"Courtney, MG has an agenda on these forums, which is to get people to embrace conventional agriculture with it's huge scale, poisons, synthetic fertilizers, depleting of underground aquifers, chimerical genetics, and etc. He's been scolded for bringing that agenda to this particular forum, so now he resorts to sneaky stratagems like claiming that his home-grown produce tastes the same as some tired junk grown on depleted fields, picked too early and sitting around in a truck and store shelf for a week or more." thanks pnbrown for telling us that! Once I heard him say he makes sauce from canned tomatoes I knew something was up! ;)

Seems a lot of us liked our paper dolls. I remember when you could go to the five and dime (we had two, Danner's and Ben Franklin's) and buy a whole booklet for a dime. Of course, a dime was pretty hard to come by back in those days and when you were 7 or 8. We cut furniture out of old Sears and Penney's catalogs and make pretend rooms. I read a lot, too. Like YogaLady, we got library cards very young. The library had a summer reading club. If you read 10 books and gave an oral book report to the librarian you got to go on a picnic at the end of summer. I usually had read at least double that amount. We also played games. We played riddle-dee-dee, I see something you don't see. Then you would give a hint--like it begins with a "B". When we would go to Grandma J's, she'd play cards with us. Mainly "War" which can last forever--bless her heart. Summer was for bike riding--with some friends we used to ride 5 miles out into the country to my grandparents' farm. We'd go to the creek to cool off and explore the woods. This was in 7-8 grades. Winter was sledding and ice skating at Herkles pond. Usually a fire to warm us when needed and hot chocolate in thermos bottles. Gosh, sometimes it'd be fun to be young again.

Re: being mortgage free. To be honest, I have been mortgage free three times. The first time was in our first small town home which we had paid off by saving every penny and before children( our interest rate was 18% - ouch). Then family came along and we needed a bigger home so basically what we got for our first mortgage free home when we sold it was our down payment for the second home. Then we paid off that but then we decided that our home was falling apart around us (literally and physically) so we borrowed against the value of our home for a gut-renovation. That mortgage we just paid off 2 weeks ago. In hindsight, given the real estate values we should have kept the townhome and rented it out. But, who knew? Our goal was to be mortgage free by the time we were 60 and we just made it.The latest Canadian stats I can find are from 2008 and it says that the average age of those with a mortgage is 45 and those now mortgage-free is 62. I suspect the 62 has risen a little bit. But it really is about personal choice on how we spend our money.

I was reluctant to buy our first house which the realtors called Hidden Hollow. It was a small cape on 5 gorgeous acres 45 miles from NYC. I grew to love it. 22 years later we were ready to move and I found our current house on a day when DH was traveling. I fell madly in love with the house and the land. DH came to see it and picked it apart. There was an oil stain on the garage floor and assorted other "problems" that he could find. Finally he said that since he had kind of pushed me into our first house he would sacrifice and purchase this house. The house is now called "Billy's Sacrifice." I made a sign. He truly loves the house now. The sign is hidden in the trees.