, but I wish that I could hear from Yama san!!I miss all the interesting discussions between you guys! Mike, my dinner invitation is still valid, I can get the best malt too, but NO CIGAR! Merry Christmas! Andrea

Aloha. Mele Kalikimaka! Many of you are well into Christmas Day or it's already over, but we in Hawai'i just got up. We're the last in line to the rest of the world, as always. The adults in my family opened our presents last night; then we ate our traditional Christmas Eve homemade tamales (6 dozen beef and pork ones flown in by my son from Texas) with fresh-made chili and several kinds of salsa, including pineapple-jalapeno for a bit of Hawaiian style. Later today we'll have the Hawaiian favorite, Spam-pineapple kabobs, along with turkey and other traditional mainland dishes. My older son heard me mourn for my lost copy of Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare so he replaced it for me. He also found a copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare that I had as a textbook in college (it has the Chandos portrait on the cover). It's in stellar condition with only a few underlinings and annotations, which I don't mind at all -- in fact, I quite like marginalia. At least it doesn't have yellow or pink highlighting. I think student readers who highlight too much -- sometimes whole pages, page after page -- suffer from some sort of mental quirk. Anyway, it's been a Shakespeare Christmas for me. I wonder what Shakespeare would have thought of his work traveling, as it has done, to places that he never knew existed.