I agree with you Klimkm, We have a neighbor who always made a point to come on our property - daily - and then rub it in our face. He would brag how he had keys to our home with the prior owners. He would come and touch the garage hours after I painted it to see if it was dry, and then tell me about it later (and he's walking all the way across my lawn to do so). He was really upset when we moved some pavers that came a foot onto our property along the side of the garage. Then he was even more upset that we put up a fence, and literally for two years, every time we walked outside our house he was making a comment that we're trying to keep him out of our yard. Yeah, we are. Deal with it! He would complain that the lawn mower doesn't get all the grass along the fence, so not only does my husband mow what isn't our property on that side, but I also go over there and pull the grass along his side of the fence so I don't have to hear him complain. If I don't, he sprays grass killer and kills my plants in the process. He's an old, rude, chauvenistic man. Really nosey too, like creepy nosey. There were days that I'd check through my window to see if he was out there before I'd head to the garage, and I'd move swiftly because I was so tired of hearing his complaining. I think a lot of long time homeowners don't deal well with newcomers and are afraid of change, especially the older crowd. They are accustomed to having rights to property that doesn't belong to them, so when you block it off, they take it personally. I told my husband that I wanted to put the fence up right when we bought the place, but we waited. Looking back now, it would have been easier if we had done it right off the bat. That was the neighbor to the north of me. I'll call him Joe. The neighbor on the other side of me recently purchased the home, and we both agreed to fence on that side between the properties because she also has little dogs. The neighbor on the other side of her now complains to her about the fence she put up. He's an old retired guy too. The neighbor behind us basically threatened to replace OUR fence in the back - it was an old ranch style fence that went around the perimeter, but the previous owners stapled this ugly lattice work on it for privacy and put it this really shabby "patio" (if that's what you want to call it) back there. It did look bad, and I can only imagine how tired they were of looking at it, but at that time, we were planning a wedding, doing major remodeling on the interior of the home, I was taking care of a sick parent, and money only goes so far. Replacing the fence at that time was not a priority, and everyone in the neighborhood could see everything that we were doing with the place - we were complimented all the time. So, we put up some cheap, Home Depot wooden fence in the back and along the nosey neighbors side that very weekend that she threatened us with replacing OUR fence. It's ugly, but I don't care. I planted trees along the perimeter, and I don't have to look at it. I don't think that people should threaten homeowners with replacing their own property. In contrast, she has this ugly wooden, broken down playset that stands about 20 feet tall, and that's what we see when we look out into our back yard. The green tarp on the top of it became frayed over the winter, and we looked at that thing blowing around all season. It's horrendous. I miracle grow my trees in the back every week. They cannot grow fast enough. The same neighbor - we have about 3 feet between our garages in the back where her garage meets mine. We have our wood pile back there, and it does not go beyond our property line. We have about a foot back from the garage. She takes broken cinder block and throws it back there. There are chunks laying everywhere, and most recently she had a pile of unbroken cinder blocks up against my wood pile. I could not even access my woodpile (it is under a tarp). So, after having had problems with them in the past, we decided to send them a certified letter and kindly asked them to move the cinder block away from my property so I can access my woodpile, so as to "avoid potential injury" should I fall on those rocks. It was moved within a week. Damn right if I fall on those rocks my homeowners insurance is going after her homeowners insurance(there have been other problems with these same neighbors, and I can say with confidence that they do it intentionally).

Ha! Yes! That is the mall that I fondly remember. We saved our allowance and babysitting money and lived for the weekends when our moms would drop us off and just let us wander the place for hours. I remember crushing on the cute boys who worked at the pizza place (a giant slice of pizza and a Dr. Pepper was always a must) - oh, and then a box of Karmelkorn and an Orange Julius. That was back in the day when Pier 1 was, as you say, BB, "junky". But what fun it was! Lerner's was a popular store for teen girls, and I unloaded quite a bit of my teenage cash in there! I remember spending hours in Musicland, the record store, then going next door to the t-shirt shop where you could have your choice of iron-on transfers applied while you wait. (I bought an ELO shirt there. ;-)) We were generally well behaved kids, but I do recall one time riding the elevator in Penney's and screaming all the way up. As the doors opened onto the second level, we were met by a very irritated security guard. We were mortified, and so worried that they were going to call our parents. Back then, we still believed that something like that could "go down on your permanent record." Ah. Nostalgia.

It does look like crewel but I know that there's a card (the one I used fit bernina's...I had to go a bit back to figure it out) and I think it's called "Asian Carp" I can't find it (it's probably a five or so year old disk) But! The big thing is that if you have a picture of a carp or fish, there are computer programs to scan them in and then a disk can be made to embrider it onto a pillow piece before the pillow is made. A high quality embroidery machine/sewing machine can do a patten as big as a 12" embroidery field (mine can anyhoo) so you can easily get a decent sized fish in a design (or two). Colors are completely up to you. http://www.babylock.com/sewing/ellegante/ This is just a picture of a machine at work. There is equipment out there that scans a live pic and makes an embroidery design from it (like your grandson or something) or you can find a picture of a fish :) And it can be reproduced in an embroidery design. There are however patterns that include koi but you'd just need to buy the disk (ok and then the machine and learn to embroider...) Or visit a sewing shop and have them point you the right direction. There are LOTS of women who supliment their thread budget with work like this for very little.

Farmgardener, I am so sorry about your tomato plants. Being rural with lots of herbicide-loving people around, we get drift every year and, yes, it is heart-breaking and frustrating beyond measure. Some years we get it once or twice and other years we get it 5 or 6 times a year. So far this year, I think we've had it only twice, and only tomato plants were affected. One year they got virtually all our okra and watermelon plants, a lot of flowers and some of the tomatoes. I grow peppers near my tomatoes and they rarely get damaged. I don't know if it just luck on the part of the pepper plants or what, but they always come through it in much better condition than the tomato plants do.For years and years it seemed like we only got Round-up Drift because the people nearest us were using Round-up along their fencelines to control weeds. After about 5 or 6 years of that (and I don't know why), everything abruptly changed (maybe they were hiring someone new to spray) and the use of Grazon-type herbicides exploded here and everyone began using that crap and now we seldom see Round-up damage, but we get broadleaf herbicide damage several times a year. It is heartbreaking, and I now raise about a dozen tomato plants a year in large containers that I have tried to strategically place where no drift can reach them. They still were damaged last year, but so far this year, the tomato plants in containers haven't been hit like the ones in the garden have. There's just a couple of hundred feet between them. Jennifer & HU, The survival garden looks great! Y'all are going to be getting some great harvests out of that. Y'all know that you can grow lettuce indoors on the same light shelves where you raised seedlings, right? Or microgreens. Or sprouts. With all the heat we have here, that's about the best option for fresh, home-grown summertime salad greens. HJ, Lilies are fascinating and we grow more and more of them every year because our granddaughter, Lillie, believes we should. : ) I am amazed at how much further ahead were here this year with the blooms of the lilies, but perhaps it is because ours bloomed really early considering far south we are. They finished blooming here about a month ago. I think the warm of days in the 90s in late March or early April set them off early, and once we returned to cooler weather, it didn't matter---they already were set to bloom early. We have them in a lot of different colors, including white, pink, red, yellow and peach, and I have to grow them either in containers or in tall, hardware cloth-lined beds because voles will come out of the woods and into the garden and eat all the lily bulbs if the bulbs are not well-protected. There are not many types of bulbs that voles won't eat (mostly allium, garlic and daffodil) so I'm limited in what I can plant. Well, also crinum lilies never have been bothered, and neither have cannas, and daylilies. I think they can and sometimes do eat daylilies but just haven't done it in recent years. Nancy, I've always gardened for the pollinators as well as for us, but we have ample sunny space, plus we never wiped out the native plants that existed when we bought our land, so that made a huge difference. All I had to do was plant to supplement what was here to begin with. In our first handful of years here, the old farmer crowd gave me hell for growing "weeds" (i.e. herbs and flowers) in my garden, telling me that Tim and I couldn't eat those. I just had to point out that the pollinators could and would eat them. Those guys meant well, but were trying to turn me into a row farmer with monoculture rows of veggies and no herbs and flowers and I wanted to be a raised bed gardener with all of it mixed together. So, in that sense I won....but it was, of course, the pollinators who won. Later on, I had more of a monoculture row garden in the back garden after we built it in 2012, but then the voles are a terrible plague back there, so that area is not utilized as much as I'd like---it depends on how much I want to fight the voles. The girls and I spend endless hours outdoors when they are here, and they love the butterflies and moths as much as I do, so much so that they hate to see bad caterpillars, like army worms, put to death. Now, I'm trying to teach them not to be afraid of the seemingly dozens of kinds of bees we have here, while also teaching them to respect the hornets and wasps and give those guys a wide berth. Yesterday when the kids were out of the pool for a snack break, a butterfly came and sat on Lillie for about a 15 minutes and she was so mesmerized by it. It sat on her bare skin part of the time and on her neon bright bathing suit the rest of the time and was in no hurry to fly away. Jennifer, I think that if the only flowers we had were the front wildflower meadow, the pollinators still would be deliriously happy, particularly this year. Between the overseeding of that area with a wildflower mix from Wildseed Farms last spring and the abundant moisture, we have the best mix of wildflowers in there that we've ever had. It is starting to drive Tim crazy---usually he can mow the wildflower meadow down after the Spring wildflowers have gone to seed and before the summer wildflowers are coming on strong but this year the spring flowers lingered a bit longer than usual and the summer wildflowers started up already, so his need to control the meadow by mowing is dead in the water, and the wildflowers and I are delighted. He had to content himself with mowing only the yard and the back pasture yesterday, where there were not nearly so many wildflowers this spring, perhaps because of drainage issues back there and all the standing water. Perhaps I need to overseed that area back there with wildflowers next fall. Would that be too diabolical? It might interfere with him mowing in that area if we got a better stand of spring wildflowers back there. I would think just the acre around the house would give him enough mowing to keep him happy, but he could be happy mowing all day long. He starts twitching and practically breaking out in a rash when I discuss our plans to replace lawn around our house with hardscaping and raised beds. He is afraid I won't leave enough for him to mow, and I keep telling him that having less to mow as we age will be a blessing and to just wait and see. Nancy, We live in what is usually a dry grassland area, so I've never wanted a weed torch. I think they can work for people in some situations, but am not convinced I am one of those people. Maybe it is because we spend so much time fighting grassfires in our county in the summer, winter and autumn...and sometimes early spring in the dry years. We also don't have stone pathways to maintain and I can see where one would come in handy there. Marleigh, You've got to kill whatever you've got to kill to keep your garden going. Over the years I've found I have to kill less and less because all the beneficial creatures take care of a lot of it for me. There is a huge difference in wet years like we've had in 2015-2020 so far, and the dry years that mostly plagued us from 1998 when we still were clearing our land prior to building the house all the way through 2014. In the dry years, the pest level rises along with the drought and I spend far too much time and effort on killing excess damaging pests. The way I grew up was that you planted about four times as much as you wanted/needed so that the wild critters could have what they wanted and you still had enough left for yourself, and that seems about right here in OK. The only area where planting extra for the wild things doesn't work is with fruit---they want it all, no matter what, and you have to fight them so hard for every bit of fruit you grow. I have gotten to where I grow less and less fruit as the years go on because I get so tired of the endless fruit wars with the wild things. Our cats have become much more indoor cats than outdoor cats over the years. As they age, most of them have seemed content to sleep in the sunroom, where the sunshine and views of the great outdoors are endless, and now are happy most days just to go out for a quick hour or two and then come back indoors. They don't bother wild birds much because I trained them (with a water gun....everyone needs one Super Soaker to blast cats away from little wild birds) to leave the wild birds alone. Now, when I am out and the cats have done the brief tour outdoors and want to come in, they come and find me and meow for me to come up to the house and let them come inside. This year's perpetually wet, puddled ground probably has contributed to that a lot. Tim and I joke that our cats have become too conditioned to the great indoors---dry "ground", no snakes or annoying biting insects, no bobcats or coyotes chasing them around, and perfect climate control so they're never too hot or too cold. There's a lot of truth in that though. Even Pumpkin has become very much an indoor cat even though he's not as old as they others. When our cats are indoors and the coast is clear, the feral cats, neighborhood barn cats, etc, come over to visit and hang out. As long as I grow catnip, we'll never be cat free. We were outdoors more than we were indoors yesterday and the weather was just perfect---clear, sunny skies, not too much wind, and neither too hot nor too cold. I think most of this week will be that way, but our highs are moving into the 90s by the end of the week, so it looks like June weather is arriving right on time. I was looking forward to mealtimes as a way to use up a lot of tomatoes---BLTs for lunch, tomatoes on hamburgers at dinner time, chopped up in salads, etc. but then I harvested more tomatoes and brought in just as many newly harvested ones as we had used up in our meals so the pile of tomatoes on the counter is the same. I haven't even harvested the cherry tomatoes yet this weekend, but I'm going to do that today. You know that the tomato harvest is going well when we're looking at the tomatoes on the counter and hoping we can hurry up and use them up before I bring in more. lol. That's a change from looking at them longingly on the plants and wishing they would hurry up and ripen. We're probably about to get to the point of needing to make salsa in the next couple of weeks just to stay caught up on the harvest. The tomato plants in pots are doing great, and the ones in the ground that were planted much later because of the nonstop rain are coming along pretty well. Mosquitoes are a huge issue now, and I am sure that will continue for weeks until we get good and dry. It is the end of May and we all survived it, with a lot less weather disruption than we have some years. Well, the heavy pounding from the rainfall was disruptive, and so was the hail when and where it fell, but it seemed like we had a lot fewer tornadoes statewide than usual. The nights still feel kind of cool to me for this late in Spring, but I bet that's going to change in June. Dawn