Thanks for the link to the old gag gifts in the holiday forum - brings back memories... Lets see... I still make the Tampon Angels, the Exotic rubber plants, MP Slippers and I've added, Weiner Washers (just had to make 20 more last night) Willy Warmers, Just Blow Whistle (a senior citizen alarm), PPTPs, Redneck Palm Pilot, Redneck Earrings... I'll post these on my webshots account (grandmabonnie55) later today - I have a Sunday Farmer's Market this afternoon.

That salad sounds like my kind of salad, but I know some people just don't like anything but a more traditional kind. I find some just don't like fruit and nuts and such in their salads, and blue cheese can be strong if you are not a fan. I would suggest a more traditional garden type salad. No fruits, no nuts, no strong cheese and no fruity or specialty dressings. I would actually not dress the salad and offer a couple different dressings to choose from... probably Ranch and an Italian or Thousand Island. For the salad, I would do simple greens (nothing too exotic), maybe some green onion, tomatoes, cheddar cheese, and croutons.. if you want to be daring add a hard boiled egg or two and some bacon or a cucumber. Keep it simple; sounds like they are not exotic salad lovers. It is nice of them to eat it without complaint. I can usually tell what people don't like by how much of it is eaten or if people go back for seconds. My SIL came right out and told me she doesn't like fruit (or fruity dressings) in her salad. I'm glad to know although it doesn't keep me from making salads with fruits. Although salad is my favorite food, I actually think most Thanksgiving meals don't really need a green salad. I find it's often passed over on Thanksgiving with all the other foods. Are you serving other green veggies, cranberry sauce? You can count the cranberries as a fruit salad and as long as you have at least one green veggie and filling meal you should be covered.

I'm back. Got to Target and saw a mob around a shelf display on the main isle ( I was thinking the jackets would be on a sales rack on the back wall)and jackets were being thrown into carts left and right. lol I picked up the first large that I could find and immediately noticed how small they ran. I then gathered up mostly the black in XL and L. Got two XL in green. Those were the only two colors in L and XL. I got a reddish/pink jacket in M for my daughter that wears a medium. My other daughter would need a large. I got 10 jackets all together. Once home, I tried on the XL and could barely squeeze in. My older daughter is rather blessed up top, so I am afraid that even the XL will not zip up to the top and that the M will be too small for younger daughter. Oh well, at least the L and XL will fit someone in need. Thanks again!

For the pass through, I am thinking that something like this would look a lot simpler/cleaner and less fussy. So you'd be keeping the doorway from the kitchen to the dining room that you were going to close and losing the two tall skinny vertical stacks of cabinets on either side of the passthrough. Not only would that visually break up some of the continuous walls of cabinetry, but instead of that whole complicated area where the oven met the pass through, you'd just have a nice clean, straight line of cabinetry dying into the wall and some open space. Visually, that corner of the kitchen will be a lot less heavy and won't compete with the range for focus. Also, functionally, if you are going to be using the dining room more often, I think it'll be nice to have the dining room that much more open and accessible to the kitchen. My last visual issue is how the angled windows now relate to absolutely nothing. They used to match the island angle and curve around a table. There were reasons for the wall to be like that. Particularly with everything else in the new kitchen's being so square and symmetrical, that architectural oddity looks SO out of place. You might at least do something like this to the island:And maybe do a range hood in an especially angular shape to tie into it all. This one that I posted earlier would probably work: You can see how that would related more to the window/island angles than something like this (made of curves and straight lines) would: When you repeat an element 2-3 times around a room, it looks like a deliberate design choice. With exactly one angle (the windows) in the room now, it doesn't look deliberate. That said, while I think any/all of those changes would make the kitchen look a lot better, it doesn't really address the functional layout problems that make this mostly a one-person kitchen. I'll do a different comment with some suggestions about that. Usually, you determine how much space you have, your goals, and then the general layout that would make the kitchen function best. THEN you figure out how to make the kitchen look pretty with everything where it needs to be to function best. It's always possible to make a functional kitchen beautiful. It is VERY difficult to do the reverse. And just brace yourself -- total symmetry is an enemy of function. The most useful kitchens have things staggered around the room so that people are not on top of each other when using them.