Cynthia, SO nice to finally hear from you. I was getting worried about and "that fool dog of your's". I can't even begin to contemplate how hard this must be. At least with Rex he still had 3 legs left to hop around on... and while he may've been sore for some time he could at least move around and shift position without yelping. I really would like to see a picture if you're up to shooting it and then posting it. Hang tough! I love candles in the windows of a home (pictures? look who's talkin'). The only reason I don't do it here is that there are windowboxes under the roadside window and I fill them with greens that would hide the candles. But when I was a kid we used them. And, MARTIE, we added one for every Sunday in Advent! All the decorations were left up until the Epiphany (Twelfth Night) and they came down the next day. I finished the 3 pediments this afternoon and put them up. I like them. But need to add something pale/bright to the lower edge to keeping them from "oozing" visually into the window below... . Shoulda bought more .99 lemons at Wallyworld, damnit. I have the big pediment on the dining room table right now and am about to embark on that. Boxwood is holding up, and I'm a whiz at making white pine swags now. :) (smells really good in here and the cats are having a total blast... in and out, in and out, doing their wonderful kitty routines. (thinking of Cynthia and the candles). Norma, your photographs are lovely (no "blurries" here, either)! I see a lot more color than just green grass in those shots. I love the way Mother Nature changes the palette over the course of the seasons but gives us the shimmer of rain and snow, instead. Martie, Kyle should be excited about his position. He must be having the time of his life. I'm a bit envious, frankly! :) I'm still struggling with how Mum's life ended, Martie. Not that I think I could have done more (aside from the ususal regrets you feel when someone you love dies), but there are several things I would love the opportunity to go back and "fine tune". I've thought about your question repeatedly over the past few days and still don't really have what I want to say completely figured out. It's such a huge thing to face and I still feel the full force of the wave that overtook me and hurled me onto the beach. I'm still shaking my head and trying to "collect myself"; checking again and again to make sure "everything is here". A good, family plan is the perfect place to start and having the doctor know you is KEY. IF you're able, make sure your Mom's doctor "follows" her if she ends up living with her children or enters a nursing home. That's one of the things I most regret... I loved her doctor when she was with me. He was young, hip, and all about minimizing medications and keeping her ACTIVE. I deeply regret the loss of that when Mum entered that awful place. Many, many thoughts and reminiscences today... alone with my thoughts, the animals and my final project (helmeet working AND going out with his buddy tonight). Some tears, a lot of "singing along", and the appreciation that the decorations are really ALL Mum. I learned it somewhere, afterall! Thinking of my friends tonight and still hoping for some basic pointers on how to "light" a basic TECHINICAL shot with my camera. Please? (MY tent would have a perpetually warm hot water bottle, blue cheese and pate. A cat, a good biography... want to know more about Martin Luther and Abraham Lincoln. Sparkling water with lemon, and Pinot Grigio or a nice red wine. Clementines, olives, and almonds. It would smell like evergreens, too).

Yes, I often stop down to 1 1/2 stopss too, depending on if I'm seeing a lot of light areas in the image. In fact, I don't have a whole lot of time and a big garden, so I have to be efficient. Not knowing what mood I'll be in re depth of field when I look at them later on, I'll take multiple pictures in multiple f stops and in each of those f stops, I'll usually take multiple bracketed exposures, if I explained that right. It's not unusual for me to take 200-300 pictures on a 30 minutes walk around the garden being really efficient! The problem I'm having now is that my lens is too slow and I'm getting lots of slightly blurred images. I need a faster lens, which is too expensive for the moment. Re the reds, if you use the magnetic lasso in photoshop you can isolate areas that you want to have a separate exposure. Also, there is now very exciting new technology by Nik software where you can just click on any area and change that area. I'll definitely be getting that at some point. In the meantime, if it's really a problem, I'll isolate the part of the image I need to change with the magnetic lasso or just manipulate the exposure with levels, but I don't like super saturated reds, so I'll underexpose the reds by a variety of settings to be sure that there is detail in the bloom later on. Working with the exposure should help with the color. If not, you can always manipulate the individual color tones.

This is a great thread. I first have to say that I had my husband look at some of this, and I will say upfront that he is totally engaged (he does most of the cooking). But I'm terrible. My family is here and rated me at a 9.5 out of 10 for being a witch the hours before a party. I remember yelling at my daughter because I had just hung up a perfect clean towerl on the hanging ring and went in, they had used it, and wadded it up over the ring. I yelled at them, and still feel bad about it today. Most importantly because I don't want them to think that entertaining is awful and never have a dinner party because they remember it being hell day. I grew up with my mother keeping a horrendous house. It was a mess, and I mean a mess. Counters piled with crap, dishes not done for days, and she didn't care. She was always having friends stop by. Even as a young child, it embarassed me to all heck. I can still remember coming home from babysitting at midnight or so when I was 12 or 13 years old (I started young), and I would clean the kitchen from top to bottom. It would take a couple of hours. I was different than her even back then. When my dad remarried, it was Martha Stewart land. She had to have it spotless. Every Saturday was crack and corner day. We quite literally had to pull the couch out and vacuum under it at least every other week, and we had to bleach the counters. Crazy the other way! So, I can't seem to have anyone over unless my house is totally cleaned! And our parties themselves are quite memorable to everyone who comes. They talk about it afterward for weeks. I do enjoy having wonderful parties but I also wish I could relax about my house. I know its wrapped up in my childhood psyche. I will even make sure the main counters are clean as guests are arriving for a dinner party. And that's while we're using the kitchen! But I'm also so proud of our kitchen and want to show it off. Now one time, we had a Chinese extravaganze where we covered our desk with Chinese ingredients, friends came over at noon and didn't leave until midnight. The men mostly cooked and it was a blast. Every inch of every counter was covered with crap. I remember walking in the kitchen, the dust was flying from someone rolling out potstickers while someone else was frying a whole fish over the wok burner, and someone else was mixing something up. I didn't care what the kitchen looked like that day. I'll never forget that party. I don't know if I'll ever change about the clean house though. It's so engrained in me. Well, my husband is making London Broil so I'm off to the kitchen!! Great stories though. I think we have more in common than we realized.

It would be significantly less expensive and use significantly less energy to have one unit do the job. Ice makers are noisy energy hogs. They don't "keep" ice. They just make it. Continually. Which means that if you don't use the whatever 60 pounds of ice a day that it makes that it just melts away and has to be drained. You are paying for all of that energy to freeze all that water and paying for a pump to pump it all away unused. (Unless you plumb in a gravity drain.) And they aren't happy about being turned off and only turned on when there's a party and you need a bunch of ice. It's a bit less convenient to go and buy a bunch of bagged ice for parties, but you can buy a heck of a lot of ice fore $2500+ that is the startup costs. Running costs can be from $20-$50 a month depending on model. Most refrigerators, even if they aren't Energy Star, will only cost you around $55 a year to run. "Beverage fridges" aren't generally that energy efficient. Nor are they that cold. They don't have freezer sections either. They start at about $1200 and go up from there. So, you'd have a $3700 beginning expense if you went with a beverage fridge and ice maker and you'd still have no freezer to chill down the Jello shooters or keep Popsicles for the kids. Depending on how much traffic this bar area gets, you might even want to go for a 30" or 33" fridge rather than a 24" one. Choosing stainless would be less than choosing a paneled one, but that's an aesthetic decision as well as a monetary one.