What a relief to read I am not the only absent minded person around! I had my pot filler installed in September, and my problem seems to be that I keep forgetting that it is there! When I do remember that I have one, it works great. I just NEVER, EVER walk away from it when the water is running. The flow is very strong and fills a pot in seconds. The flow is too strong to fill a mug, but works well in filling a kettle. I use an electric kettle for my water and love it. We have one of those instant hot things at work and while it is ok, I am a pretty fussy tea drinker and much prefer water from a kettle.

I taught my granddaughter, at age 4, with a used book called 'Making Children Better'. What I did(and it worked well) is teach her the sounds of the letters preferably before (or with) the names of the letters like B is B and sounds 'Buh'. Of course start with the vowels and letters used frequently. Then I make a tic tac toe(3X3) on a large piece of cardboard(about 20"X20", even a 4x4 (squares)tic tac toe later, and placed words like cat, bat, hat,cap,as, I,etc (I added the word 'the' in one square and just told her it didn't fit the sounds and she would have to learn to recognize it. Then I put pennies on the ones she learned to sound correctly. I'd buy little candies or presents from the dollar store. When she would get 3 "bingos" or 3 tic tac toes, she would get a prize. Also, once she was learning them, I'd point to these words in books and newspapers and ask her what it said. I did this as frequently as she wanted to 'play'bingo(4-10X week) and she could sound very well and knew many words before kindergarden. By 1st grade, she sounded words as efficiently and quickly as an adult and could read a sentence with unknown words and hardly pause when she came to them and sounded them correctly or very near correct about 95% of the time.

The reason I didn't comment on Angel is because I am not familiar with that dog's problems. An in-home consultation with a behaviorist might be good to evaluate the situation and suggest ways to re-introduce the dogs to one another. I also think that once wolfie is dealt with, he will be more calm around the house and this problem with angel being annoyed by him might go away. If I had 31 acres, I would find some place to dig a hole. Then I'd wrap some food treats in a paper towel and bury it in the hole and backfill with dirt lightly. Then I would drop crumbs to leave an extra scent trail back to the house. I would then take your active dog and go outside with him on a leash and let him follow the scent back to buried treasure. Tracking and digging may not be as exciting to all breeds as it is for my dogs but it's a lot of fun for mine to track down the treasure and dig it up. It gives them an opportunity to uses their senses and their noggins and it's not that physically strenuous on me. I'd rather do that than a long walk. If I had as much land as you, I'd have some rather extensive trails and would set up lots buried treasures.

The more I look the more I think I like house number 4 in the above if one were to keep the natural stone. Although the bottom shutter color changed in the transfer I like how a gray shutter with slight blue undertone brings together the gray-ish roof and the gray tones in the stone entry. I also like the little brick band under window painted one of the creamy colors in the entry stone to liven it up a tic and make some relation to rest.. (Edited to add: is the roof a gray tone in real life or is it showing that color on my monitor? ORIGINAL BELLOW.