TONI rub it in will you? Mine didn't make it and I used the vermiculite and bag trick this time! I did actually manage to get some sedum to finally put on some roots, last year I did my rooting in August with hardwood cuttings I am going to try that again this year and see how it goes. I have a purple butterfly bush, a honeycomb BB and a red bottle brush I wish to try this time. I SOOOOO hope the bottle brush takes it is sooo pretty. I do have a few hardwood cuttings of a smoke tree in water and I thought they were dead so I was going to through them out the other day and noticed some callousing and thought NO WAY is that root starts BUT I honestly THINK it is so I stuck them back in the water! I SOOOO hope those make it and are not just a false start LOL. Toni I think I am gonna send cuttings to you we can share my cuttings LOL. Thanks for the update, you know I really AM glad you are having so much success right? I really am, I think it is wonderful! OHH OHH OHHH, someone TELL ME PLEASE HOW I should do some Weeping Pussy Willow cuttings? Someone sent me a bunch and right now they are just in water is this good? OR what would be the best approch? They are hardwood from the base and from the limbs. ANY advice would be sooo much appreciated PLEASE. :) Fran

Not enough room for 1/2" xps, 1X3 fur on top and 3/8" drywall on top of that(or 1/4" if I could find it). Best I can figure is to mount some pt 1X3 furs (if they even sell that) directly to the concrete (Maybe with some of that rolled pink stuff in in between, the stuff usually put under the pt wood that goes on the floor) Mount these strips every 2 feet. But some 1/2" XPX and put in between. Mount the drywal over that. In fact, if I measure right, the drywall would just about run flush into the drywall at the top of the stairs. I shoudl take some pictures. How does that sound? Note this area of concrete wall abuts the back of my garage...all underground, can not imagine water getting in unless it comes from below somehow.

Hate to say it, but I vote for the gut rehab if you can afford it. You would love it if you could pick everything out for yourself and update it. It's easy to splurge a bit on bathrooms because we don't need much in the way of volume of materials. So you could put in a really gorgeous slate floor, for instance. But if this is an "antique" house maybe this looks right for the house and is part of its charm? That's up to you. My inclination is if it's old subway tile it's priceless, so I'd work with it... but this... mmmm... not so much, sorry. If you decide to leave it for now, how about picking up some paint color chips at the store and holding them up to the picture to see how they look to you? Another choice is to beadboard over the wall tile, then redo your floor. You'd probably want to re-tile behind the tub in something neutral. You can also have a tub professionally resurfaced, and a bathroom remodel place can advise about the cost. It's undoubtedly cheaper than a new tub as I've seen them do it on HGTV's "Designed to Sell." You might want to take a photo to the hardware store and ask what they see as your possibilities and approximate costs for each thing. One word of warning... when you dig into old bathrooms there is often rot in the walls and floor from years of water, and mold. Subflooring may need to be replaced as well as wallboard. I'd just expect that. That's an added headache, but it's also a good reason to go for the gut rehab, to make sure it's structurally sound and mold-free. Do you have another bathroom in the house if you need to tear this one down? Whatever you do, please post before and aftef pics for us!

Post dinner report. We had about 20 people over for this buffet meal. The idea was to bring out seafood dishes one at a time. Sides and salads were available throughout the meal, and people took plates and sat wherever they wanted at two dining tables, on the living room couch and chairs, or just standing around. As DD and I planned the meal, it started making sense to deviate from the traditional Seven Fishes dinner of full -on entree dishes. Instead, we decided to have every seafood dish more like an appetizer, that you could eat off a small plate with just a fork, so that the evening was more like a cocktail party with endless food. We also decided to keep each dish simple so that preparing seven dishes and serving one every 20 minutes wouldn't be crazy. To the extent possible, we'd prep ahead. When guests started arriving, we had salmon mousse on crostini ready. Two kinds of salmon mousse, because DD objected to my version. I make it by baking salmon, then putting it in the food processor and adding a couple garlic cloves, some shallot, salt and white pepper, heavy cream, a little bit of brie cheese with rind, a pinch of wasabi, lemon zest, processing to the desired consistency and taste, then placing into a squeeze bottle with pastry tip. DD was outraged at the brie cheese, and insisted on making her own version. Which, in the end, included cream cheese :-) Next was a shrimp louie salad. SWMBO made this, so I don't know what was in it. We made a clam fettucine, following a recipe that was so minimalist, it was intriguing. Heat a few garlic cloves in wrote a lot of olive oil, discard the garlic cloves, add clams in shells, cook until shells open, remove shells, extract clam flesh, return clam flesh to oil with parsley, cook a couple minutes more. Yes, that was it. This was a good cookbook, so we thought maybe the stripped-down recipe would bring out the essence of the dish. Turns out it basically yielded clams... in oil - ick. So we used the result as a base for a more full featured clam sauce, which salvaged the dish. DD made oysters in a leek sauce. You shuck oysters, clean the shells, lightly cook oysters to release liquid, combine the liquid, white wine (not too dry - or champagne or Prosecco), and cream into a sauce - there was more to the sauce but I wasn't watching closely - assemble oysters on beds of wilted julienned leek in the shells, broil, then sauce and serve. Meanwhile there was manicotti as well as other side dishes and salads that people brought, on the buffet. I made crab cakes. This was crab meat, minced onion and garlic, parsley, salt and pepper, a little red pepper flake, mixed with boiled and riced potato, molded into patties, dredge in egg and coat in Panko crumbs, then deep fry. A messy thing to do but they came out nicely. Normally I use egg and bread, not potato, as the binding agent, but we were trying a recipe from the Peterson book. It is a cross of crab cake and latke. Personally I prefer the way I usually do it. Then we broiled some halved lobster tails, with plenty of melted butter. We should probably have extracted the meat and cut it to bite size pieces, in keeping with the cocktail party appetizer theme, but by now we'd been cooking for hours and were getting bogged down by guests wandering into the kitchen, helpfully and insistently busing piles of dirty plates and glasses into the midst of our prep and cooking space. So I was having to do dishes while DD cooked, and our smooth process was getting chaotic. That's the drawback of a small kitchen. My new dishwasher requires a particular workflow. One side of the sink is full of soapy water. Dishes are scraped into the other side of the sink (that has a garbage disposal) then placed in the soapy water. When enough dishes have accumulated, they are removed from the water and placed into the rack which is loaded in the dishwasher. After the dishwasher cycle, which takes three minutes, the rack is removed and set on the counter. The dishes and glasses come out very hot so they are dry in a minute. Quickly remove and stack the clean ware. This is an effective way to wash a lot of dishes very quickly, but definitely interrupts cooking. The seventh dish was to have been scallops in lobster butter. We collected the lobster shells and were starting to make the butter, but then SWMBO reported that everyone was full and it was time for tea, coffee, dessert and the White Elephant present game. So we shelved the seventh seafood dish with some relief. There was still a lot of cleaning up to do!