Geneva Area Turtle and Tortoise Society's free meeting on February 2

Turtle Society leaders Suzanne and Peter invite all club members and visitors to this mid-winter meeting in their home in Nyon, about 15 minutes northeast of Geneva. Although everyone's turtles and tortoises are probably hibernating for the winter, many club members prefer to remain active all year. Quite a few members have become great friends, and we want to keep seeing each other at club meetings throughout winter instead of waiting for warmer weather.

The main activity at the February 2 meeting will be a question-and-answer session, with contributions by both amateur and expert keepers of turtles and tortoises. Discussions can bear on choosing the ideal species as pets, feeding them the most nutritious foods, adapting aquariums and ponds to accommodate turtles, designing indoor and outdoor enclosures to house tortoises, healing ill or injured specimens, preparing appropriate nesting sites, hatching the eggs in home-made incubators, influencing the proportion of male and female hatchlings, caring for newborns in their first year, providing safe accommodations for their hibernation, and any other subjects that may come up.

The remainder of the meeting, as usual, will consist of very informal conversations about topics totally unrelated to turtles and tortoises. Over snacks and drinks we'll chat about any subject that comes up, most of which tend to generate lots of laughter in each conversational group. Our meetings are social as well as instructional, which explains why so many club members have become good friends.

Full details of every free meeting are always on the club's informative web site. Log on to its 'Calendar' section at http://turtles.meetup... to read about this and other upcoming meetings. Click on a meeting's title to get its location and details, then click Yes, Maybe, or No to inform the hosts whether or not you can attend. Hosts have to know who will and who won't be coming to their meeting.

If you've never attended a Turtle Society meeting before, you might enjoy reading what happened at each of our 25 previous meetings. Just go to the'Past Events List' at http://turtles.meetup..., then click on each meeting's title to get all the details. There you'll also see the true evaluations that some members wrote about each event.

If you're unable to leave your home to attend a meeting, Suzanne and Peter can arrange to have a meeting come to you instead. Club members (only) are entitled to host a meeting in their own home or garden, and new hosts are always welcome. It involves not much more than providing some snacks and drinks for those who attend. Very few people come to these events in winter and early spring, so now might be an ideal time for you to host your first meeting. The club meets on the first Saturday of every month, and occasionally on the third Saturday as well. To reserve your preferred date for your own meeting, write to Suzanne and Peter in Nyon at PeterSuzanne2@hotmail.com.

Non-members can't host a meeting, but they can instantly become members for free right on the web site by clicking the red link marked 'Sign up.' They can then download road maps and driving directions to each meeting location from the site's 'Files' section at http://turtles.meetup.... Your choice of maps and directions can be printed for your drive to each meeting.

Registered members can also help determine the club's management by casting their vote on each of our online polls. Go to the site's 'Polls' section at http://turtles.meetup... to read each question, and click to see the results so far. Then submit or change your vote and instantly see the change in results. Only one vote per member is counted, but you can always change your vote.

All other sections of the web site can be accessed by members and non-members alike. The 'Messages' section at http://turtles.meetup... contains club members' questions and answers about turtles and tortoises, plus Peter's complete alphabetical lists of every sub-species by scientific name, by common name, and by taxonomy, and his list of hundreds of direct links to other turtle and tortoise web sites.

The site's 'Photos' section at http://turtles.meetup... has albums of identification photos of hundreds of varieties. The 'Members' section at http://turtles.meetup... lists the 80 families or individuals who are current members of the club. If you're not on that list, click the red 'Sign up' link to join the club.