Hi Campanula, >Mary, thank you for sweetly pointing out my tendency to disappear up my own bottom. A little introspection is a good thing and those who never indulge are missing out on some good insights. Apologies! I didn't mean what I wrote exactly in the way it might have sounded. >I have decided to jump on Melissa's kind explanation and claim wisdom and experience - I certainly know enough about my own lazy tendencies to know that any rose I grow must look good with weeds. Melissa is certainly right. And I like weeds too. We pulled a huge one growing right next to General Gallieni earlier today. I kept looking at it, thinking that it was a good-looking weed, so did we really need to pull it? But it was clearly steeling lots of nutrition from the rose; we almost had to pull up the rose to get the weed up. Anyway, I'll bet that if we looked up that weed in our book on native flowering species of North Carolina it would be one of those natives I'd really enjoy having somewhere. >Roses have to have a definate presence en masse, flopping and rampaging with abandon. I think our tastes are fairly similar so I know exactly what you mean, I think. >I can just about detect an underlying vision for the whole plot, loosely based on wildness, abundance and a certain amount of make-do, bodging and chaos. I've purchased some landscaping books and have noticed over and over how drawn I am to landscapes like this. What most people consider well-balanced symmetrical perfection seems too unnatural to me to be the ultimate in beauty. >Even so, I have jumped out of my comfort zone and finally ordered Hot Chocolate (after years of dithering)-it can live in a pot on the sidewalk if it looks too silly at the allotment. We've not tried that one but it looks exciting! Good luck on it! Oh, oh... I just heard your Hot Chocolate asking for another rose friend to sort of repeat some of its colorings a bit farther along in the plot. I hear Hot Chocolate right now, saying that it wants you to plant Cinco de Mayo, ownroot if you can find it there. Just to keep Hot Chocolate company. Or maybe just because Hot Chocolate likes its developer? Anyway, we have tried Cinco de Mayo, and both of us loved it. It might have been a bit thornier than average, but that's the only negative that I know of. We lost it due to RRD and I still miss it, happy party rose that it is. Healthy as you could ever wish for; no spot of anything anywhere at any time. Beautiful, beautiful foliage, dark green with new growth edged in red for many weeks. It grew to about 4.5 feet here in one season, growing extraordinarily rapidly from a plant in April so tiny to begin with that its foliage could have fit into a teacup (though it had its roots in a gallon-sized container). The fragrance is at least moderate 90% of the time and it is WONDERFUL. When my husband brought a single cutting into the house, that wonderful scent from a single bloom wafted across the room. I hope you have a great time with whatever you end up deciding on! Best wishes, Mary

Yep, apricot, soft peachy blends and changeable colors (think Tamora, Gruss an Aachen, Crepuscule, Reve d'or.) Thought I didn't care for yellow at all but found I'm a sucker for "yellows" with a strong peachy, apricot or golden hue (think Golden Celebration, Amber Queen.) Also thought I didn't like white roses but am currently obsessed with them....though I always seem to gravitate to the ones with a blush of other color to them (Madame Alfred Carriere, La Biche.) I've recently discovered a passion for purple roses and am wanting to try a few of the dark purplish/wine/crimson reds, though in general red roses don't do a thing for me. Pink always seems to end up sprinkled in there, simply because so many roses are pink. After writing this, I realize I have more diversity than I thought and am headed for even more, which is good!! When I started out, I had a bunch of apricot and pale blends and a wish list of even more from that same area.

Frankie, a few years ago, I could have written your post. The mess was enormous, and I just couldn't see how to get out of it. I was basically paralyzed from the chaos. This is going to be a long post, but I'm going to tell you what worked for me. Not because I think you should follow every step I did, but because maybe my thought processes will help you figure out what will work for you. 1. Get enough sleep. When I'm tired, not only do I not do regular housework, I create more mess. I can make dinner, but then I'm too tired to clean up after dinner. Not a good place to be. Along with getting enough sleep (and it take take a week or two to get to a well-rested place), get a physical, if you haven't had one recently. Make sure you are not anemic or have low B-12 or any of a number of other things that can make you tired and turn your brain to mush. Once I started B-12 and iron supplements, things started to get better. 2. Don't make things worse. In other words, start today to clean up after yourself. Make a sandwich? Before you go to bed, clean up the crumbs from the counter, put the plate in the dishwasher and make sure the mayo, bread, cold cuts, etc. are all back where they belong. Don't worry right now about cleaning up the existing mess; just don't add to it. Some people call this Eliminating the Evidence--meaning that you don't leave evidence of what you've been doing. 3. Find techniques that work for you. FlyLady, if it works for you, is great. But the goal is to find things that work for you, not someone else. These are my techniques. A. Use "wasted" time. Every morning, I stagger out to the kitchen and put on water for tea. While the water heats up, I empty the dishwasher and dish strainer, feed the cat and make my bed. While the tea steeps, I go around the apartment and open the shades and get dressed. If I'm microwaving something, I use the time to change out the dish towel, wipe down the counters, sweep the floor, write a shopping list. B. Get in a rut. For some things, having a set routine can work well. My morning routine can be carried out even if I'm half asleep--put on kettle, empty dishwasher, make bed, pour water over tea, get dressed, open shades. And it has the extra, added benefit that it's 6:15 in the morning and I've already made the bed and put the dishes away! Nothing like starting the day accomplishing something! I have an evening cat care routine that involves cleaning the litter box, refilling water bowls and checking the food bowl. The cat is so used to this routine that she follows me around, checking up on me. The key benefit to a routine is that you have done it so often that you don't have to think about it, you just do it. Somehow, that makes it easier for me to do. C. Try to create habits. I started by deciding I would add one new housekeeping habit a month. My goal for the month would be to do that task every day. I started with the litter box, because why should the cat have to suffer because she came to live with me? I would get out of bed to clean the darned thing if I forgot. But at the end of the month, it came much more easily to me to remember to do it. Then I started washing the dishes every night after dinner. I have a dishwasher, but there's always stuff that can't go in it and that stuff would pile up in the sink until I couldn't use the sink and then I'd have to wash it all in a hurry because I needed to use the sink. But for a month, every night, I'd wash whatever was in there. And I got used to walking into the kitchen every morning and seeing a nice empty sink. At this point, I have the cat care routine, the evening kitchen routine (do dishes, wipe counters/stove top, sweep floor), the morning routine, and an evening routine of change to pajamas, wash face/brush & floss teeth, read for half an hour. Those are the daily routines. Weekly, I deal with one room a day. It gets "tidied up," i.e. everything gets put back where it belongs. Then it gets dusted and vacuumed. Once a month, each room gets a slightly more in depth cleaning, with dusting of the baseboards and window sills, vacuuming behind the furniture, etc. When I started the weekly room-a-day routine, it took me forever to clean one room, because I had to stop and think about each and every step--oops! I forgot to dust those table legs! Oh, heck, I need to empty the trash! Guess I should have put that stack of books away before I backed into it and knocked them down. After two months (it takes me a while), I got used to cleaning each room, I knew the best way to get all the work done, and it took me less than half the time it did when I started. And this was an important lesson for me. It takes longer to clean a dirty room than to clean a room that was cleaned last week. And the more often you clean, the faster and better you get at it. So for the stuff you have to do--dishes, laundry, cooking--try to find a way to make it as routine as possible. I get up on Saturday and put in a load of laundry. Then I clean the bathroom. Then I move the laundry to the dryer and start the second load. Then I make a meal plan for the week and write a shopping list. Then I put the first load away dry the second load. Then I head out to the supermarket. Then I get home, put the food away and put the second load away. It's 10 am on Saturday, the bathroom is clean, the food is bought, I know what I'm eating for the next week, my laundry is done and I have clean underwear for the upcoming week. I can goof off for the rest of the weekend with a clear conscience. (And I do!) But that started with just doing the laundry Saturday morning, and has slowly grown to include the other things over time. Start small. Work up to big. D. Do tiny things. Clean for just 10 minutes. Or clean just one small area--a drawer, a table top. If you do just 10-15 minutes of "extra" housework a day, you will be surprise at how much better things start to look in just a week or two. It may seem silly--"The entire place is a mess! What good will 10 minutes clearing off the kitchen table do!?!" It will make your house look 10 minutes cleaner, and that's better than nothing. 5. Analyze your messes. If the kitchen table is always covered with stuff, sit down and write out a list of the stuff. Why does it end up on the kitchen table? Is it because it has no place else to go? Then it needs a home. You need to find a place to store it. Is it because you enter the house through the kitchen and you need to put things down to take off your coat? Then you need a system to make putting your coat away easier and a system to clear these things off the kitchen table--or in other words, another routine. Clutter, for me, happens for one of two reasons. I don't have any place designated for the stuff to go, or it's too difficult to put stuff away. I'm a firm believer that you can't make it too easy to put stuff away. I remember a Clean Sweep episode where the husband tossed his dirty clothes all over the bedroom floor. So in the final reveal, they showed him his new laundry hamper. And I knew instantly that he'd never use it. It had a lid, for one thing. It was in his closet, for another thing, and it was tucked under a shelf with barely an inch to spare. So, just imagine this. You have dirty clothes in one hand and you approach your closet. You have to 1) open the closet door, 2) pull out the hamper, 3) open the lid, 4) put the clothes into the hamper, 5) close the lid, 6) push the hamper back under the shelf and 7) close the closet door--all with one hand! A big laundry basket on the floor of the closet would have worked better. 1) Open closet door, 2) throw clothes in laundry basket, 3) close closet door. Frankie, you mention putting your shoes back into their box. How do you store the boxes? Are they on shelves that are easy to get to, or are all the boxes stacked one on top of the other, so that it's difficult to pull one out and put it back in the right place? Is storing the shoes in their boxes the best, easiest solution for you? Or would a free-standing shoe cabinet work better--open door, put shoes in cubby, close door? Or shelves? Or putting the shoe boxes on shelves? Take a good long look at what types of things aren't getting put away. It may take some thinking and analyzing to figure out why they aren't going where they belong, and then some more thinking to figure out how to make it as easy as possible to put them away. But once you've found the solution, it becomes as easy to put things back where they belong as it does to keep them out. And your home looks much nicer as a result. And if you've managed to read to the end of this novel, I'm amazed. But I've been where you are and if I can help at all, I want to. I hated living in chaos. I vastly prefer a neat, tidy, clean house. Yours in the messy sisterhood, Cammy

I have a three year old, then top of the line 48'' Thermador Pro Grande Range Dual Fuel 4 burners with Grill and Griddle. I thoroughly researched ranges before I bought. Not knowing a single soul that bought a Thermador range like mine, I was 'sold' by the looks of the range and really sold when the Titanium non-stick griddle lifted off as well as the cup at the bottom of the griddle for run-off and crumbs. HOW much easier life is with this griddle! I hate how all of the other griddles on these very expensive ranges look. Can't you just imagine the yuck and junk draining underneath? AND How about trying to clean one of them compared to the Titanium non-stick finish? In my mind, it's worth EVERY PENNY TO HAVE THE GRIDDLE LIFT OFF AND BE NON-STICK TO BOOT! Knowing all that I know now about this machine, I would never, ever purchase one again with the GRILL. I would buy the same range but with 4 burners and a 24'' griddle! THAT would be perfect! I HATE the inside grill. I got a deal on this model, so I went with it. I never expected to use the griddle so much! I LOVE IT! The only problem with mine is that it's too small. I want the 24'' version. My teens love using it, too. As for a sink: I bought the PSX110-30-12 Franke Professional Series Under mount Sink that is WONDERFUL. All parts to my range fit this sink perfectly with room to spare. I would never choose a traditional double basin sink again. If you only have one sink in the kitchen, I believe it needs to be a single basin. You can always use a dishpan and colander for special needs. Everyone could use the largeness of a single basin; you are limited with what you can really clean when you have a smaller split basin sink. I have huge pots. I cannot stand not having them fit my sink and don't like washing them in the laundry sink. This Franke sink is WONDERFUL. It's not cheap, but it's perfect. Most outdoor grill parts fit in a single basin like mine, too. I'd seriously re-think the range. And when you buy the Thermador, buy an extended warranty with it. I bought mine from a guy on ebay and saved THOUSANDS of dollars compared to local dealers. Wow. He's gone up quite a bit in price! I'd still call Doug and ask for any "deals" that he might not have on eBay. Here's his store and the second linke below is the model I'd buy now. I noticed that they are now making the griddle electric. Mine is a gas griddle. I'd rather have an electric griddle. http://stores.ebay.com/Buy-Appliances_W0QQssPageNameZstrkQ3amefsQ3amesstQQtZkm. http://cgi.ebay.com/THERMADOR-48-Pro-Grand-Dual-Fuel-Large-Griddle-RANGE_W0QQitemZ260224159436QQihZ016QQcategoryZ71252QQtcZphotoQQcmdZViewItemQQ_trksidZp1742.m153.l1262 Here is a link that might be useful: sink and range views