Hey Michael, Good ole Florida Piney Woods dirt, but I am on the Gulf Coast. We are so much drier than the East Coast. We only get up to about 90 degrees and 90% humidity during watermelon season. My soil is kind of sandy but with a little work you can grow just about anything. When I am away from Florida I miss the summer thunderstorms more than anything else. Nothing less than a 6.0 earthquake shakes the ground like a Florida thunderstorm. The picture of the baby melon was just trying to see if I could post a picture from the instructions. How can you survive winters in zone 5?

Hi Kath - Thank you for replying. Evidently they are New Zealand mud snails which are harmless to the worms except that they are extremely invasive and will reproduce my the thousand within a week or two. One of the people on another forum had them in her aquarium and she had to clean out her aquarium twice with scalding hot water to get rid of them. She had to boil her rocks, etc. as well. So I have to remove all of my worms and cocoons from the bedding and rinse them off with warm water and then place them in fresh new bedding after thoroughly cleaning my bin and trays with super hot water. The only best way to kill the snails is to drop them and their eggs in salt water. So I figure after I remove my worms and eggs I'll dump all of the bedding and compost into a bucket of salt water and then dispose of it. I hope my worms are just slow like yours. :P Maybe it's just the type I have - I have Indian Blues.

This is what happened to me. DH and I got married in the spring of 2003. At the time his uncle (DH's father's brother) was dying. They live in the midwest (we live in New England). My MIL INSISTED (and she never insists, she's very nice) they (uncle, aunt and 3 adult children and their families) not be invited because they would not come due to the uncle being so ill and it would seem like a grab for gifts. I disagreed (I think you invite all aunts and uncles even if they live on the space station), but went along with MIL. When DH and I went out to the uncle's funeral one month after the wedding we learned one of his cousins was actually in Boston (less than an hour drive from our wedding!) for the week of our wedding. They knew we were getting married. They could have attended. But we didn't invite them! I felt so horrible. I apologized and explained what happened (i painted MIL in a sympathetic light), and I think all was forgiven. I don't think I'll ever listen to MIL again on something like this though, I should have followed my gut. Five years later and I still feel awful about it. If you can't afford a gift I would send the couple a note wishing them much happiness, maybe with a little anecdote about when they were small (if you knew them). I received some notes like that, and they meant more to me than most of the gifts I received since they came from the heart (and not WalMart).

Sorry -- I think I fell off the end of the earth -- no that was just the first week of school, meetings almost every night since then, football and band going full tilt and I thought I could function with little or no sleep. My son had a big roller coaster experience with his college and life plans over the weekend and the first of this week. I'm still not certain where that will wind up, but the crisis moment has passed. OMG -- I'm not sure I'm ready for this senior year. I'll be okay when he leaves for college, but deciding where he will go and all that goes with that is not going to be easy for this one. I was supposed to be somewhere else hours ago, so I will quickly tell you what I was playing with and see if it sparks any interest rather than spending more time trying to get back to drawing it up and then finding it's impossible or whatever. I'm really getting caught up on the living spaces and flow of the home more than the knit-picking of the kitchen itself. The main thing that is bothering me there is the pantry being so far away from the cooking and prep areas. If you have enough cabinets to put your spices and most used staples in them near your baking and cooking zones and use the pantry for extra storage, small appliances and extra bakeware -- the things you don't need daily or won't have to go grab as you adjust or improvise when cooking, it might work. Or if you cook in an orderly fashion -- all by recipes or can gather everything once and not need to run to the pantry to get something you forgot or decide you need to adjust or improve something, it may work for you. I had a kitchen with a pantry across an aisle -- not as far as this one would be, and it drove me crazy -- to the point of hating to cook. I had very few cabinets in the kitchen itself and no room for any food other than the fridge. Even my spices were in the pantry. The walk-in pantry was one of the reasons I loved the house when I first saw it and one of the reasons I hated it by the time I left. -- but it was the whole package and you have more to work with. Just make sure you know where things will go and how it will work for you. I was thinking that instead of moving the laundry you simply move the door and reorient it, but if that has moved already, it's a moot point. I was kind of hoping that would save some expense so you wouldn't hate me if I suggested taking the kitchen to the right instead of to the back so that you could create a large great room rather than having things divided. It doesn't sound like you live divided and need the two living areas and two dining areas. I will forget that for now -- looks like it might be too much and too late. However, I would not wall off the area in front of the master. I was thinking of moving the desk that faces the kitchen and putting it over between the coat closet and the master BR door, then make that open area (overgrown hallway) a reading or game area with comfy reading chairs and/or a game table for playing cards, board games, crafts, extra dining for get togethers, etc. That's an area that will work with your family room but still give you an added function. I think I would still do that and even if you go with the kitchen pretty much as planned, the area that was patio could be a crafting/activity room that is more segregated and can be closed off from the much used door. I think that closing off that space and having traffic right through the middle of it would make it a mess in terms of too much hall and too little room to work with. If you make that area a game/study area, you could make that wall separating that area from the kitchen a peninsula - go all talls on the back wall and then have a pass through so that you can do snacks, coffee/beverages and even buffets there. If you have island seating, you then have three eating areas for when the family and grandkids are all there -- possibly even room to set up another folding table - and everyone can see each other. The thing that really stuck with me was that this house didn't flow and you wondered where the space was. I am afraid that if you wall it up and box things up like you have them, you might not improve that at all -- maybe make it worse. As I said at the start -- I have been out of the loop on all that has preceded it, so if I'm off on the wrong track I'm sorry.