>>>>Terry, is any of the flooding affecting your area? I understand it's starting to subside, but I just thought I'd check up on you.
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>>>No, ALan, thanks for the concern. As it happens I live on one of the 7 hills of our city, and a huge engineering project a few years ago constructed a huge storm drain, big enough to fit a double-decker bus in, along the seafront. However, last Friday I dropped the kids off by car at school, in a deluge (normally I walk them but it was late and wet). After I drove off it turned out that the school was closed for the day due to water leaking through ceilings and running down walls with power points, floors and carpets being sodden and flooded, etc.
>>
>>Left your kids to swim home, did you?
>
>No, my partner's car wouldn't start (she had been going to take them) which is why I took them. A bit later she met a neighbour coming home with her kids, so knew to go and fetch them :-)
>
>>
>>>That day, btw, the rain was so hard though that even the drains on the hill couldn't cope and water was filling the road, mounting the kerb, and approaching my door step, over my basement area bridge! Torrents ran down the main road down the hill and crashed against trees, splitting two ways - to the road and up the sidewalk.
>>>
>>>My geraniums aren't liking this!
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>>Glad to hear you're ok. This is punishment for growing geraniums. They are far from my favourite flower. I don't know what it is about them that people love so dearly.
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>Having visited Normandy & Brittany several times, where they mak an art form of them. Window boxes, hanging baskets crammed with them - practically a mono-culture, and the overall effect is stunning, esp. if all the same colour.
>
>>Everybody with a garden around here grows them (not including yours truly, of course). Personally, I don't like the odor,
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>Funny - they speak very highly of yours!
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>>and I don't like having to constantly dead-head the things.
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>But one does that with any flowers one wants to perpetuate.
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>>Give me begonias and impatiens over geraniums any day.
>
>I noticed the propensity for bizzy-lizzies in US chain-link-fenced gardens, in Buffalo and Boston - everywhere. Got so bored of seeing them. Thought that they were just an easy-to-grow cop-out. But we do have some, interspersed with nicitinia et al. Those little begonias, with the red stems and leaves, to me look like chopped liver sprinkled on the garden.

Is the nicitinia the same plant we call nicotiana here? A genus of the tobacco plant. I have night nicotiana growing in my garden. Beautiful plant, beautiful aroma, but they only really open up the flower and the scent in the evening.

>
>BTW, went to see the Vancouver combo, B Good Tanias last night, in our local church. Very good. One thing that struck me was that they referred to an "aeroplane" AOT an "airplane". They mentioned how beautiful Brighton was, and how much happier the place seemd than their other dates in the UK, as the sunshine was streaming through the church windows. They mentioned that that might have been a factor :-)

Never heard of them, so I looked them up (B Good Tanyas, it turns out). I guess they must not get played on the jazz stations. ;)