Okay now, come on confess, all of you, WHAT DID YOU DO TO ANNOY THE WEATHER GODS!!!!! As I stated in the best place to live post, I have been out weeding, raking and burning brush. Nice enough today to burn, raining now. Best March here in years. And as you call us the frozen tundra, yeh "what is the point"? LOL Remember Hosta are tough and a little bit of snow will only do them good. I bet your hosta this year will be the best yet. Don't worry, be happy. All the moisture in the ground. They say we are supposed to have a dry spring/summer here this year. Now you can sympathize with what we usually go through, and whose to say, we will probably have snow in April. Won't be the first time. The only thing we cannot control is the weather, no matter where we live. By the way, the golfers have been playing on the greens since last week. Sorry, just had to say that, they are such a happy bunch. Betty

Single bowl girl here. We had a double bowl sink before the reno, and I will never go back! The thing that inspired me to install a single bowl sink in my kitchen renovation was not this forum (hadn't found it yet when I made that decision). It was the memory of the kitchen in my home growing up. My childhood home was built in the late '50's and had a very large enameled cast iron white sink (as an aside, I read here that today's enameled cast iron sinks aren't made the way they used to, and that's why the modern ones don't look as good or are as durable). I had almost forgotten about the sink of my childhood, because in the several apartments and houses I'd lived in as an adult all had double bowl sinks. I was always dissatisfied with those double bowl sinks - neither side was ever larger enough to soak a roasting pan or give me enough elbow room to wash my big dutch oven. The non-disposal side always had gunk to clean out of the strainer, or worse, got stopped up cause stuff went down that non-disposal side. When I looked at sinks for my reno, I suddenly remembered that big ol' single bowl sink, and how wonderful and easy it was to work with. Though I got a stainless one, rather than the cast iron. As to raw meats, no one in my family ever got sick from meat contamination in the 20 years or so of that single bowl sink in my childhood kitchen, or in the last 5 years of my new kitchen. You wash your hands, and your utensils, finished. Frankly, I think there's almost more chance of cross-contamination with two bowl sinks, cause there's more likelihood or tendency for the meat to be in one bowl, the veggies/fruit in the other, and the more that both are out at the same time, the more there could be cross-contamination. A single bowl imposes the discipline of cleaning everything right away, or putting in the DW right away, before going to the next thing. Maybe it's just the way I work, I dunno, or the habits of childhood so firmly ingrained! What's great about this forum is that everyone can give their own pros and cons, and there's really no right or wrong answer about which style sink to get. I just wanted to describe why I prefer the single bowl arrangement.

We have our house listed with a real estate and we are also advertising it on Craig's list ourselves. We have an agreement with our realtor that we can sell it ourselves without paying a commission. We have had no one look from the real estate (listed for one month - but not the best time during the holidays) and 6 people who qualify and are seriously interested from Craig's list, ... but all 6 have to sell their homes - one would qualify without selling but they don't want to carry two mortgages even though they have just rented their other home. So there are people looking and if they do sell their homes, we are hoping they will remember our home if it is still available. We had a couple of companies contact us and didn't email them back except one which sounded ligitimate - they were an investment group, we gave them the particulars about our property, but not our financial picture or any personal information and no last name, not what we owed etc. I told them we didn't have to sell but if they were seriously interested to make us a reasonable offer, we never heard back from them. I think more buyers are looking at Craig's list and more sellers are putting their homes there. Definitely put your home on Craig's list and be sure to post the best 4 photos you have of the home, also use flickr or photobucket and have a link to more photos of your home and put the link in the ad. We are looking at Craig's list for when we sell our home and we only look at the ads with photos of the home. Make sure your home stays near the top of the list on craig's list, don't let it go to the next page, most folks don't look any further than the first page of ads. Just cancel the ad and re-up it - but no sooner than every two days. A little house and lots of land, right up my alley, but not in your state - too cold. In 1993 we couldn't seem to sell our home through a real estate (we lived in Arkansas then). We finally decided to sell it ourselves, put an ad in a newspaper of the next closest city to us and sold it. All the real estate agents said we would never sell it (for the price we wanted). We also had a relative set up a website for the home the same week, but when it hit the search engines we had already sold it - one guy called us from the website and was really mad it was already sold - saying "but it just came up on the computer". Thank goodness we were persistent or we'd still be there. You never know who's looking to move where. Good luck.

about the "center of attention" thing--can you figure out WHY? Just as an exercise in getting to know yourself? And you're lucky as the groom--you can mentally consider yourself as an "accessory to the bride," and so deflect the "other people's expectations" pressure that comes w/ being the center of attention. That doesn't mean you're any less important, and I'm sure your bride doesn't think of you as unmportant at ALL--but it does mean that during uncomfortable hooplah (which isn't necessarily expensive--just the aunts, and all that), you can think of her, and how to support her, etc., and stop thinking about yourself. It's an advantage grooms have over brides, I think. Also, I can only speak as a bride, one who observed her groom. We were SO busy, so caught up in the emotion of the day, so caught up with each other, that we really didn't notice stuff like the aunts, and the dancing, and all that. So I wonder if you will even have mental TIME to feel miserable at your wedding reception. When it was my wedding, it was just not comparable to other people's weddings where I was a guest. It was just so very different, so much more emotional, etc. It went by in a blur. And I was so happy, just SO happy, to be marrying BIll that it was not possible to be miserable. My goodness, my FACE hurt from smiling so much! And I couldn't stop, even though I *tried*, because it *hurt*. HE was flustered, and happy, and just not able to really concentrate on all the pressure, and expectations, etc. He (and I) enjoyed the dinner, and the time with the relatives, and the dancing. But all the other stuff that makes you miserable at someone else's wedding? That just totally didn't register. So, don't predict your own wedding-day emotions & reactions by the weddings you've been a GUEST at. Instead, find some other day that was highly charged for you: my wedding day was MUCH more like my college graduation party.