Hybridizers: It can be fun to breed your own zinnias - Part 5, 4 by Zen_Man

Zen_Man wrote:
Hi Sharon,

And I also appreciate your comments and you. Yes, it has been a few decades since I was in Vegas. When I was much younger I had several occasions to make business trips to Las Vegas to help install some software at Nellis Air Force Base. Slot machines were everywhere. As I walked down the ramp from the airplane, carrying my carry-on bag and heading to the luggage pickup area, there was a slot machine right at the end of the ramp.

I had a couple of quarters in my pocket, so I fed them to the machine. The second quarter hit a jackpot, and suddenly I had a pocket full of quarters, and I was kind of "hooked". I mentally budgeted $20 as the amount I would lose in Vegas on a trip, and I stuck to that.

It actually took me several hours in a casino to lose that. I followed the same plan on subsequent trips to Nellis. Lose $20, and quit, and treat it as cheap entertainment money. (Actually, $20 was worth a lot more back in those days).

On my last trip, I hit a "run" of jackpots and found myself $135 ahead, so I vowed to quit while I was ahead, and I did.

Until many years later, while attending a wedding in Las Vegas, I remembered that $135 and decided to "go for it". Needless to say, I eventually lost the whole $135 and quit.

So the saying that "the house always wins" eventually came true for me, after many years. Except I quit at a point where I was even, and had the consolation of being "ahead of the game" for over two decades. They say that for many people, gambling is an addiction, and I believe that. In the casino there were people who had been pulling those slot machine levers for hours, and you could tell that many of them were no strangers to it, because their right arms were noticeably bigger than their left arms, like you see on some people who bowl a lot. I guess the new slot machines have solved that problem.

Your Whirligig zinnias will appreciate your composty soil. I still have a long way to go in that area. Although I did till in a couple of old compost piles into my zinnia garden yesterday and the day before. There were some live earthworms in that compost. I don't know if earthworms love me -- they probably don't, because I have undoubtedly cut a few of them in two with my tiller. But I definitely like earthworms. I am attaching a few pictures of some of my Whirligig specimens from past years. Whirligigs have a variety of petal forms.

ZM