thanks for all your helpful advice 'suel' - greatly appreciated. i notice you're from VA - what a gorgeous state! you're certainly not short of crape myrtles in there:) my brother and his family actually live down in richmond, so i drive down there often to visit them. that's where i first saw crape myrtles. i'm continually amazed how beautiful they are and how abundant they are in your state. i actually drove down to delaware this morning and picked up 2 crapes from a nursery down there. see ya, bobby~

At the end of my refrig/pantry run I have a small section of countertop above a bank of drawers (about 21X24) where all the mail and other c**p get piled. Two of the drawers hold mailing and school supplies. The other two drawers are supposed to be for DH and me to store mail and other stuff that needs to be saved short term. Unfortunately DH's drawer remains empty while his pile on top grows ever larger. Heaven forbid he should have to open a drawer to get to something when he wants it. I have a three tier letter holder where bills, bank statements and that sort of thing are put until they get paid or whatever. From there they go directly to the file box that I keep in one of my kitchen cabinets. I wanted a filing cabinet in the kitchen, but it was one of the things that had to be scrapped due to lack of space. I wish DH could be a little neater/more organized, but as long as all the clutter stays on the one counter I guess I have to consider it a victory. In our previous kitchen there was so little counter space and his piles were so large, I had a space about 15"X24" to do prep work in. Totally Confused

Nope, don't have them and won't have them. I have enough experience trying to find addresses when I was with the PI firm and would go out to do process service. Talked to enough police and fire folks and saw firsthand during ride-alongs and other experience that they're not very effective. Snow, ice, dirt, parked cars, faded numbers, kids altering numbers... are just a start of the problem with curb numbers. It's another false sense of security pushed by people selling something. Even numbers on the mailbox can often be problematic. First, not all houses have street mailboxes. Some mailboxes are on the house. Many have them grouped, 3-5, some are across the street, down the street, some even a block away. How is that helpful? Far better to have LARGE NUMBERS on your house in a conspicuous spot. I have the numbers that are probably 8" high and very thick in a very contrasting color and it looks fine. I've seen the lighted ones and while they're a good idea, they also should be bigger. I've seen the solar lighted ones too and like the concept but again, they're not always easy to read. It's super easy to tell my house by the number. And the biggest peeve and complaint I heard of emergency vehicles are people who try to be fancy with their address and have the "written out" version rather than numbers (Twenty Three Seventy Seven), as they're in a difficult to read script, thin and small, but "look so fancy". Then the real foo-foo folks try to be fancier and put them in several lines. On behalf of all emergency vehicles "ARGH!!" When you abandon common sense to try to be fancy you assume the risk of delayed emergency response. If your trees and bushes are so overgrown that you can't see your house and numbers you're a burglar's dream. Maybe you should consider trimming your trees and bushes. Otherwise put large numbers on a post at the street high enough to be seen over snow drifts, plow ridges, parked cars/trucks and other obstructions. Turning their heads to the side to see an address is dangerous? Come ON! Sheesh! Sounds like another sales pitch! LOL How about turning your head and LOOKING DOWN? That's not dangerous? Can't buy that one. And yes, GPS is notoriously inaccurate. (And phone apps are worse yet.) It will get you to the area but that's the best you can expect. Plus I know of places where addresses have been changed. A friend's place had his address changed so it can take years for that to be updated in a GPS database. It's always a good idea to have someone outside waiting for emergency vehicles if that's a possibility. That's NOT a bad thing. Around here, the police will almost always if not always respond first to a medical so an ambulance can usually figure out where the problem place is located. Most cops know the locale quite well so they can find the place quite efficiently. FWIW as I mentioned on the parking, fire departments often have issues with people parked in the streets so they have trouble getting the trucks through. There's been times they've just pulled up and pushed cars out of the way so they could get through. There's the advantage of those huge bumpers and powerful engines.

Hi Marlorena- I have doubts about whether Geschwind ever released a rose named Eugene E. Marlitt. The earliest reference to the rose I can find is in French (Nomenclature de tous les noms de roses connus... by Simon and Cochet-Cochet, 2nd ed. 1906), and references 'Eugénie John Marlitt' as a 1902 HT raised by Geschwind. In the 19th C. there was a German novelist who wote romances under the pen-name E. Marlitt; her real name was Eugenie John. I can find no other early 20th C. references until 1912 when the rose (now called 'Mme Eugene Marlitt') is hailed in an American catalog as one of the finest red HT's known. Sometime in the 1920's, she apparently switched genders, as rose names sometimes do (and a sex-change via typo sounds much less painful than surgery). It's easy to see how Eugenie can sound like Eugene E., but was the rose still going by Eugenie even in the 1920's? There are no early references that I can find (and I've looked, but probably my method was lacking) in German. Not in Rosen-zeitung or any other publication. It's true that I don't speak or read German, although I do know enough "rose German" to usually be able to translate rose descriptions I find when adding references to HMF. So I wonder what Geschwind called this rose, if it really was his rose. There doesn't seem to be anything at all that's straightforward about the Marlitt rose, and I'm surprised that anyone could find a specimen with a reliable provenance to test against "Maggie". As for whether "Maggie" would be a good rose for you, the question is moot if you can't find one, but it does seem to be fairly adaptable. And sometimes roses that are heat-loving also do well in cooler climes (Geschwind's 'Gruss an Teplitz' is apparently grown throughout much of SE Asia, but I seem to recall that you grow it too). So if you did happen across a "Maggie" one day, it might be fun to try it out. Virginia ETA: Since writing the above, I did locate a 1907 reference to Mme Eugene in a U.S. catalog.