Brian, thanks for your very informative response. I have been to the Raleigh/Chapel Hill/Cary area a few times while visiting my son who is stationed in Goldsboro and found it very lovely. My DH was raised in a town in Connecticut that had a population of 2200 and now we live in a town with a population of 480. He actually LIKES this. I am all for living in a small town for I like the sense of community pride and commorodity that goes with that but I prefer a small town with at least 15,000 - 20,000 people LOL. My DH also wants acreage. Not a particular desire of mine as long as I am not living on top of someone else. He could never live on a property less than a few acres and that is where we are running into some issues. Due to the type of work he does we need to be within reasonable driving distance to a metropolitan area. I understand that Raleigh and Charlotte are the two places he is most likely to find employment so I have been scouting bedroom communities for both cities. I have found some lovely homes in the Lake Norman district outside of Charlotte as well as some in the Cary as well as Clayton area outside Raleigh. Thanks for the headsup about northern Raleigh and Cary. One thing I know is sure to send my hubby off the deep end is the hummer crowd. We see a lot of that where we live in the Berkshires. My hubby is a sweetheart and hates confrontation but he is also a man comfortable with who he is. Whenever he is amid the keep-up-with-the-Jones type of people something comes over him and he turns into a neanderthal which if it weren't so in-your-face- on his part it would be rather comical. We have the "New York" aka "The Wallstreet Crowd" that own summer homes around the lakes in our area. They are excruciatingly politically correct, pretentious and obnoxious. To protest their invasion every year DH goes out of his way to make things unpleasant for them. He has an old truck that he named Mable. The thing should have been buried about 25 years ago yet he insists on keeping it professing its value for hauling things around the property. At the peak of summer when he is sure to find the snobs, I mean New Yorkers at the one and only general store in the area he insists on driving my little daughter (who does not know any better) to the store for an ice cream cone. I have had the "pleasure" of being on a few of those trips myself and it is rather humorous to see the expressions on these peoples faces as he pulls "Mable" next to their Lexus' or Hummers. LOL...I overheard one man tell his wife "it really is time to sell our place here" after seeing my husband pull in and get out of his truck. She responded "oh dear but we love the lake so". It was the one and only time that I really wanted to go up to someone and tell them how rude they were and how much we looked forward to fall every year to be rid of them. At the time my DH was running his own company and financially was probably doing as well as anyone of these pompous jerks but they judged the book by the cover and thought we were the "poor relations". I managed to hold my tongue and I am glad I did. What do I care what these trogs think anyway and it is a good lesson for my daughter to learn about humbleness as well as seeing for herself how plastic some people truly are. I am all for intellectual dialect but attitudes are best checked at the door.

Randy, The first time I had a hard freeze well past the "average last freeze date" I just blamed the law of averages and shrugged it off. Then it happened again and again and again. My only guess is that the 30-year-average reflects past years but the current trend is toward later and later cold spells. Climate change? And, I have tried to take into account that we are in a low-lying microclimate so might be getting colder than the higher ground in Love County, but a check of mesonet temps revealed the rest of the county was at or near freezing on the same dates. (sigh) For what it is worth, our average rainfall numbers are misleading too. We hardly ever get up to our "average" rainfall amount in any given year and have only exceeded it once, maybe twice, since we've been here. I put less faith in these "numbers" all the time and more faith in what we personally experience. I still can plant pretty early if I am prepared to spend a huge amount of time covering and uncovering plants, but I would prefer to plant later and spend less energy covering and uncovering stuff. That's actually a pretty major change in philosophy for me. : ) PROPANE? Oh, my. I'm shocked, Randy, absolutely shocked! I'm just kidding. Hope everything is toasty warm in the greenhouse on these cold nights. Hobo, I wish there was an easy way to say that one given veggie is "safe" from freeze or frost (or snow or sleet) damage at a given temperature, but there are many variables that determine the outcome. I'll post a separate thread on freeze and frost damage in a few minutes while eating lunch and listening to the latest dire weather forecast. With regards to your specific veggies, your onions may be OK if they have been in the ground for more than month and are somewhat used to very cold nights. They will be more cold hardy if raised from sets or seeds but less cold hardy if raised elsewhere as plants, pulled up, shipped here and then planted here. I always mulch mine with several inches of hay if below-freezing temps are expected, and especially if snow, sleet or a wintery mix is forecast. Potatoes are not quite as cold-hardy as onions in my garden but even if they freeze to the ground, they almost always regrow just fine. At about 30 degrees (for a sustained period of several hours) you'll see some damage to potato foliage. (In my garden, I've noticed different degrees of damage on different varieties too.) At about 26 or 27 degrees you may see the foliage completely frozen back to the ground depending on how long the temps stay that low. So, if you dirt your potato plants, I think they'll be perfectly fine. Cauliflower and Broccoli can normally withstand temperatures in the mid-20s (good heavens--I hope y'all aren't going to be that cold in Pittsburgh County!) for a brief time, but it depends on how long the plants have been in the ground, how long the temps stay below freezing, etc. I mulch mine with hay if I am expecting snow or sleet no matter how long they've been in the ground. I might not cover them up if it is only going to 30-32 but if it is going below that, I throw a frost blanket, sheet, blanket, etc. over them. I should think that hay alone would protect yours unless the weather is drastically worse than expected. Of course, you have to take into account that the storm could be more severe than forecast, so I think it is better to use more mulch than less and to throw sheets, blankets, row cover type frost blankets, burlap bags, etc. over the well-mulched plants at night just to be "extra safe". My plants are always mulched, but I give them extra mulch and cover them up when severe cold is approaching. I don't have anything tender in the ground to worry about, but some people here in Love County do have tomatoes in the ground. (Well, tomorrow IS our average last freeze date, so I am sure they thought last weekend or the one before that it would be safe and they went ahead and planted.) I hope they have buckets and blankets so they can cover them up. Our forecast here is for the low 30s which at our house usually means the 20s. Dawn

Hi! I hope I get a response on this as this forum doesn't appear to get much traffic. Has anyone vacationed in the Lake Norman area? Any idea of advice as to the area to stay in? We are looking at Cornelius which seems to be the main hub of the area. We would like to be in an area where there is a lot to do within a short distance. Our DD, 20 yrs. old will be with us. We have been to Myrtle Beach a few times and loved it there. However, we would like to try someplace new this year. Thanks for your input!

Dear New House......boy, that's a shame that you didn't have more input before the house was framed as to the windows you were going to use. I see that a lot though. I am a self-professed window snob and really don't like vinyl windows. I am leary of the H3 although they are used in million dollar homes around here. I think they have not been in the marketplace long enough to know if this hybrid will stand the test of time due to the heating and cooling expansion coefficiency differences between the vinyl and the aluminum extrusion on the exterior. If you are going to use the doublehung, then IMHO, definitely look elsewhere. The casement, because of the price point, may be worth the gamble but I probably wouldn't do it. I recently sold my house that had Windsor windows (mfg in Iowa and in Monroe NC right outside of Charlotte) and I had no problems with them and purchased them because of the big difference in price between it's competitors. This is the aluminum clad product. I do not like their composite window called Legend. Now I live in a house with vinyl doublehung windows. It is in a neighborhood with Windsor Autrey track built homes. The vinyl windows are Stanley (?!?). I had never even heard of them and I have been selling windows for 25 years. But-cha know.....they ain't half bad. I have been rather surprised. They have grills in the airspace, which I never really cared for, but the builder applied jamb extensions and some really nice trim and a good deep window sill and they look really nice from the inside (who knew?)From the outside they are white with black faux shutters. The house was built in 2004. They keep me warm and dry in the winter, and cool and dry in the summer. Yes, I can feel a little coolness near the glass in the winter, and in the summer I close the blinds on the side of the house that gets the most sun in the afternoon. To get the same Aluminum clad windows in this house from a premium window company (Marvin, Kolbe, Semco, even Windsor) would have been 4 to 8 times more money I would estimate. Vinyl is not what I would prefer to do and if you do go to vinyl, don't do Plygem. Windsor owns Atrium but I have never sold nor used their vinyl window. In the end you probably need to look at the whole picture (cost, utility, resale value of your home, energy efficiency, aesthetics, etc). I wish you luck.