Yours sounds good, I've never tried Rösti with cheese, but I am sure I would like it. I like this one and make it often. I like the crunchy, nuttiness of the wild rice. Wild Rice Potato Rösti 1/2c wild rice, cooked 2lb potatoes, cooked and peeled 3T walnut oil 1tsp yellow mustard seeds 1 onion coarsely grated and drained 2T fresh thyme Salt & pepper Coarsely grate cooked potatoes into large bowl. Add cooked rice. Heat 2T oil in large non-stick frying pan. Add mustard seeds, when seeds begin to "pop" add onion, cook gently for 5 minutes or until soft. Add onions to potatoes & rice, add thyme and mix thoroughly. Season with salt & pepper. Heat remaining oil in pan. Add potato mixture, press down well and cook for about 10 minutes or until golden on bottom. Cove pan with plate and flip over, slide rosti back into frying pan and cook other side 10 minutes more, or until golden. Cut in wedges and serve. Linda

I finished Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates over my "girls escape to the mountains" weekend. I enjoyed it very much - very creative, interesting twists, and the historical tie-ins were well done, I thought. During this "escape" weekend, my friends and I hiked through some snow/slush, down to spring wildflowers, then re-entered summer by heading further "down the hill" a ways, into the little goldrush town of Murphys - where, to our delight, we found a "used and new" bookstore! It was even air-conditioned - critical, since it was 103F. All 3 of us picked up various biographies - all of our DDs need to read bios for "summer reading" before high school starts. I found several good buys, including some early editions of some favorite childhood books, which, of course, I had to sit down and read immediately upon our return. I also picked up a Jonathan Stroud (of the Bartimeus trilogy ) called Buried Fire. It concerns an ancient dragon sleeping, and then waking deep below a hillside next to a small English town, and the effects on some local boys. I'm sure glad I read this after we had our Mid-summer fest! I have quite a TBR list and stack, but a friend just loaned me Dan Simmons Olympus, sequel to Ilium. So of course, I have to re-read the latter to read the former. Not that I mind - it's great the second time around, too! take care, litlbit

On Sunday I finished The Innocent Man, John Grisham's non-fiction account of two men who were wrongly convicted of murder in Oklahoma. One of the men spent years on death row before being released. It is not a happy book, to say the least, but it is very well researched and for the most part well written. The book was a stark reminder to me of why I always wanted to study and work in criminal law and also of why I dropped out of law school because I realized I could not emotionally deal with criminal law. One personally interesting aspect to me was that I was on a business trip to Oklahoma City and had been upgraded to a first class seat (one of several times that the very nice former airline TWA upgraded me for no apparent reason except that first class was where I was meant to be!). Anyway, I was seated directly behind Barry Scheck, the lawyer who was involved in the O. J. Simpson case (a bad thing) and who runs the Innocence Project (a good thing). When I stood up to leave the plane I saw that he had two large notebooks, each with a man's name on it. A couple of days later he was on the Today show because he had just helped to free two men who had been wrongly convicted of murder and their names were the names I had seen on the notebooks. They are the same two men John Grisham has written about in this book, although I didn't realize it when I first started reading.

Generally speaking the bedroom you are going to get is contemporary and transitional and the things that are going to look most at home are contemporary transitional things. What might not look like a cliche in your inspiration picture would probably look like a cliche in the second picture. The problem with fishing net decoration is that it doesn't address what the built structure looks like most of the time. You could not turn picture two into picture one just buy decorating it the same way and that's how people fall into the cliche trap, they try to do that. I think things can be built out-of-region with some degree of success. People build Colonial Revival all over the country and it looks okay except in the most unsuited climates. And there is a lot of Spanish Revival on the East coast because it had a brief popularity in the 1920s. There is an 1870s(?) Italianate Brownstone in Philadelphia, that is famous for it's Spanish Revival Facade, and it's heightened when you walk into the first floor and it's a "Spanish Courtyard Patio" complete with fountain and Juliet balcony. It's a ridiculous cliche but it's so complete that it works. By the third floor you're back in an Italianate but they at least reconfigured the main public rooms.