Wow, just wow. Beautiful food that I would like to eat much of. Lousy grammar but you get the idea. Teresa is right with the drooling. Ann, I think I could make myself sick eating all your good food from the crepes, through the haddock and well past the bread to my favorite, the pasta. The only thing that saves me is your liberal use of black pepper which I don't eat at all if I can help it. I'd be doing some serious scraping at your house with no complaints. Smiles. DCArch, I love that onion soup in particular. Just gorgeous and I can almost taste it. John, the trout is calling me and the grapes look beautiful with it to me. I loved your earlier pics with the girls cooking. Foodona, Christy and I would both be happy with your Saltimbocca dinner. We like orzo too and treating it with a rizotto dressing is a great treatment for it. Ya did Mardi Gras in fine style. We almost always use shrimp, chicken and sausage in our gumbos and jambalaya. Love the combination. Ruthanna, the shad is running? Spring really is on the way! That strawberry cake is envy worthy. I love the pie plate it's in, it's the same one my Mother used for many years and brings back great memories. Thanks. That tablecloth is one of my all time favorites. I used to collect old linens. Sol, what can I say? I'll skip dinner and eat dessert with you any day. Although, those mini pita's do look perfect and the white bean hummus wants my lips on it. LPink, I think your concoction looks pretty cool and delish. I'm sorry it's so hard figuring this diet out, but sounds like you're getting there. Best of luck to you. Annie, I love that I can count on your veggies being done. Yum. I'd be eating the potatoes and asparagus with you happily and leave the wings to Elery and Christy, carnivores that they are. I'd probably have to fight off Ashley because I'd love that goulash too. Oh Annie. All that pasta. If I'd thought about it in time I should have just sent you my motor for your pasta machine. It would help you so much. It would only be a loan, but ... guess it's too late to help now. Sorry I haven't been around enough to notice you needed it. Now for that doodle. Yeah, there aren't enough unwanted dogs around that they have to design mutts now. The biggest joke is that they aren't even really hypoallergenic and can be... well as you noticed... a bit hyper.. lol.. He's way cute though. Love how he's looking up at you.. lol.. Oh,,, btw, your cannelloni look just perfect. We have been eating here and even cooking, lol, but no pics for a while. Finally got a new batch of batteries for the camera and all I've managed to take pics of is soup and cornbread. Smiles. Well the cornbread deserves the most pics because I've been obsessed with it lately. I needed some more cornmeal to further my experiments and told Christy, stoneground. Well ladies and gents, the DH's aren't the only ones that bring home grocery surprises, the DW's are just as capable. She brought home a 5# bag of stoneground white self rising cornmeal. She got the stoneground part right and was quite proud of herself. I tried the recipe on the bag first but it was a bit dry so I've tried several variations and I'm liking it. I see I'm not the only one cooking the yellow dried split peas. The soup was very good. As is my custom I made several pounds of it so I have a nice amount of quarts in the freezer. I'm not sure when last I had yellow peas but I was pleasantly surprised to notice that they're a bit more mellow than the green ones. A nice change I'll use more often. Now my yellow pictures. Smiles. A few of the cornbreads from the self rising in Mom's cast iron pan. And the soup, with some cornbread of course.

Hmmm...we'll work out something--maybe Friday? And you know what, I meant to add that I was really underwhelmed by the experience of painting with the MoorGuard. Are Exterior paints generally thinner than interior? I then went in and put on a coat of EK (ICI-Dulux) interior semi-gloss on some window trim and it was a completely different experience. The Aura was more like the ICI. I'm wondering if there's a better exterior paint that I could mix the Sandy Hook Gray in...I may take the sample in to ICI-Dulux and ask them to mix it in one of their exterior finishes. Any thoughts on that? What exterior paint do folks favor?

I'm an IT (computer) person but I still find that good old graph paper & pencil gives me a better "feel" for designs. All my designs were done on graph paper. I did what Bmorepanic did, I made a to-scale drawing of the space as big as I could on an 8.5" x 11" piece of graph paper, labeled everything, and then made about 25 copies. I then played around with it, took digital pictures, resized them (using MS Office Picture Manager), uploaded them into PhotoBucket, and posted them here. The drawing contained all the walls, windows, doorways, etc.---but no cabinets--i.e., down to the studs! Lately, I have started using MS PowerPoint. I copy & paste a copy of the person's kitchen I'm working with into a new MS PowerPoint presentation and expand it to as big as I can fit on the "paper". Then, I make a rectangle that's 2' x 2' based on the image (I create the rectangle & expand/reduce it until it's the size of a 2' counter in the drawing) and make rectangles of varying sizes based on the 2' x 2' rectangle (i.e., 1/2 the width of the rectangle makes a 12" x 24" cabinet). Then I just make appliances and have at it! Where necessary/helpful, I insert text boxes, use arrows, etc. When I'm done, I save it as a "jpg" file, resize it, upload it to PhotoBucket, and post it! HTH!

We had the choice between two condos, one was flipped-reno'd, the other hadn't been touched in 20 years. Neither were interior condos but they faced the sun slightly differently. The flipped condo had lots of mirrors installed everywhere. It never occurred to me they were manipulating the light on purpose, but now that I think about it, perhaps so. I can say the mirrors were off-setting to me because it did seem like old-style, even if it'd just been renovated. We went with the never-renovated unit that had the problem of so much light, the circa 80s yellow walls and yellow oak floor made the place seem on fire every afternoon.. unbearably too much sunlight. I guess you pick your battles! Since you have yet to buy this condo, my advice it to see if you can go over there and spend a long chunk of time, to see how the sun affects the place as it moves over the hours during the day.