Ladies, I have been remiss about visiting this page and clearly I have been missing out! Your worlds are all beautiful... and very different from my own. Thank you for sharing them. Suzy, I know exactly what went "wrong" on your embedding attempt. When you go to Photobucket, you have three coding formats to choose from for copying and pasting. You chose the one that began 'img src=...' and not 'http://...' In choosing the former and putting it into an 'a href=...' command, you created a hybrid command that both showed the image and highlighted the text. To embed that photo of that beautiful gown into your sentence, you should have typed: Here's the gown I made my newest g'daughter for her christening, so you could say (a href="http://i132.photobucket.com/albums/q8/calliope07/anniegown.jpg")I sew(/a). [Note: "(" should really be "".] With the correct punctuation, the sentence displays like this: Here's the gown I made my newest g'daughter for her christening, so you could say . I hope this little didactic tangent is helpful. I really love the images in this thread and want to make it easy for you to post more!

The park ranger at the nearby nature park was saying that everyone was coming and picking the brilliant red leaves (the few that turn color here)...of the...poison oak! Oops! He had to put up warning signs everywhere. I hope you are really happy in your new home! It sounds beautiful and bucolic--something we hunger for here.

So guess what? I've now been to Ann Arbor for the first time in my life! Loved the town! Had some fabulous food there, and just found the entire Main. St. area to be very authentic, very lively on a summer Wed. afternoon, fabulous farmers market going on till 2, just perfect. After traipsing around Main St. for a bit, we drove to the Chain of Lakes area which was just about the perfect distance away, 30 minutes or so from the Main St., and an easy drive. As we drove on, I fell more and more in love with the landscape, which got more and more rural and beautiful as we approached the lake area. We first went to Portage Lake, and then to Baseline Lake. My first glimpse of Portage was perfect. Really liked the size, the setting, everything. It's a little difficult to GPS your way around a lake because I didn't have a specific address, just wanted to explore. The main part we saw had houses much too close together for my liking, though I loved many of the styles of homes. Similar feeling about Baseline. The overall problem was that my mom and sister are not good explorers. They are real homebodies, and don't get out to explore much on their own, so they were completely panicked about finding our way back, driving willy-nilly down roads that suddenly popped up etc. Once I realized I just wasn't going to be able to explore the way DH and I would, I just gave up on truly exploring the area. I did sneak down to the water's edge by trespassing at a house that looked somewhat vacated. The water seemed fairly clear, but there was definitely some algae at the shore. Not sure if that is a once every ten years kind of issue, or ongoing. At least I got to see the area, and assuming we could find a somewhat private waterfront home, it would definitely be in the running. On the other hand, 2 1/2 hours drive time from my sister's home to a lakehouse might prove to be too much adventure for mom and sis.... We're still hoping to get to Sleeping Bear at the end of Sept. so we'll have something to compare to. Thank you all so much for your help getting me there!

Deee, We're in ARLINGTON. The real estate in Manchester is a little too rich for us. I happen to like winter. The problem with so many people is they hide from it, but people up here PLAY in it. There are snowmobile tours that can take you from Mass to Canada with stays in B&Bs and nice restaurants. And there's NOTHING like October in Vermont!!! And give me a BLIZZARD over a HURRICANE any day! I hate the summer heat though. That's why I like it up here. The average summer high is only 80 degrees. And another thing about here that even when tourists come up, the traffic is still less than 10% of the "normal" traffic in the NYC area. "Rush hour" for us is waiting for 5 cars to pass by before you can pull put onto the highway.