Ditto on the Chives, Donn I LOVE my garlic chives. They go into just about everything. Put them in tossed salad, they give them a great taste and look. Put them in potato salad...ditto. Put them in sauce or whatever I stir fry or as part of a marinade...yummm...and they just keep coming all season. I think I need to grow more. You know what else I like that I knew next to nothing about before I WSed it? Lovage. It tastes like a stronger version of celery and it is wonderful in chicken salad, nice in stews or tossed salads...You can use the leaves or the stalks and you just use less of it than celery (the flavor goes a long way). And it's perennial! Linda

Being a 61 year old born and raised Okie, from my view, I've seen the interest in storm cellars change over my lifetime. Growing up in the 50's and 60's, our family always had a cellar ( or a " fraidy hole " ) as my Grandmother called them. And we spent a lot of time in the cellar. My Grandfather worked for the Carter Oil company in Seminole ( which eventually became Exxon ) . He moved there around 1930 when the Seminole oil field was booming. Back then, the oil companies would build camps for their employees to live, because there was no housing, and the Carter Oil camp had two big concrete cellars installed by the company. One of them right next to my Grandad's house. But everybody had access. Then when he retired and moved into Seminole, he had a cellar built . On stormy evenings, my parents would take us to Grandad's and we spent the entire evening there, with my Grandad watching the clouds. Our warning system consisted of the men of the Seminole Civil Defense, who would take positions out on the outskirts of town and watch for tornados and would give word to blow the sirens. Some neighbors would show up and it became a social event as everyone chatted and passed the time. Around late 70's , my parents built their own cellar, but also that was the time when TV warnings were getting much better. They started using radar. And in my adult life, up till now, I'd never thought a cellar was a good investment because the warnings kept getting better and better. From other people I've talked with, they did the same, and houses with cellars become fewer than back in the 1940's and 1950's. My plan had always been to leave the house and go to a sheltered place, like Crossroads Mall. But after the debacle last May 31, when I got caught in traffic because everyone else had decided to get out of the storm's path, I then decided I needed a shelter. Its like we've come full circle, from a time that lack of any warning made a cellar almost a necessity, to warnings making cellars less important, to a time when the warnings are so good, we need a shelter again. This post was edited by LCDollar on Thu, Jan 23, 14 at 20:16

In my opinion things do work better than in the old times. I'm a veteran from those times. Hardwood floors required paste waxing and buffing now and then tokeep them shiny, then the dust readily showed. Vacuum cleaners are much more efficient now than then, many light weight, self-propelled with myriad of handy attachments. We never had household help but mom kept house until WWII when women went to work. She had one day for washing and hanging out clothes and one day just for ironing. I do my wash, folding, and "ironing" in one morning while I watch TV and bake bread. The problem these days is not the expectation to be clean as I see signs of "unclean" everywhere, clutter in yards, garages not even a volkswagen would fit in. The problem is too much of everything. When we thought we had finally made it, 35 years ago, we bought a house with 4 bedrooms and a 3 car garage, and believe it or not, we can drive 3 cars into it every day. We just got rid of the third car (pickup) as we only have 2 drivers. Today, our house is considered medium but this is it for me. My daughter, who has been a housewife most of the time has a 5 bedroom house, 5 kids still at home could never keep a neat house until she got a housekeeper, comes in every two weeks, 2 ladies work on her house about 4 hours and leave it sparkling everywhere. She has to stay on the kids to keep their things put away and that appears to be her fulltime job. There's many more conveniences we could purchase but my goal now is to keep it as simple as possible. Too much floor space to keep organized and clean. I won't do it unless we get some household help which I've never had. The biggest problem is so much unneeded stuff we don't really need. If I didn't have clutter, my house can be cleaned in a couple of hours. All closets are full of clothes, bedding, seasonal stuff, toiletries,etc. No place to hide more stuff and we refuse to toss stuff in the garage. It's still my goal to clean them out, donate or toss but that takes ambition and time which seems harder to come by these days. FlyLady where are you?

Yeah, don't assume it's ADHD or whatever they are calling it these days. The thing is the kid isn't even 2 yet, right? Okay, he's hitting people for no reason. . .have you heard of the terrible two's and tantrums and things? He's trying things and testing his parents. The hitting will stop if you punish him and get it across to him Most kids don't really start talking until after 2. The closer to 2 1/2 my son got, the more words popped out. Your GS is using his own language because he's still a little child and can't say everything. It's like my Gram saying during the summer that she sure wished Shane could talk better so she could understand him~he was about 27 months old. He could say some things very clearly but he was 2! No kid can speak when the come out and it takes a while for them to be understood and some sounds and words take a lot longer than others. You say he doesn't learn from mistakes . . .another part of being two. They're curious and trying to explore things around them. Kids that age don't always just accept that they aren't allowed to do something just because Mommy and Daddy said so. They want to know why they can't touch the hot stove or why they can't throw the glass dish, why can't the tear the papers Mommy and Daddy have on the table, etc. They think you're just being a big meanie and not that you are trying to protect them and teach them. I think the case is here that they just have a trying child on their hands. Ask anyone with a few kids and in most cases, there is one that was more trouble than the others. Like my brother and I were raised with the same rules and regulations but my brother was one who liked to take things apart, he took many many many glass ornaments off the tree and crushed them in his hand at 2 years of age (I remember trying to "help" my Mom by picking them up myself and getting cut), he climbed the huge fence we had around our yard to keep us in and would get out, he even once walked this 6 inch wide ledge along our sun porch about 4 feet off the ground and climbed on the roof by the summer kitchen while my Mom was hanging out clothes (he was supposed to be napping and she finds him on top of a roof!). I on the other hand didn't do any of that stuff. Mom just said the other day that if she needed to get something done all she had to do was turn on Sesame Street or something and I would sit there. My brother would rip the register out of the floor and stand in the hole and try to rip down curtains and trash the bedroom. He ripped wall paper off the walls when he was a baby in his crib! Now he's a perfectly mild well behaved college student with a very good brain about computers and mechanical things. His problem was he wanted to test his limits and see how thinsg worked, he didn't have anything medically or physically wrong with him. The other problem seems to be that you guys expect too much out of a child that is under 24 months. Are you guys like my one friend who said she wasn't holding her son anymore because she carried him around enough and he was big enough to walk now that he's 13 months old? Are they telling him at 15 months they're tired of changing diapers and he's going to potty train now? Or that he should know what no means by 15 months and he's just doing stuff to P*ss her off? How old are the other two kids and are they girls? Boys are different to raise than boys and sometimes there are harder to raise girls than boys. We're not all the same. So what's wrong with your gs? He's a 2 year old toddler. ~Leslie~