Hello and thank you very much for your offers to help and educate a semi-newbie. Kathy, I looked at your pictures, and I definitely see the same growth on a lot of my plants. However, if you read the e-book mentioned above, you can see why I became confused, as several of the pictures closely resemble yours. Especially when you see a lot of leaves/stems forming from the same spot it gets confusing. So I will relax about the new growth. I haven't been able to find my camera, but I will try again tomorrow when I have some time. However, putting aside all the red new growth, there is still one plant that originally worried me and still does. The growth is not red, it is like a thicker stem growing straight up from a thinner stem, and long sepal-like leaflets surrounding the point of origin as well as forming higher up. This is occurring twice on the plant, and it is pictures of this that I cannot find right now. I will take pictures with my phone tomorrow morning, and take you up on your kind offers to examine them.

Diane, We weren't expecting much freezing drizzle, but it doesn't take much to glaze the highways. We had a very light drizzle for hours before the front arrived. It was a fine mist--almost like freezing fog. Once the front arrived, more freezing drizzle fell on the roadways and that's when the fun and games began. Most of the accidents were between the town of Marietta and the Winstar Casino (which is on I-35 at about the 1 to 2 mile marker), and I know some of them involved locals so likely they were casino workers trying to go to or from work. The roads were bad from about 3 a.m. to about 8 or 9 a.m., but I haven't heard many calls since then for vehicle accidents....just lots of medical calls and a fire or two. Sitting inside the house looking out, everything looks fine. I think by now the roads probably are fine. The freezing drizzle hit Dallas about 5 a.m. and the wrecks began happening then. It is SO boring to be stuck inside. I haven't even walked down to the mailbox yet...because she might be running late because of the ice, and I don't want to have to make that walk twice in this cold weather. We are not supposed to get above freezing until Sunday afternoon. Isn't that awful? Spring seems light years away. Dawn

Plasticguy-clearstone is pricey and has its place in the commercial/high end market. The product doesn't actually go on clear-its poured onto the surface and left for 24 hours as it hardens cloudy and opaque. Then with abrasives the coating is honed or polished. It is a lot of work as we will move thru grits ranging from 80 thru 4000 dry. Then with the use of polishing automotive compounds we can establish a great finish. Lots of pros and cons-I am a traditional stone refinisher. Coatings on marble is still strange for me but there is a place for this. However if you are going to hone (matte) finish and seal your stone properly I just don't see the reason for it. Vitremela is a very thin coating and may be available in the future. It offers no guarantees and is easily removed. I enclosed a pic of a clearstone polished job we did. If you look closely on the right side middle of table the installers left a seam open. We filled it with clearstone and it picked up the colors of the stone. Along with some whitish/grey we placed inside the seam it looked pretty natural. Besides that it was no longer a crumb trap it looked a lot better.

Aloha! The kitchen is mostly done and at the end of the day we ended up with Glacier White Granite! When I went to reserved my stone, all of the pieces of the honed arabescato that I liked where gone. I wasn't inclined to spend all that extra money and settle for one that had large dark spots all over it. I also wasn't thrilled with the selection of polished, for the same price. Then I found a slab of polished Super White at another stone yard that I loved and was so proud of myself for picking a stone that was a $1500 savings over the arabescato. Then the fabricator called me to let me know that the slab wasn't big enough for the whole kitchen, so I would have to pay another $1000 to finish the last 15" piece of counter. That was my final sign. I gave up on the marble and started all over. I found a slab of Glacier White that I loved, and it turns out that it was snatched up 3 days earlier. Feeling burned out, I finally found a slab of Glacier White that I didn't hate and that became our counters. At the end of the day I went from wanting my first love to settling for something I didn't hate. Sigh. The final sting was that the fabricator didn't tell me when he was templeting (I thought he was going to let me know, because he said that I could come down and help decide), so the parts that I didn't like ended up being the most prominent. Unfortunately, that has been how our entire remodel has been. Even our contractor has been shocked at how many issues we've had. I have definitely been schooled by my kitchen. :-) (The worst was having to rent a concrete grinder and personally grind down a hump in my floor that the self leveler didn't fix. Worst mess to clean up EVER!!! I actually cried that night.) Now, having said all of that, and having reached a temporary stopping point (still need to tile and deal with some minor issues), I've finally had some time to stop being mad at my kitchen and really enjoy it. And guess what - I really like my counters! I love that I don't have to worry about my husband leaving wet raspberries and other gooey things on my counters (because, yes, he still does). And, yes, they do end up having things stacked all over them all the time, so they are not a glowing and pristine focal point. They are my work horse counters. I love my deep undermount sink that these counters allow me to have. We stayed pretty close to budget. I would say that, after tiling, we'll have spent about $16K, but with that low budget came A LOT of extra work and frustration. All of our cabinets came from Ikea. We used 18" fan cabinets and stacked them to achieve our 36" uppers and then ordered Scherr's custom doors to go over them (Scherr's was fantastic to deal with). I do not, however, recommend the stacking method. It made it so hard to plumb and level with our fantastically out of square ( and sloping walls) u shaped kitchen. One thing I can't recommend enough is edgebanding our Ikea cabinets with Fast Edge wood. We painted the edges of the Gnosjo cabinets dark, so you don't see the white through the doors. Even where the white doors go. Once we trimmed out the cabinets, I used wood putty, then primed and painted the trim and cabinet edges and everything looks so cohesive. Also love our new LED pot lights! I have so much extra light in the kitchen and I love it. We did lose some natural light taking out an east facing window (that faced the neighbors window about 8 feet away,so we never pulled up the blinds), but we also gained a lot more cabinet space. Living in the gray NW, I don't get much natural light most of the year anyway, so I find that having the extra electrical light is a lot more helpful. Some things that I'm mixed on... The Ikea Gnosjo cabinets are crazy finger printy!! Someday I will find the time to clean them properly again, but they are very streaky in the meantime. My dark gray Marmoleum floors feel fantastic on my feet, but they show ever single crumb known to man. They were also very tricky for us to install. I won't go into details, but let's just say that every demonstration on the web showed them being installed in an empty square room. It was also really hard to get info online about the click together tiles (what kind of underlayment?) and the instructions were obviously translated from another language and didn't always make sense. The prior kitchen looked decent from a distance, but it was falling apart and quite dysfunctional. I love the functionality of my new kitchen and the ikea cabinets (with lots of drawers!) are fantastic. I love my sink and I love that my floors don't have missing chunks and holes all over. I do miss the over the stove microwave (now we have one in the pantry), but our gas stove was just too hot for one and our third microwave was failing. Now we have a hood that is actually vented outside. All in all the kitchen is a huge improvement. It could use a little color, so I've been tracking down some aqua accessories. We are planning to do white subway tile with light gray grout for all wall surfaces within the next few months. Sorry for writing a book to your small question! :-) DJ