To be specific... today I am doing as little as possible due to the heat and my now premature old age, thanks to gardening. After ambitiously creating all new big flower beds around our house and yards, moving MANY tons of compost and mulch into these beautiful sweeping mounded beds, I realize too late that I was a short-sighted fool, since each summer my wife goes away for a month to visit her So California family. I realize too late that NOW I won't be able to go to my lake and drink beer with my brother, because all this beautiful new flora needs watering every day in this oppressive summer heat. Good bye Old Milwaukee and fishing. Hello hostas and coneflowers, plus hundreds of other perennials. I can ostensibly hide soaker hoses under the mulch and use those watering timers I bought last year... but it seems a bit risky to rush into another project when it's 95 degrees. Now when I go to our little neighborhood grocery store, all the nice ladies working there gather to make fun of me, and (baiting me) ask how my wife has been treating me through all my insanely ambitious garden and home projects that I have underway? I tell them that I pretend to be working but that I'm doing nothing more than softly singing negro spirituals and avoiding her. Now don't get me wrong about my wife of 37 years. We started dating when 16 years old, and I love her in a way that's sound as any forever bond or steely weld. I just wish she'd retire before 60 like me. She's a too organized 2nd grade teacher, and I'm a very bad boy it seems. As a result, she keeps putting my name on the refrigerator. Women... I swear they are fussier than an orchid at times, and meaner than a weed. Our yards now look fantastic and have commercial landscape lights... but Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen. jim Palmer

Sorry about those hard choices Miss Kitty. Takes all the fun out of it. We are kind of just doing winter stuff. Little bit of snow, kind of cool at mid 20Fs. Supposed to warm up by weekend. I spent last week cleaning out the barn, house, tack collection. DD and I went to a Tack Sale to SELL! Amazing how fast stuff accumulates, then you never use it or need it again. Lots of things she has outgrown. We washed and packed everything into plastic tubs to haul, worked out pretty well. The sale was a little slow, just steady. Sold stuff, but not what I expected to sell. Made some money, warm place to sit on a cold day! There was a second tack sale about an hour away, same report. Lighter in buying this year. I guess we will be hitting a couple more sales, see if we can get rid of some more of it. Sunday we had the 4-H kids over to see hoof trimming on the horse, along with learning foot and leg parts. They are studying for Hippology Contest. That is a horse knowledge competition for all the County clubs. Have to know LOTS of stuff. Our horses were very cooperative, stood like troopers. They have bigger feet, easier to see things. Checked husband's old shoe collection, what kind goes on what hoof, used for what horse activity. Husband used lots of the "new thinking" labels, so kids would understand if asked. We also did some mouth and teeth inspections, since we have widely varied ages. Mouth changes with age, so they were able to see the teeth and angle visuals on a real horse. Find the reference points mentioned in the books. Also see how age and teeth don't always match exactly. Was pretty interesting for all. One horse tricked the leader, his teeth made him appear younger than his registration paper age! Picked the good and bad points on a couple horses, checking the kids "eye" for a horse. Every horse has notable things, good and poor, so they practiced on ours. We don't worry if ours aren't picture perfect, they aren't look-at-only horses. They have to work for a living, makes them need a different body style. Pointed out features that make them better as Sporthorse rather than a cow horse. Why body angles make them move bigger, use their knee, not flat movers. Kids appeared to have a good time, just got cold standing in the barn for a couple hours. The rest of the week is slower. I will be riding the sale horse everyday to get him tuned up a bit. He is going for a tryout ride on Thursday. We have a better-than-me rider who will ride him so I can video it. She will actually be riding both our sale horses, make them look terrific. She is just a super rider. Long distance lookers want to see horses going before coming to look. DD and I will have to get up early to haul horse over to the indoor arena where she will be riding them. Hoping everything goes smoothly. My birdfeeders are getting a fair amount of visitors. Lots of little woodpeckers eating up the peanut butter suet. Sunflower seeds going down steadily in this cold weather. Wind is very chilly, wet feeling. Dogs have smoothed out all my snowy paths with their warm feet. The paths have a shiny ice layer! Hope it stays cold, nice not fighting the mud.

Oh, man, I don't even know how many snakes we've had! When the hay gets mowed and baled, rats,mice,snakes....ick, you name it. The river is so close. The weather is warm pretty much year round. And some of the incidents are so crazy, you just can't make this stuff up :D If you didn't read my blog..well, my son was about 12 or 13, and killed a snake, and then decided he wanted to make a belt.(a friend is a taxidermist,so he figures he'll get tips how to do it) So he nails this huge fat snake to a long board, took lots of nails and quite a while to get it done, since he's carefully stretching this snake a little at a time. When my sister comes over later,he's all excited, come see the snake I got, I'm gonna make a BELT...the board was there, but the snake and all the nails were gone. It turns out this hell-a long snake was still alive, and played possum the whole time he's nailing it with dozens of nails. My son just figured, oh,well, I'll get another snake one day. Me, I picture this PinHead HellRaiser snake crawling away, continuing it's snake-ly business. But about snakes in the house...one time, I guess my son was about 21 at the time, I don't remember, but already an electrician. He and my future daughter in law were in his room chatting about what to do for the day when he tells her 'go see my mom'. She got up and asks 'what?' and he says 'there's a snake, go see my mom, and tell her to come here'(cause ya'll know how useful I am in these situations!) Well, turns out he noticed the helium filled mylar balloons she'd gotten him were bobbing about. And it was a snake...ON THE WALL...that kept butting heads with the balloons,making them bounce around like that. He's shut the door by then, but I run down the hall to see what he wants ME for. He says' bring me my sidecutters..whatWHATwhat?...yeah, I squawk like a chicken ..he repeats himself and I go fetch them. And he wants me to put a towel under the door' so it can't get out, Mom...well, all of us, future daughter-in-law,daughter,myself..naturally we stay outside the door where we can hear all this bumping and banging, then swearing "*&^% the *&^%$#@ thing went into the back of my television. MOm, bring me my tool bag.'..ack,omg..so he has to take apart his TV to retrieve this huge snake. We can hear him swearing and then finally he says 'ya'll back up and go to the living room. Mom, open the door." omg..he comes out,with this snake he's grabbed by the neck with a pair of sidecutters(something with a SHORT handle),and it's wrapped around his forearm, with it's head half cut off, but he's holding onto it pretty good with these sidecutters, and he takes it outside, and has to fight to get it uncoiled off his arm, but he gets it off and throws it in the bushes. Then he wants to know "what did you plan? a movie or what?" So calm. So brave. Once my son was here working on his truck when a couple of his friends, brothers, stopped by. They'd just gone canoeing down the river and saw him in the drive, so they stopped to chat. Well, as they stood in the shade talking, up crawls this long green snake. The brother wearing the shirt, reached down and grabbed the snake and held it up to the brother without a shirt. They're all laughing, and the shirted brother is holding this snake out in front of him....when all of a sudden...the snake jumped forward, and latches onto the brother without a shirt, right on his NIPPLE!!! I was out there,too. I couldn't do anything but make little strangling sounds and these guys are all laughing, even the one wearing the snake on his nipple. Finally I start backing up and the guy without a shirt got the snake to let go and he's holding it. All I could think of to say was "you need a tetanus shot"..... We've had LOTS of snakes inside. I have LOTS of snake stories. Heck, I have rat stories,too! It's scary. But anytime you live in the country ,and on the river, this happens. They sell these big huge glue traps for rats and snakes. Just like the little ones you catch mice with. So far,though, the rats are too smart, and maybe too big, for the glue traps. We had this rat we tried and tried to catch, one that would jump from behind the washing machine when I'd go in there at night. Well, my son decided he was going to get it one night, and set out a mechanical trap, and a glue trap, and then set a chair so he could look through the kitchen door at it. He got an air rifle, and fixed himself a drink, and got comfy in that chair. Sure enough, this rat comes from behind the washer, but jumped right on the glue trap. This rat gave us the most horrible hairy eye-ball as it went back down beside the washer with this glue trap stuck to it's butt. But a few seconds later it jumps straight up,looking us in the eye, and reaches down with it's little rat fingers in mid stride, and YANKS that glue trap off of itself.....and gets away. I'm sure it went on to father many many smart little rat-lings, but we never caught it. And it never came back. But that was a GOOD THING, right Martha? ******oh, this is long. I'm going to have to write a book one day :D

Well, "life" happened and the kitchen took a back seat :(. It's always on my mid but did not get a chance to spend any quality time on it. Thank you jakuvall, for some reason I did not realize that 36X33 would have smaller suzan - duhhh - thank you for pointing it out. That now makes me think twice about doing 36X33 as I am "loosing" more space than I thought. westsider40 - I was looking at the rev-a-shelf but did not look closely at the measurements. I will double check to see how much space is inside the rails. I don't like that left corner so much that I am considering moving the window so I can have more usable cabinet sizes. As I have it now on the uppers, I do see how having skinny 9" (about) door as part of easy reach and than 12 inch door/cab might not be the best. And there is just no great solution for the bottom either. If I move the window about 10 inch to the right and make my cabs 13" deep since I think I can do maybe 26X26 easy reach than 15" cab and 29" cab on the other side of the window. I Than the bottom cabinets I think could be - 36X36 susan, 12" (pullout), 30" sink cab, 15" drawer. I have total of 119 inches on that wall but want to leave couple of inches (I think maybe I'll leave 3") between the cabinets and door molding. I will have to draw it out and see if i need to tweak the sizes as I am not that quick with math but it seems like maybe that would be a better solution? I will play around with couple layouts and see what makes more sense. Once I re-do my drawings, should I make a new post or continue this one - not sure what is more acceptable and easier or proper.