Josh: Happy Weekend to you too! "Rules of thumb" are a strange thing. They are usually wrong, and rarely are the very useful in practice. ;-) The two rules of thumb presented in this thread are a great example. The whole "1 week per inch" thing is conservative for warm weather outdoors (the sort of place many of us take cuttings). In reality, I wait one week then pot into dry soil for easily 95% of my cuttings. That include Jades of *all* diameters. For the occasional rare or touchy species, I'll actually monitor the callous and pot only when I'm convinced it is fully formed. All the same, I feel good about telling people to follow that rule it here on the forums, because as applied, I think it tends to favor the plant surviving. Sure, in a rare case it probably doomed a cutting to die from dessication, but it has likely saved far more that would have ended up as mush being jammed straight into sopping wet pot o' peat the moment the cutting is taken... Now, lets look at the other rule, 1 month per inch to establish roots. Of course, the implication to me is that once the roots are formed, it is safe to start watering. Honestly, a month an inch, specifically for large cuttings (>1"), is pretty close for Jades, at least here in SoCal (probably more like two months). At a minimum it is at least as accurate as the other rule. The key difference, at least to me, is that following the rooting rule you mentioned could lead to people watering their 1/4" jades one week after repotting them. In most cases, it probably won't hurt, but it certainly doesn't help, and if their soil sucks then the plant is dead. So following that rule to the letter gives essentially no benefit, but increases an existing risk. The other rule (1 week/1" drying) gives very little benefit too, but it *reduces* an existing risk. So, I hope this long-winded rant helps make it clear why I dismissed the "rule" you mentioned, while at the same time promoting an equally plausible "rule" of my own. It is too easy to share advice without sharing justifications, but for the sake being polite and friendly, sometimes I just can't let myself be lazy!

We have a peninsula with seating for four (3-person family). We use it for breakfast every day, lunch on weekends, after school snacks, and dinner for DD8 and I when DH can't be home. We have a separate formal DR, and that is used for most dinners and occasional "nice" breakfasts when we have overnight company. I LOVE the peninsula seating, but I also love eating in my lovely DR where I can see everyone's faces. I firmly believe in having 2 eating areas - one purely casual, and one less casual (even if not fully formal). I think seating for 3 to 4 works. More than that... I would seriously look at a curved design or an L-shaped seating area. Some other useful things that peninsula/island seating is great for: 1 - Kids can eat cereal while parent(s) pack lunches, make snacks - promotes conversation, including conversations about healthy snacks! Eye-contact is frequent during these times. 2 - A couple stools can be temporarily requisitioned for crafts/projects. The whole month of December, half our peninsula was functional, while the other half was covered with a diorama project. This also forced us into the DR a bit more often in Dec., which is a good thing! 3 - Countertop seating is great for MESSY stuff - i.e., your super sticky 3-year-old neice or the fondue that seemed like such a good idea at the time. I'm not a huge fan of really messy stuff on my newly refinished DR table. 4 - When DD has a friend over after school, they eat snacks at the counter, and I get to be a fly on the wall - doing dishes, sorting mail, etc. They forget I'm there, since a mom in a kitchen is almost like a decor item. So sometimes I get good info about who said what, or which teachers are mean - kid stuff, but it helps me understand them better! Our last house had just a DR table in a separate room from the kitchen. I hated it. DD would eat breakfast all alone while I made her lunch. When other kids were visiting, it was like an exercise class for me - constantly jumping up and running to the kitchen to refill a drink, or get more strawberries, or replace a dropped fork. When she was really small, I had to sit with her while she ate - and she was SLOW (we had a super small house and no actual high chair, just a portable booster at the table). I never had the luxury of doing dishes while she finished lunch, hence the dishes simply never got done. With counter seating, we would have had a counter-height high chair, and I could have done something USEFUL while she played with her peas. When I was a kid, we had a peninsula with seating for 3. We were a 4-person family, so my mom was a short-order cook in the kitchen, while my father, sister, and I lounged at the counter. I cannot *fathom* why my mother allowed my father to build the counter this way, nor why she never once kicked one of us off so she could sit down. I don't think I EVER saw her sit there. So, whatever seating you choose, definitely make sure you have enough for your whole family. Otherwise, you run the risk of your kids seeing you as (treating you as?) their servant. Good luck with your layout!

Yes - feel free to photoshop a smiley if you like. kaegarden - do you have a space for a plant with 5 foot diameter leaves? It's basically a bog plant. (Gunnera, not me.) The picture was taken in a shady woodland setting at Abbotsbury subtropical gardens. http://abbotsbury-tourism.co.uk/gardens/gallery/

Lars, I'm so sorry! I didn't mean that at all! I wasn't addressing only the women or lumping the men in with the women. I only meant that the proportion of women plumping for the raw size of rare was unusual to me. The men's responses seemed to be a normal or unremarkable spread. In the linked discussion, I could have said "people", but I said women just because I know about women's cooking behavior, both now and from my grandmother's age, as well as what I've read in old diaries and cooking articles. I don't know enough about men to say, though I have heard lectures about the kinds of implements that women used in the past, while I can't recall anything on the subject about chuckwagon cookies or other male cooks. My only memories of a being in a kitchen with a man making a reduction are by an astronautical engineer who is more precision oriented. I wasn't excluding men, per se, just didn't have any relevant information on how they do things so didn't speak for them. If something should like that should happen again, please chime in! There are some posters whose genders/gender identities aren't known to me, but I promise you I don't mean to marginalize men, and I certainly didn't mean to make you feel uncomfortable. This is not a women's group, nor do I regard it as one. I have belonged to a women's group whose mission was to give women roles and authority, as well as a feminine voice, in what was otherwise a very traditional, traditionally male field, but even then men were welcome to participate so long as they didn't try to take over. This is not such a group and the only one I can remember belonging to which was 100% women only was the girl scouts. Neither textiles nor cooking are womens' fields (nursing babies is, though there are some men with acquired (rather than experiential) knowledge on the subject), nor does gender of any kind have much to do with them. While there are some sociological and biological differences in tastes, they're not prominent. That is something that desired meat temperature speaks to, however, which is why I made the remarks at all--it was a beside the way difference that I found interesting and educational.