Hi Sheila! Yes, they are totally sweet. I'll post a picture soon... have to get my son to show me what to do. I've heard good things about Romans... they are certainly beautiful and are supposed to be good-natured. After a year with one Pilgrim and one Buff, I'd have to say it is a tie. You won't go wrong with either breed. Willow, my Pilgrim, has a lot of personality and is more interactive, but my Buff is gentle, dignified and beautiful. She has remarkably expressive eyes that are both wise and amused, as though she knows the secrets of the world. I tend to favour the Pilgrims for myself because it is easy to tell the males and females apart. Also, being a smallish breed, they can't do the damage that larger geese can if they become aggressive during breeding season. The Pilgrims have been so inbred here in Ontario that it has affected their fertility. Jason Cain of Performance Poultry (from whom I always buy my birds) has imported goslings from Oregon this year... my two included. Willow comes from Californian stock. So I am hoping with two bloodlines that mine will breed well. Several of the seven goslings hatched here look like Pilgrims. The rest are more golden, like Buff was a year ago. It will be interesting to see what they look like as they grow. The purebred Pilgrims are wearing green bands on their legs so I can be sure which are which. My shop will sell what I think of as "everyday antiques". I have stripped some of the walls back to the original 1890 hemlock planks and bought scads of old-fashioned square nails to hang things from. I am grouping by theme: household and kitchenware, agricultural, tools, a few nice pieces of furniture, antique and vintage toys and games, ancient skates, skis, snowshoes and the like. Lots of old cast iron, lots of enamelware, bedwarmers, bellows, candlesticks, kettles... you name it, I've got it. And teddy bears. I have quite an assortment of vintage bears and I also design and handcraft my own. It will be a visually interesting shop, I think, almost like a miniature living history museum. I bought a lot of these things in France on my visits to my sister during the 12 years she lived there. They are not "fine antiques" but rather the kinds of things our ancestors would have used and enjoyed. I hope it does well... I need to start bringing regular money in to keep this place afloat. We can live here very cheaply and well, but it does take SOME money.

Hi Brenda :-) I'm glad you have some time to look through all your wedding photos and enjoy them now. So great that there are these uplifting and happy times along the way, isn't it? Your daughter's dress was so beautiful! I love that photo of the six of you. Such happy looking newlyweds! And the photo right under it, they look relaxed and content. My favorite has to be the two of DD in her socks. Sad and happy at the same time, that they are all grown up. Congratulations!

Thanks for the kind wishes, everyone :) re used bookstores . . . my library has a dangerous room where they sell their overstock; anywhere from 10 cents to $3.00. Of course, I head straight for the cooking section where I've gotten many beautiful cookbooks. (sigh, I DO have "addict" stamped across my forehead, but I don't think I'm alone here :) I once said something about the expense of entering that room, and the clerk snarled about how cheap everything was . . . but she cackled like an old hen when I told her it wasn't the BOOKS that were expensive, it was the addition of the new wing I was going to have to build to house all my cookbooks! Scott, I never even THOUGHT that the '69 BC cookbook might have been a duplicate wedding gift!!! Now I feel kind of guilty for thinking the new couple was unappreciative, but I couldn't get myself to throw that card away anyway, so it's taped inside the cover as a reminder of my lucky find :)

It's a really beautiful quilt, Kate. You did a wonderful job on it. And Jennifer is right - the quilting almost makes it look like it's pulsing, or pulsating... whichever (or maybe both).