We had a GREAT Thanksgiving, the best one in several years. Now THAT was a real blessing, spending time with my family (especially my sister who lives in Ohio - we don't see her very often). Today we'll spend some time with good friends, and tomorrow with my husband's family. It's the Thanksgiving that keeps on giving. . . . And, we're avoiding all shopping for the weekend - Black Friday isn't my cup of tea at all. (Now, if they sold DAYLILIES on Black Friday, I'd be up and out the door by 6AM!) Laurel

Larry, Ouch! Do you really want dead carcasses in the road by the house all the time? The other day we had a dead armadillo in the road and the vultures swarmed around it all morning. Then they came and started circling the garden where I was working. I was wondering if they were trying to tell me that my time was about up, but then I realized they likely were attracted to the bone meal and blood meal I had added to the garden a couple of hours earlier. I often do get circled by vultures after I've used those particular organic fertilizers. Carol, My summer peas hardly made anything because those plants seemed to be the preferred food of blister beetles and grasshoppers. The fall peas are doing a lot better. I am about starved-to-death for fresh cowpeas from our garden. I really don't mind shelling them. I can buy them fresh and already shelled at Central Market in Southlake, or I even could buy them fresh, shelled or unshelled, by the bushel, from the purplehull pinkeye pea farm in Thackerville. I just prefer to raise my own whenever I can. To me, they taste best when I pick them, shell them, and put them right into the pot on the stove and cook them. While they're cooking, I make homemade cornbread. I can make a meal out of purplehull peas and cornbread. Progress in my fall garden goes slowly. Parts of it are such an overgrown jungle, and I have to go slowly while clearing it because of the snakes. It never ceases to amaze me how many snakes like to come into the garden and climb the trellised plants. It is such a rude awakening to be looking at a plant and to see those beady snake eyes looking back at you. It is a wonder I haven't had a heart attack and died right there in the garden. I make a little progress every day, but it is such a big garden that I feel like I am not making progress quickly enough. It is still so danged hot that most of my cool-season plants seem stalled and not growing much. I know they'll grow more as time goes on, but these windy, warm days with temps in the 90s aren't the weather that the cool-season plants prefer. The Seminole winter squash has watermelon vines, Grandpa Ott's morning glory vines, cardinal climber and some bindweed mixed in with it. I've been trying to cut out and pull out the watermelon vines (no melons or flowers on them at this point) and the bindweed vines without destroying the Seminole winter squash, morning glory and cardinal climber vines, all whilewatching for snakes. I could save time by leaving all those bindweed vines in there, but I'm trying to get them out before they set seed. I am hoping to get out in the garden early, early tomorrow at first light and do some clean-up of the vining areas while it is so cool that the snakes shouldn't be up and moving yet. Larry, That's the reason I haven't bought a pea sheller--I don't want a bunch of mashed-up summer peas. I went through a period of really wanting one during a good summer when we had oodles and oodles of peas, but talked myself out of it after talking to someone who had one and said it mashed up the green peas a lot. It is a lot of work to shell them by hand, but if you cook them fresh, nothing's better. Some years I get a lot of them put up in the freezer but I doubt this will be one of those years since the nights are already cooling down quite a bit. I'll be happy with a few meals of fresh ones though. I do always do put up one frozen packet of southern peas for New Year's Day. It is like summer in the garden when they're cooking on the stove. When I was a kid, shelling peas was just something you did in the evenings--that and snapping green beans. We'd just sit out there on the porch with a big pile of purplehull peas or green beans and work out way through them and, before you knew it, they were done. Dawn

I've been looking for this pattern, Count Your Blessings by Imaginating. Is it possibly out of print? Anyone have one to loan, give, or trade? ...or know where I can purchase a copy? Thanks so much.

My aunt in MI was watching reports about the tornado and sent this to me: "Wonder if you happened to see the elderly gentleman (86) who was digging by hand through all his debris, under piles of lumber and tree limbs, etc., all the while the CNN reporter was trying to interview him. He said he was looking for his greatest treasure. Suddenly he screamed, "There it is, that's it!" as he was dragging it out into the open. It was his "MICHIGAN" jacket. He said his daughter gave it to him for Christmas. He struggled to put it on over his dirty, tattered "Michigan" sweatshirt he was wearing." I'm thankful he found it! I hope there are many other stories like his. As we watch the news and see the devastation after hurricanes, tornadoes, bombings, etc, we have much to be thankful for. SharonG/FL