Sally - you are right on. I will be 64 in April, have had 3 knee surgeries, keep up 20 acres, 40 something miniature horses, a 2 story house and gardening. Graduated nursing school at age 53. Lots of projects are not completed when I want them to be but I have lots to look forward to. I do have help feeding horses and unloading feed 4 days a week. My other daily helper that I'd had for 6 years recently had a blown heart valve at age 47 so he unfortunately is no longer able to work for me. I adore getting up and seeing what is blooming and growing, dont even think about age, just do exactly what I want to do. I AM careful of my knees as I want to make a liar out of my doctor who said I would have to have knee replacement surgery in 10 yrs. The trick is - keep moving, do what you want and dont let anyone dictate what you can or cant do. If I want to come in and rest a bit - I do. One night last fall I stayed up nearly all night, burning feed sacks, potting plants, working in the barn.....people can do much more than they think they can. I always sleep well at night because I work hard. And I feel great. I hate to go to bed at night because I still want to be out in the yard. But am going to make myself tonite because I am treating myself to a Tyler trip tomorrow, going to Blue Moon Gardens and Chamblees where I will no doubt fill up the car with roses. Dont know where they will go, but am thinking positively that I will find a place! To love to garden is the greatest gift - enjoying being outside.....doesnt matter how much one accomplishes...but just to be outside and participate in the miracle of growth! Happy Spring to all and good luck to you, Lucille, with your new home and garden! Judith

In Northern California, I have these perennials mixed in with my roses, penstemone, salvia, scabiosa, yarrow, blanket flowers burgundy, oranges & lemons, perennial geraniums Rozanne, Jolly Bee, and Brookside, verbascum, sidalcea party girl, sun loving foxgloves like excelsior and camelot, English lavender, sea lavender, veronica, creeping lobelia, Japanese iris, Chinese foxglove, and lots of campanula. With the salvia and penstemone you have to be careful to select smaller varieties. Many of the hardy geranium do not like full sun, I have found that Jolly Bee handles the sun better than most. My favorite scabiosa is giant blue, the flowers are Hugh and the butterflies love them. I am somewhat limited since I have such intense full sun, and limited space. I miss my bearded iris, I only have a few due to limited space. Diana

A few years ago I was asking the same questions because I wanted the iridescent glass tile look but choked on the price. I found the price on the Oceanside Glasstile to be pretty uniform and picking it up at my local Expo was the cheapest when shipping was factored in. You might want to look at Maestromosaic.com. I bought some very pretty glass tile from them for a different application and they were cheaper than Oceanside, though none of it is as affordable as ceramic tile. Home Depot is now carrying glass tile too, but in small sheets or strips rather than a 1 sf sheet. Do you really need a full wall of this? Could you get by with a decorative band? How about mixing the occasional glass tile into a field of stone or ceramic mosaic of the same size? If you wouldn't mind a more irregular look, you can get tumbled "beach glass" that would be great for a broken tile effect, and many tile stores now sell glass "pebble" sheets, at about half the price of Oceanside. A little creativity can pay off in big savings. Something else to know about OG and some other glass mosaic tiles: if you are thinking of DIY'ing it, be prepared for a lot more work than you would do with a mesh-backed tile. The Glasstile is front-mounted onto brown paper which you are supposed to wash off after the tile is cemented in, but it has some annoying drawbacks. Most importantly, you can't see your tile, which means that if a tile is out of sync with its neighbors, you won't know it until after the tile is mortared in and you wash off the paper. Ditto if you have mortar oozing up too high through the grout joint or onto the tiles themselves. Vertical applications are especially challenging because, even when dry, the paper tends to collapse and not hold the tiles as evenly spaced as a mesh backer would do. Compound this by 10 if the paper gets wet - like, say, from wet mortar, or a wet sponge or rag you use to clean mortar mess off your tiles as you go along. To get satisfactory results with a vertical application, I'd suggest that you use a mortar mix that is on the dry side, use the shallowest-tooth trowel that you can find, and insert 1/16" spacers into the grout joint lines at fairly regular intervals to keep the little tiles lined up well. Good luck.

My daughter's house backs up to a national cemetery - a VERY small national cemetery, in which a long-ago KY native President is buried. The entire neighborhood was once part of his family farm, Springfield. The family home (now privately owned) is around the corner from DD's house. The cemetery is surrounded on three sides by houses, and on the 4th by a busy road. On all sides, there is a beautiful old stone wall that is about 4 1/2 ft tall and 2 ft thick. What a gift! A wall like that would cost a fortune today! In a national cemetery, all the headstones are the same simple marble markers. To see rows and rows of these, is very lovely and very moving. My grandsons have always played in the cemetery, climbing over the wall. When they were little, my daughter had Easter egg hunts there. She asked me if I thought it was disrespectful, and I said if I were buried there, I could think of nothing lovelier than happy children, gleefully hunting eggs on Easter. None of the houses surrounding this small cemetery have ever been hard to sell. Most people adore the stone wall, and like the quiet as well. Kind of nice to not have noisy neighbors behind one!