Thanks, everyone! I love sharing this stuff with you. Have you designed a project for a larger hooked rug yet? With your new frame how large of a rug can you create? One of my first hooked projects 20+ years ago was a small rug I designed. Then later I bought a pattern that appealed to me and hooked that. I think both still need to be bound and finished (procrastinating about this step is a problem common to many rug hookers). Currently, the two projects I have lined up are a chair seat (I have five but need one more) and a new cover for my footstool. My new frame (which should arrive in less than two weeks) is the same size as my old one, but both can accommodate any size project, as you just lift the rug up and move it to work on different sections. Here's a story for you: Last night I was trying to come up with a design idea for the hooked chair seat. I looked through one of my books on rug hooking, and got nowhere with that. Then I reached for a book on folk art, thinking as I did so that it had been years since I'd opened it. Inside the front cover I found cut-out patterns my daughter Jill and I had drawn for a quilted table runner I made years ago. I didn't use the horse she drew at the time, but there it was, a perfect size for the chair seat. I feel that I was guided to open that book. Here's a picture of the pattern I drew on the linen burlap last night. I'll do some sort of design in the outer border. Now all I have to do is pick which wools I'm going to use. It's like coloring. :-)

CEF- I keep waiting to see a picture of the living room, pretty please with cookie dough on top? ;) So glad you are able to sell the doors and make some money back. Also, yay for having a properly working car!! Pinkelephant- I am so intrigued by your old school house turned home! I'm curious, do you happen to have any pictures from when you first bought it? It sounds like it has already been through a lot and now you are renoing it again. Your little girl is gorgeous!!! Sorry I couldn't help more with layout, it must be b/c of the time of year it is, the board seems kinda dead. You might try posting another new thread asking for layout help. There are some amazing layout guru's on here, you just have to be lucky enough to catch them. Good job though on shoring up walls, getting window openings set at this time of year, I know I don't want to be outside working right now!! OB2B- I.e. refinishing wood floors, I don't envy you. The first place hubby and I bought was a 60 year old house, remodeled in the 80s and they installed wood paneling and carpet over the wood floors. When we bought it, the first thing we did was pull off the paneling and pull up the carpet. We ended up refinishing all of the original floors ourselves before we moved in. I can't imagine trying to refinish wood floors in a house while living there! The dust and fumes are so pervasive!! Good luck! Also, on a personal note? Only 10 lbs?!?! You are doing much better than I am with reno fatigue!! Terri- I really want to see the before/after pics now!!! From the pic with your son, those trees were massive!! It must have made a huge difference to remove them! Annkh- I'm not a skier but those views look amazing!! I'm glad to hear you had a wonderful time on your ski trip. Schick- I, too, have all our taxes done, just waiting for a few forms to come in before submission. Are you good with electrical or are you going to have to hire it out? Our first house had to have the main replaced to bring it up to code, we were able to do it ourselves. When we added my kitchen last year, we added a sub panel for the new addition and, once again (thankfully) we were able to do it ourselves. I have only, in the past few years, come to realize why renovations are so expensive for the average homeowner. I was raised with a dad that taught me plumbing, electrical, car work, etc. (Yes, all work was done with a permit and passed inspection) No wonder others reno budgets are so high!!! I would have never been able to get even a fraction of what I have if I had to pay others to do it. I hope you are able to replace the main without eating into your bathroom reno too much! As for me, we left Saturday afternoon for them to spray insulation. We came back Sunday night with a vomiting kid and I spent the next few days trying to tend to her AND get work done. She was well enough to go to school on Tuesday so when the baby was napping, I pulled (what used to be) the window in the master bedroom which will now be a doorway to my closet. I also went in my "closet" and pulled all the decking off of what used to be the outside of the house. Just need to finish running electrical in there, build a header and install a door, and get drywall up and I will be able to start planning the design of the closet and planning the reno on the master bath. The bricks were delivered yesterday and the brick layers are supposed to be here tomorrow to start bricking. My dad is the one calling the shots on the reno since it is his (and my moms) place and I think he is honestly just ready for it to be done. We hired out pouring the slab. We hired out the septic (necessary since you have to have the proper licensing, etc. for it to pass inspection.) Hired out some framers to do the HIPP roof and now hiring brick layers to come and do the brick work. Most of this (except the septic) we could do ourselves but he is ready to be done and I don't blame him one bit!!

Nancy, I saw where they were advising some folks in Wagoner to evacuate, and that kind of surprised me, but then when you look at the rainfall map for the month of May, maybe the big surprise is that the whole northeastern quarter of OK isn't evacuated already. Yes, there's so many good people doing so many things to help the people, livestock, pets, wildlife, etc. It is touching....like fire stations offering their use of their 1 or 2 showers to people whose homes have lost power and/or water....and people who are just showing up with cases of bottled water, figuring somebody needs it for drinking water. Shelters popping up, volunteers coming to staff them, restaurants feeding the first responders, and on and on and on. That's the Oklahoma Standard, isn't it? Like you, we're on high ground, so while the Red River is on three sides of us, it never could flood enough to reach us. I had a few doubts in 2015 when we got 80" of rainfall and the river seriously flooded (including washing away two homes not that far from us--but at a much lower elevation--but water never got close to us. We could drive a couple of miles and sit in the parking lot of the McGeehee Catfish Restaurant and watch the incredibly high water go by, but then we drove back uphill to get back home. Everyone said the creeks might back up because they couldn't drain into the river, but they really didn't. They ran high after heavy rainfall, but they always do, and even then, the water would have had to rise 12-15' to make it up the hill to our yard. There was never any chance of that happening. Our road never has flooded at the creek, but there's been flooding to our south and to our north, so we might temporarily be trapped at home for merely a few hours. We almost bought riverside land at a much lower elevation, and I am so grateful we didn't---although we would have had incredible neighbors. (We also have incredibly wonderful neighbors here.) I paint that way....forgetting myself and ending up with a new set of painting clothes too. I don't think it is that I don't know I'll get paint on me, just that in my excitement about getting it done, I forget to go put on clothes that already are dotted with paint. Thanks for sharing the story about Russ. I'm glad he had the chance to get to know his father better. Jennifer, First, congrats on Ethan's high school graduation! That's such a monumental point in a young adult's life (and in the parents' lives as well). Everything eats seedlings. Caterpillars, snails, slugs, flea beetles, army worms, pill bugs and sow bugs (they are decomposers but I find them eating plenty of green plants as well), and I could go on and on and on. Most plants outgrow it, but the brassica family plants need to be treated or the cabbage loopers and cabbage worms will destroy them. There's just too many of the little caterpillars and they munch until they become big caterpillars. Bt 'kurstaki' is the answer. Many of the pests that will eat kale, broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower really, really prefer collard greens or mustard greens, so often I grow those on the edge of the garden so the pests will flock to them and not bother my other crops so much. That works pretty well. The non-organic gardeners spray with synthetic pesticides. I have friends who do that. Their plants always look perfect. They use stuff like Bug-B-Gone and Liquid Sevin, and in the olden days used all sorts of heavy-duty stuff like organophosphates like diazinon and malathion. I'd probably give up gardening before I'd ever use those, but using them doesn't bother some people. Guess what is missing from their gardens though? Lady bugs, green lacewings, butterflies, dragonflies, hover flies, flower flies, bees, and often....anything that anyone would consider a pollinator, so they end up having pollination issues. The organic gardeners often spray with organic broad-spectrum pesticides too. I'm not going to fault people for doing that because it is their garden and their choice, but I just do not like spraying a broad spectrum pesticide all over everything. I feel like it isn't worth (to me) the risk of running off or killing all the beneficial insects. Still, I'll never say that I absolutely, positively never would use these products because some day something might happen that pushes me to that point. There are many broad-spectrum organic pesticides available---Spinosad, Neem, Organocide (soybean extract, fish oil and sesame oil), PyGanic (pyrethrins, so can be deadly to felines), Safer Insecticidal Soap (Potassium Salts of Fatty Acids), Safer Tomato and Vegetable Spray (Potassium Salts of Fatty Acids + botanical pyrethrins), Take Down spray (Pyrethrins and canola oil), Hot Pepper Wax (more of a repellent) and Garlic Barrier (also a repellent), Zero Tolerance (herbal oils like rosemary, thyme, cinnamon and other oils), and Beauveria Bassiana (when you need to bring in the big guns---it is a mycoinsecticide that is a fungus in a Liquid Emulsifiable Suspension used to kill soft bodied insects and a few hard-bodies ones as well). I bought Beauveria bassiana last year when I felt like the grasshoppers were winning the war over who was going to harvest from the garden, but then they disappeared (I think birds were eating them) and I never used it. I probably wouldn't have sprayed it on my garden plants but was going to spray it in a 10-12' wide band all around the exterior of the garden fence in the hopes that the grasshoppers would make contact with it there and would get sick and die. Every time that I think that I could and would and will and am going to use a broad-spectrum pesticide to combat some horrible thing in my garden (hmmm....leaf footed bugs or squash bugs or stink bugs, for example), I think about all the living creatures in my garden that I like seeing there, and I just cannot do it. I guess I am a total failure as an organic pesticide user because I cannot use the above products. I will use some narrow-spectrum ones---like sometimes Bt on the brassicas or Semaspore for grasshoppers (it is a bait) or Slug-Go/Slug-Go Plus (a life saver when you have a heavily-mulched garden full of pill bugs and sow bugs), but cannot bring myself to use the broad-spectrum ones. If holes in your kale or cabbage or whatever do bother you that much, then why not find the right product and spray them? Bt should take care of most. Little tiny grasshoppers are just now beginning to hatch out here, though I have not yet seen that many, and they eat holes in everything. I don't think I'm seeing enough of them to make me worry though. Not yet. I usually have a bottle of Take Down spray in my shed so I can spray it directly on hard to catch things like leaf-footed bugs, but I've been out for a couple of years and just haven't bought another bottle yet. It is your garden. If the thought of holes in things bother you, spray with whatever pesticide you're comfortable using. I've just gotten away from doing that and hardly notice the holes in leaves any more. dbarron, Ha! I have had to water my containers the last 4 days. That's what we get for having a combination of strong winds all day long and temperatures in the upper 80s, sunshine (finally) and no rain (oddly). I won't complain and say the rain is missing us, but we aren't getting anything close to what everyone else is getting and May is barely above average rainfall at all compared to other months over the last year. Our ground is starting to dry up some (woo hoo!) and there's no rain in our forecast until Tuesday. I'm glad you're safe from flooding. That's one less thing to worry about anyhow. Eileen, With regards to your pepper seedlings, yes, birds will do that sometimes. Usually it is mockingbirds and they do it only to tomatoes and peppers. I have no idea why. They don't eat them. They just cut them off and leave them lying on the ground. It could be something else---there are some climbing cutworms that will climb a plant stem a couple of inches and then cut it off. I have no idea why. They always seem worse in wet years. I hope your house will be okay. There are some limited 100-year flood zones directly alongside some of the creeks in our neighborhood, but I've only ever seen the creek come up into the yard of one house on our street, and it sits quite a bit lower than us---I think they are actually in the 100-year flood plain while we're well above it. Of course, we had the good sense to build on the highest point of our land, not down in a low area beside the creek, and that helps too. Out closest neighbor to the north put a mobile home way back in the woods right beside the creek. Perhaps they should have taken a clue from the fact that the old farmhouse on that property was built on its highest point of ground but apparently they did not. Still, that house didn't flood in 2015 either. I am sure that if I lived up there in your general area, I'd be feeling anxious about all the rain too. The images of all that water everywhere is mind-boggling. So is the forecast. Rain keeps falling and falling and falling, mostly over the watersheds that can least handle more rain. I feel pretty good about the Red River near us and Lake Texoma right now. They've been releasing water from Texoma for several weeks now, and it is to the point where they're finally releasing water from it faster then new inflow is coming in, so the lake held steady yesterday and should be dropping beginning today. The Red River is high and running fast, and absolutely wall-to-wall (i.e. bank to bank is full) which is not all that common here, where it often is so low you can pretty much walk across it---and, sometimes, in the summer you can walk across it without touching water, but as of this morning, it still was within its banks. We had the unexpected pleasure of a weekend with our oldest granddaughter, so today was kid stuff--shopping for summer clothes, going to the playground, to the movies (Aladdin) and then home for pizza night, playing games and watching some TV. We tortured her by forcing her to watch two episodes of Gunsmoke (in black and white) with us. She thought it was funny---especially because it was in black and white. One guest star was Kurt Russell, playing a kid about 12-13 years old, and she asked me if he was Elvis. I told her no, but that later on, after he grew up, Kurt Russell played Elvis in a movie about his life. She thought it was cool that she picked up on his resemblance to The King. Everyone has gone to bed now except me and one cat, and she's lying here beside me trying to sleep. The house is quiet. It is a nice time to reflect, and Nancy's beautiful description of how Russ reconnected with his dad has me thinking about cancer. A few weeks ago we lost one of our neighbors to stage 4 cancer of the nervous system. He went so quickly after his diagnosis that it was mind-blowing. Today, we found out that a family member of his to whom we are quite close was diagnosed with stage four cancer in his spine. This is such devastating news. He soon will begin a very long chemo regimen. It is hard to understand, sometimes, why some families get hit again and again by diseases like cancer. I didn't work in the garden today, but expect to be able to do a little work out there tomorrow afternoon, and possibly on Monday. It has been so wet that I've largely stayed out of there, except to water stuff in containers. I did a little deadheading and weeding the other day, but not nearly enough. I am keeping up on harvesting. We are very far behind on mowing. Neil Sperry had a great reminder in his newsletter this week that it is chigger time. I'm glad he reminded me. I've been walking through the taller grass in the yard without insect repellent on (I hate spraying it on my skin!) and am sort of surprised the chiggers haven't gotten me already. Am I the only one wondering what happens to the insects in the heavily flooded areas? Like the areas along the Arkansas River where floodwaters are 3 or 4 or 5' deep in neighborhoods, cities and homes? Do the insects get swept away in the floodwaters? Do they die? Do they fly away or crawl up high into trees and survive? What about the earthworms? How about the crawdads? Did they get enough warning to flee to higher ground like they did here in 2015? I mean, I have no idea what does or doesn't survive in this sort of flooding. I do know that mosquitoes become a huge problem even before all the water recedes, but what about everything else? It is something to ponder, is it not? Dawn

Being stuck inside with a big puppy who cannot run around outside is driving me almost as crazy as it is driving him. He is smart, he is learning all the standard commands like No, Come, Sit, Stay, etc. but he seems determined to engage the cat, Lucky, in a battle of the wills every single day. The lesson he has not yet learned is that her claws are going to win every single time. I am on the verge of losing my sanity here. I need a vacation from the big puppy. He is a bundle of love, but a very energetic bundle. Jennifer, It always is challenging the first time a person processes something new from the garden---new to them---and sometimes the sheer quantity of whatever needs to be processed is quite daunting. I'm glad you're making progress on the Seminoles. You do need a root cellar! I've always wanted one but never have been able to convince Tim that building one would be worthwhile. If our clay wasn't so impossible to dig, maybe we would have one by now. We started digging out a spot for one once and simply gave up---digging that dense red clay is like trying to dig concrete. After decades of trying to raise as much of our food as possible and spending far too much time canning, freezing and dehydrating it, I'm sort of over it and really, really wanting to cut back more and more. I no longer can 600-800 jars a year and I don't miss all those long hours in the kitchen. I don't think my body can physically tolerate being on my feet all day every day in the summer any more either. I'll always can some stuff, but more and more I focus on food that can be root-cellared (or maybe I should just say kept in dry storage since I don't have a root cellar) or frozen. Nothing makes a person appreciate things like onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes and winter squash like the fact that you can harvest them, cure them, and put them in dry storage as needed until you use them. This summer I processed and froze all the excess tomatoes in 8-cup batches for salsa back when we were harvesting tomatoes, telling myself that when the weather cooled down, I'd spend October-November turning them into salsa. So far, I haven't done that. If everyone is going to get salsa for Christmas as planned, I need to get busy canning salsa. After all, October is almost over. I think I'll do a few batches of salsa next week, and I haven't yet decided whether to make apple pie jam, candied jalapenos or Habanero Gold to go in the gift bags as well. I need to decide on that and get it done because it seems like once Halloween arrives, Christmas is here in the blink of an eye. I dread doing all this canning for the holiday gifts. I know I'll enjoy it once I start doing it, but I'm so burned out from doing so much for so many years that I don't absolutely love doing it the way that I once did. I wish I did absolutely adore doing it as I did 10, 15 or 20 (or longer) years ago, but I just don't. There's probably a lesson in here somewhere about pacing one's self better over the years so you don't burn out, but I didn't learn that lesson in time. I wish I had a nickel for every night I stayed up canning and cleaning up until midnight, and then got up at 6 am to go out to the garden, harvest tomatoes, and do it all over again....until midnight again.....and again, and again. I used to feel shocked when my older friends here gave up canning in their 60s or 70s after a lifetime of doing it, but now what I'm thinking is that I'm surprised they didn't retire from canning sooner than they did. I may can a lot more after Tim retires---he'd be here to help lift that heavy canner filled with water and filled jars, for example. On the other hand, I may decide that I completely retire from food processing when he retires from his job, though I really don't think I will. I am not sure he wants to help with the canning, because every time he walks into the kitchen now and I'm canning away like a mad woman, he sort of gets that deer-in-headlights look in his eyes and cannot get out of the kitchen, and the house, quickly enough, like he's afraid I might put him to work in the kitchen. lol I'd like to point out that I never once have asked him to help me can, dehydrate or freeze anything, so I don't know why he gets so twitchy when he thinks it might happen. Nancy, I hope the new faucet works out. I hate plumbing work. Tim can do it, and he does do it, but it always requires at least 3 trips to the store to get all the right parts, as if it is impossible to buy all the right parts the first time. I realize that when you start taking apart old plumbing, sometimes you find a part in there that you didn't expect and have to go get one, but it drives me nuts...partly because it is such a long drive to get to a store that has what we need. I hate having to go out in the rain anywhere for any thing at all. Nobody here can drive in the rain and we have a lot of motor vehicle accidents everywhere when it rains, particularly on I-35. We joke that people here cannot drive in the rain because rain is so rare they lack experience in driving in it. Yesterday, within 5 minutes of the rain starting to fall, we were paged out to an auto accident in town. It boggles my mind how common this is. Jen, I love dogs but couldn't have that many of them underfoot all the time. It would drive me crazy. There is a really nice pet boarding facility north of Marietta and some friends of mine who love animals worked there for quite for a while (several years, I think), and it was a tremendous amount of work. We needed the rain and I'm grateful we received it, and now I'm ready for it to end and be over already. We've got about 2.5" in the rain gauge, with light rain expected to continue falling today and tonight. I'd be happy if no more rain fell, but it still would be very wet, chilly and miserable out there even without any more rain. At least we aren't getting snow like those folks in western OK and northwestern OK. I am not getting one single thing done with this dog in the house. He just has too much energy, and I am too kind-hearted to send him out to play in the rain. I'm going plant shopping tomorrow, come hell or high water, because being stuck indoors is driving me almost as crazy as it is driving the dog. Next week's cold looks discouraging. It looks like summer held on forever, and winter is coming early. I miss the long, pleasant autumns we used to have. Dawn