Glo - Thanks for reassuring me! I hope your move is awesome! My husband has wanted to move us to Colorado for years and hasn't managed to quite convince me yet, although I think it's absolutely wonderful there. LOL So, Winter Solstice is the same everywhere? (LOL)... I guess you're seeing how little I know... Nancy - Thanks for the tip! I am gonna have to watch the lead hand myself as I way oversowed my cantaloupes this fall. The poor babies are fighting each other and giving me 2 to 5 inches fruits that don't look like they're EVER going to full ripen. I will be much more careful in the future. I'll try to not get TOO excited when I go to plant. LOL Carrie - Wow! That's some really good info. That's exactly the kind of thing I was worried about. I'm grateful for the heads up. Liz - LIZ!!! Hey, girl! Fancy meeting you here and there and now here! hee hee... The whole last paragraph of what you wrote is exactly what is concerning me. I know that I personally wear shorts through-out almost the whole winter except for those few crazy days that we see. 50's or what have you is not cold to me... We do get the occasional freeze, but then a week or two later at most you could have a 70+ degree high! All this in the same few days / weeks / months... it's SO crazy! Oh, and if they're having a plantswap around the 8th of December as well, I sure want to know as I'll be out that way. :-) Blessings, Angela

Claire, very inventive. That idea of putting in the wire fencing down the side of the house and then putting rambling roses on stilts running on the top is a riot! I used to love your rose arch so I hope this becomes a great substitute. It looks great so far. And to surround the tasty phlox with the phlox the critters don’t like to eat, genius...lol. Hope that works out. From a distance, that green fencing is not very noticeable. That is such a sweet birdhouse, teapot. Your 8 year old must be so excited to see birds and babies in it! It's such a positive lesson in seeing the rewards from making something with your own hands, to actually end up with birds in it. Gee, I didn’t know you didn’t have turkeys, Claire, but I guess Jane may pick up the slack in that area. How fun! Hope they stick around, Jane. Sorry Jane, didn’t mean to burst your bubble with the chipmunks. It is really just a rumor with no basis in fact that I am aware of…..how’s that, better? (g)

Hi Wayne. I was pretty sure it was a Milk Snake. The odd thing about it was the pattern, which is so much more like the "Intergrade" Milk Snake shown on plate 30 in Conant and Collins 3rd edition, or really like a Red Milk Snake. It was awfully large too; I have seen Milk Snakes, and they were rather smaller and had more of the pattern shown in the plate for the plain old Eastern (from the Boone area, collected by Wayne Vandevender). I am wondering if the "Intergrade" happens outside the Mid-Atlantic, and if we have them, or if it might be a rather odd color and pattern variation. Oddly, for all the years I have been catching and chasing snakes (probably over 50), and to live in Milk Snake range, I had never seen one. I saw your page Wayne. A neighbor of mine was proudly talking about her son killing a 5 foot rattlesnake, and I just walked away; I hope she heard me cussing and saying that the snake wanted nothing more than to live another day, and did not want to run into an ignorant human that just liked to kill things (he air guns squirrels and pigeons in the neighborhood; he was talking about air gunning Woodpeckers, and I offered to turn him in - federal crime! HAHAHA!). Ah well, we can only do what we can do...

Personally, I never liked milk all that much. It was never a beverage for me although sometimes served as a vehicle for dunking cookies in. I purchase whole milk for making yogurt and the kids use milk in their cereal. I do reduce the amount of cheese in most recipes but an unlikely to eliminate it entirely. When cooking, I use a wide variety of "milks" and that often depends on what is in the house, sometimes coconut milk, hemp milk, cashew milk, etc. I have found no acceptable alternative to half n half for my coffee. We generally prefer Blue Bell ice cream so will only have ice cream when it goes on sale and that is a measured amount. Sometimes we will also make ice cream with alternative milks. Coconut milk ice cream is fabulous. Annie, hemp milk is rather easy to make if you have a good blender, significantly cheaper too. kswl, I think all the alternative milks are for people like my dh who liked milk drinking at one time and want an alternative that is perhaps healthier. DH always loved chocolate milk and now he still likes a small glass of chocolate hazelnut milk at night. As far as the effects on children, I suspect that there are many factors within the diet that contribute to things such es early puberty, not just dairy. My daughter actually started puberty 2 years later than I. It is hard to say in our family how the teeth are affected as they all got their baby teeth relatively late and so the process of losing them started late too.