In Appreciation

Mary Sue Ittner msittner@mcn.org
Wed, 20 Jun 2007 12:58:23 PDT
Hi,

Thanks to all of you who have posted such kind words about me. It always 
feels good to be appreciated. In turn I'd like to mention that I appreciate 
all the help I've received since I started the list and wiki. Thanks to 
former list administrators, Jennifer Hildebrand and Susan Hayek and to 
current list administrators,  Arnold Trachtenberg and Diane Whitehead. 
There are always a lot of non member requests to field and I'm happy I 
don't have to do all of them myself. Thanks to Mark McDonough and Mark 
Wilcox for helping in the early stages of the wiki when we were setting it 
up and figuring it out. Thanks to Susan Hayek who put in hours and hours of 
help on the wiki, patiently changing and improving images, helping others 
to add pictures, and helping change all the pages when the wiki url name 
changed along with other countless little jobs and almost daily words of 
encouragement and support while she was helping. And thanks to my current 
helpers, Linda Foulis and Jay Yourch. Linda put in a lot of hours 
converting the urls for the wiki photos so they would display as thumbnails 
on the wiki pages. Without Jay, we wouldn't have a wiki that is working at 
the moment as he has rewritten a lot of the code so that it is secure from 
vandals and displays properly. And he is the one that figured out how we 
could have thumbnails and wrote it into our wiki so that our version of 
this particular wiki is superior to other versions.

I appreciate how helpful members of our list are to the other members of 
the list. It has been rare that there have been unpleasant or testy 
remarks. So much information has been provided to all of us and I really 
like that experts are willing to help beginners. I appreciate all those 
people who have contributed to the wiki, but especially those people who 
have taken the time to learn how to use it and who work independently. I 
appreciate the new people who join our list who are brave enough to 
introduce themselves and all those people who take care not to include the 
whole previous message in their replies. And I appreciate all those people 
who help me figure things out when I write them privately. A lot of 
appreciation goes to my husband, Bob, who provides support and help for all 
my projects. He doesn't share my passion for bulbs or even for gardening 
although he does like meeting other bulb enthusiasts and seeing plants in 
bloom and in the wild. He puts up with a lot considering how much time I 
spent on the list and wiki that could be spent otherwise.

I have gotten back a lot from all the time I have put into this besides the 
great amount that I have learned (always good for the brain to be stretched 
and mine has been stretched a lot by trying to figure out different 
species, but also by learning how to use and organize the wiki). Our 
wiki  and list is a great resource for me as well as anyone with computer 
access. Best of all,  however, has been all the wonderful friends I have 
made. I count some of my closest and dearest friends people I have met over 
the Internet via my passion for bulbs.

Mary Sue


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