The contest is officially over!! and if I can ever get this phat cat photo to cross over you'll see the phat lady sing! Thank you all for the warmth and humor you've shared - I really need it now that we're not going to see 10F for another week. (-30F windchills for the next 4 days - yes, sympathy please). SO! It's up to the judges now, the panel of 4 has their work cut out for them. We're picking 1 winner in the pond (aquarium) catagory, and 1 in the non-pond related catagory. Each winner will have $25 donated in their pet's name to HSDM. And as I've told the judges, every photo here is fair game, because while some photos are of the pet involved in their OCD behavior, other pix are of the pets and the stories are of their OCD behavior. And, yes, the owner's OCD! We're all family here and a picture of Aunt Mable snoozing in the Lazy Boy may bring up fond memories of that great Thanksgiving when she got a little tipsy and fell asleep before the pecan pie! There's often alittle history behind a photo. Winners will be announced SUPER BOWL Sunday! Thanks everybody!

This is funny you posted this, because I was wondering today if an ikea bed would work in the guest room. I think I decided against it for now. I dont know anything about MASH but I did consider their beds before I bought mine from dwr. I like that bed in your photo. Where I live, there are scorpions and centipedes and I wanted a bed with little surface area touching the ground. I have the dwr modern bed in walnut and really like it. I got it at their semiannual sale for 15% plus free in home delivery. I think they have a couple storage options also. You probably already considered dwr, but just in case... http://www.dwr.com/category/bedroom/beds.do Here's another link, to hive modern: http://hivemodern.com/pages/category123/beds I dont think I would spend 5k for a bed unless it included the mattress. I really do like that bed you posted sochi. It seems like it would work for your new house.

c - them apple's be mostly stone fruits. Except the "papples", as my kids and her friends call em. Those get skinned (I know you can eat the skin but they don't like them), sliced and refrigerated in boxes for mid-dance breaks. The bigger the papple the better because the inside flesh gets gooshier. Also, refrigerating them breaks up some of the cells and also gooshifies them a bit. Not that they're bad crunchy, this is just the preference du jour. The rest are various unnamed stone fruits. The green ones are wonderful crunchy plums -- I meant to ask the farmer if those are "Green gage", only because I know that name. They are pointy and crisp and sweet. I love those. The smaller round ones are very slightly hairy and they're something like a nectarine cross. They're also quite crisp. I think there are some true nectarines in the bunch. If "true" isn't an oxymoron, it's just that those fruit growers never stop crossing things and by now there are so many crosses of crosses of crosses, no one has the slightest idea what anything is anymore. That is if they even remembered where the crosses came from, which usually they don't. Not an apple in the bunch! And I never get around to doing anything with any of them but eating em straight up really. I still have some amazing summer oranges from a month or so ago but because they're citrus they keep. I just put one in a salad with an avocado from our yard. Sometimes I put avocado in smoothie: highly recommended! Creamifies it better than cream (which I never use because it's fattening except .... oops. I hadn't thought of how avocado is probably at least as much so). I had a passel of peaches I thought about sticking in a pie ... but that didn't happen either. They're just too amazing fresh. And truthfully, when they arrive straight off the tree and so fresh and non-commercially engineered, it's a little hard to manage them. They have a very short ripe period and then get bad or crunchy out front of it. When they turn I stick them in the fridge, cut out the bad parts and smoothie-them. I suppose that would be also the time to pie-them. I'll have my assistant look into it. ;) Just in case anyone's interested I have an arrangement with this farmer personally to operate a sort of modified CSA. Happy to share details offlist with anyone who might be interested. It's more work than I figured but worth it!

For us, it was going thru 2 general contractors before firing them and doing it ourselves. The first one did excellent work, came highly recommended, until we found out he had a severe drinking problem with several DUI's. Upon interviewing a former client of his, we found out he would show up 3 hours late, make himself drinks in the house, the whole job took twice as long, and that client would never hire him again. But his craftsmanship was flawless! Go figure. So we offered to still use him if he went into professional counseling to deal with his alcoholism. He blew up, we walked away from the deal, and found another one. The second one we used to fix a rental house we bought to live in while the main house was being done. All he had to do was install an IKEA kitchen, refinish the wood floors, remove the popcorn, and take a wall out. Simple enough. When we saw the wavy uneven floors (he refused to rent a new machine and tried to use an old one he got a "deal on"), along with the puddles of dried polyurethane (we actually thought the dog had pee'd on the floor!), and the inept help he got (they couldn't even install IKEA cabs properly), we fired him on the main house and withheld payment. Of course, he cried foul and tried to make a stink about it, but one of us is an attorney, so we know our rights! LOL We ended up general contracting the main house ourself, it turned into a year long total gut job renovation, I had a great team of subs, we only made a few mistakes along the way, and I gained a profound respect for general contractors. And the money managing skills I gained that year actually paid off...in my main job I was asked to fix and maintain a multi-million dollar departmental budget, which was a piece of cake after doing a house.