Marti and Juneroses thank YOU for take the time to look and comment. So sorry to mislead you about the name of the cactus which Tally passed along. Last year I posted photos in which it looked like a praying Madona so I've called it that ever since. The plumbago by the driveway gets a lot of sun from the West. It's water needs are low and it has needed even less water this year since we've had several little showers and the rain runs across the driveway to where it planted itself. One reason a lot of pots are used is that it is NOT easy to dig a hole in this hard and rocky ground. Water absorbing crystals in the potting soil for the more thirsty plants helps hold the water longer. Also large holes are drilled in the bottom of pots so the roots can go out the bottom and still make use of any water that has escaped from the pot. For me it seems that pots require less water volume wise, because it is concentrated in the pots. Recently I'm using more desert plants in the pots that need very little water. This post was edited by roselee on Thu, Oct 9, 14 at 22:02

We're always away for the holidays so I like to keep decorations to a minimum. Since we downsized to a downtown condo last year, our decorations are limited to kitchen/dining/living areas. No holiday decor for master and guest bedrooms or bathrooms. I personally like small items so I limited the decor to a charlie brown tree with some ostrich feathers that I thought I was going to discard (but found new use for them), and some spherical ornaments in a bowl and coffee table. random balls: I like the LED glass spheres because they look like the Amazon biospheres a couple blocks from the condo, so I might keep them on the coffee table after the holidays. :)

Sunfeather - Here it is. Its a small room. The washer and dryer are behind the set of bifold doors closest to the window. Behind the other set of bifold doors is where we keep our laundry. I painted the lady, I painted the chairs, I built the table. Its my crazy painted room I guess but behind the doors is where all the washing happens. I guess the dark walls and the crazy art could be deemed strange but by my standards they are pretty tame.

I find the pictures at the top of this thread to be "too much" ... I like calm, restful, and these "collections" feel jarring to me. If I didn't like collections or the collected look, I'd have given this thread a wide berth : ) . in my "Death book" (a notebook my husband and I put together for the kids, which contains all our accounts, passwords, paperwork), I specified items that have real value (for example, pieces of jewelry) This is a great idea, Mrs. Pete. Because of time constraints "With a few exceptions, used items aren't worth much; your time is worth more." When I wrote "Because of time constraints", I was referring to the amount of time (90 days, IIRC) we had to empty the apartment, since my parents were tenants rather than owners. The "up side" of this is that we had much less time to clear things out; if they had owned the apartment (and lived closer), the clearing out process likely would have taken much longer. Because of circumstances, it had to happen in a very concentrated burst. Same with the house in the West Indies and the NYC office. Books are one of those things that -- again, exceptions exist -- don't have much actual value. For me, it was important to re-home some of the books to others who would appreciate them. I realize this isn't something that others would necessarily want or be able to do. Though the palm and cactus books my father had collected over decades, most out of print or first editions, were indeed valuable to other palm and cactus enthusiasts, and I had no trouble getting folks from the New York horticultural societies and botanical gardens come to take them away : ) .