|
Exercise your flower power: Snip, tweak a store bouquet
I do naughty things to florist's bouquets. Almost invariably, I take them home, get out the scissors and have an Edward Scissorhands afternoon. Yes, this is slightly ungrateful and infinitely prissy, but I promise that, in the end, they actually do look better.
There is honorable motivation here: I want my flowers to look like they came from the garden, and there is nothing less organic than a dozen long-stemmed roses spaced just so between mountains of baby's breath. (Apologies to any person who has been kind enough to send these to me. I promise I showed them a lot of love.)
Whether they come from the florist or the grocery store, it's easy to make them look chic at home. .
Focus on freight security
You can feel pretty confident that the birthday bouquet delivered to your door next year wont have a hidden bomb, thanks to a new program that will check every commercial drivers license holder against the U.S. governments list of possible terrorists. The real intent of the Transportation Security Administrations new strategy is to make sure that a trucker with terrorist ties wont load an explosive into a box slated to go on an airplane, said Kip Hawley, who pilots the Homeland Security Department organization responsible for making skies safe. Hawley was in the East Valley on Monday to speak to air cargo leaders about how to keep freight flowing while keeping those in the passenger compartment above the cargo hold safe. We know al-Qaida is regrouping, we know aviation continues to be a focus, and we know they are training people to attack, Hawley said in a speech during the air cargo convention at the Sheraton Wild Horse Pass Resort on the Gila River Indian Community.
Well-traveled roses
PEORIA - Diamonds may be a girl's best friend, but flowers remain the romantic token of choice for Valentine's Day. Americans buy an estimated 189 million stem roses just for Valentine's Day, and 74 percent of those purchases are, not surprisingly, made by men, said the Society of American Florists. Getting the perfect rose or floral arrangement is as simple as walking into your favorite florist's shop or grocery store and picking it up. But how do the retailers in central Illinois actually get the roses and other flowers they sell? Let's just say if a rose could get frequent flyer miles, it might want to cash in. In most cases, the roses in your sweetheart's Valentine's Day bouquet have traveled thousands of miles to make it to florists in central Illinois. Ninety percent of the roses sold in the United States come from South America, primarily Ecuador and Columbia, where temperatures this time of year average around 70 degrees.
|
|
