The Amaryllis which the Johns' sent us right after Thanksgiving, finally came forth with a huge bloom, with others to follow. The plant has been on the kitchen windowsill where it is fairly cool. We've had to prop up the fast growing flowering stems by tying them to wooden kitchen spoons and the like, planted in the soil. We're glad to see the blooms in what has been so far a cold January, hardly above freezing so far. The two flowers are a large left and right bloom with a little middle bud, all from the same stem.

I went to Sacramento this week to visit Bob and Shirley, and Bob and I went to the Macintosh computer show yesterday. We had agreed to meet at a designated place at 5 pm, and I was sitting in a Microsoft presentation which ended about 5 minutes later. Should I get up and meet Bob or hand in a card and see if I can win a drawing? Since I've won drawings in all of the Comdex computer shows I attended, and even got my name drawn for a minor prize when I went to the previous Mac show, I finally decided to make Bob wait and test out my luck. Amazingly enough, the moderator drew a card from the stack and shouted out "Paul Griffin", and I walked away with a copy of the brand new version of Microsoft Office 2008 for the Macintosh. So the record is intact. I wish this fortune extended elsewhere.