"Just wait until you have to pack up all that crap and move it." My SIL just bought a retirement home so they are decluttering their current house as a preparation for selling it--she keeps telling me she can't believe how much STUFF she's got to get rid of. When I go to their house I always admire how it looks nicely organized and without extraneous things all over. However, I also admire her tons of closets and storage space which she says leads to keeping, you guessed it, all that stuff LOL. I've decided I will play a mental game this summer and pretend we have to move; maybe that will be my motivation to get rid of much unnecessary and unused stuff in our house! I use the holidays and shopping for gifts to satisfy any yen I may have to be a retail hunter/gatherer. The past few years I increasingly feel as if I am gorging myself after staying on a careful and healthy diet; by the time January comes I feel so psychically bloated from all the shopping /buying that I need another year to rest up and recover! It's interesting to me to watch my young adult daughter who is setting up her first home. She loveslovesloves Home Goods, Marshalls, Pier 1 etc. And when I go with her I usually find stuff I could easily buy. I have a rule that I can't take anything from those places home the day I see it. That usually short circuits the purchase, I'm rarely motivated enough to fight the traffic and crowds to go back a second time!

My Tuff Stuff has survived -23F without showing any issues and blooms well on new wood. I don't know how much colder you expect to get than that. Although I only planted my Tiny Tuff Stuff last year, I haven't been impressed so far. It is so small that I thought it had died and although I recently discovered that it didn't it is so tiny it has no current value in the garden. Perhaps in a small courtyard or if I had an apartment balcony it would work well, but in my garden it's so small that it is getting overwhelmed by even relatively small perennials. This isn't an issue I've had with other hydrangeas.

LOL! Too bad about the chicken. Was it not tasty? Long stewed chicken can be luscious or just plain overcooked. :) My mother always used a darning needle to sew up stuffed birds too, but she made sutures. :) My first thought for stuffing is always matzah. We almost always had turkey for Seder. It's easy to make for three dozen people at an indeterminate time. My mother would have loved to have made rice stuffing but my father's Ashkenazie family would have freaked. :) Recently I figured out that my failures with matzah stuffing were the brand. I like Yehuda best because it doesn't taste like cardboard, but Manischewitz absorbs the stock and fat much better and is ideal for stuffing. Even better if there are also mandelin and various varieties of matzah besides water. Freeze overs from the year before. Bread stuffing is an American tradition probably because in the old days stale bread was plentiful and cheap. Oysters in stuffing definitely gained a name because of that. It's odd to think of now, but oysters used to be so extremely plentiful in the Northeast, just waiting on the beach to be picked up, that they were thought of as poor people's food. Other regions make cornmeal or cornbread stuffing, probably also started because it was plentiful.

@rouge21 so glad to read that you keep AH-AH in an unheated garage. I just got one and I was thinking of doing the same thing. I can't decide where to put it in the garden, so thought I would keep it in a pot until I decide where it can go. My beds are downsized and tiny now and jam packed so new plantings are a real dilemma! I bought one for a friend's birthday after we fell in love with it on a garden tour. So of course, I had to buy one for myself too LOL! She got the large one. The large one came with couple of flowers and I was disappointed to see pink. But I imagine once it hits New England acid soils, it will get blue on its own. I hope... Also love the March dead top pic followed by the June in bloom pic! Did you cut off any of the old top growth? Was the top growth truly dead or did it sprout as the season progressed?