Wow! Like Kate,I am impressed with your motivation! :) To me plants and photography go hand and hand,plants are my favorite subjects,well, except the family and pets of course!;) It sounds like you have great opportunities before you,I say seize them! Push the fear aside and go for it! You have youth on your side,you have a long time ahead of you to make mistakes and correct them. Although from reading your post,I don't think failure is likely for you. You really have it together for someone your age,you are not wasting your potential like so many others are. Your fears are reasonable,with everything going on in this world right now,there is alot to be afraid of,but just remember, there are still people out there reaching for their dreams and finding much success in doing what they love. I have confidence that you are one of those people,now it's your turn! :)

Toni, Actually... I don't remember what time of year it was lol. Sadly, our local nursery (there's only two here and the one rarely has houseplants so I don't bother driving over a half an hour to look there) that does sell houseplants, seems to sell the same things: Pothos, PLs, Spider plants... the usual stuff. I probably seem a bit weird to them considering I still come in to just look despite the plants almost always being the same kind. Ha, just about every person at the BBSs here and nursery knows me. One lady calls me the "cactus lady." I used to have a good number of cacti until a couple years ago when the apartment people hired someone to pressure wash our apartments. We didn't get a notification and I had my plants outside. Everything I had outside died because the guy used a "bleach derivative." It was kind of my word against the apartment people (hard to prove I didn't get their e-mail, they could of just said well you just deleted it and didn't heed our "warning"). Oh well. That's interesting, I've never seen any HD plants around here marked down (I just went to HD the other day too lol). I love to buy stuff on clearance, but it seems like lately by the time plants are marked down at Lowes, they're already 80% dead. I was really surprised to see this PL on clearance not half dead. I haven't seen a Flash Fire before in person in a super long time. I think the last time I saw one was when I started getting into houseplants and thought it was one of those "exotic" plants and I avoided it lol. That's been some years ago now that I think of it. Maybe almost five years now. I've read that they're super easy to care for too. I don't know much about taking care of them though (in response to not knowing what to do). Is it a "man-made" hybrid? Maybe that would explain its slowness. Sadly, I've cut down on my plant collection substantially in the last year. I got to one of those points I started feeling overwhelmed and plants were more of a job than an interest. I have no more outdoor plants (unless you want to count three cacti and a Gasteraloe that I'm going to be leaving in our South window this year)... well, I did just buy some lily "bulbs" the other day. I need something that blooms frequently. Inside, I have a Maranta, Pothos, PL, Chlorophytum "Zebra Grass" (the one that doesn't make babies), and an African Violet. :\ I purchased a couple other plants this year already but had to take them back due to issues (I wasn't convinced another African Violet I bought didn't have mites!). I've discovered the hard way only having one window/room for plants is limiting. It's great to have such a bright window, but it limits what I can put near it without burning something. I told Hubby once we get a house, it might just look like you or Purple's house... a jungle. ;) I could post some pictures for you of my plants if you'd like. I don't have anything special though lol. Planto

Sharon, I think they would have been fine even if they got rained upon by heavy rainfall. The curing process is really all about not just the external moisture drying up, but the internal moisture as well. As the internal moisture dries up somewhat, the scales on the onions move together near where the stalk emerged from the plant. As they move together, the neck of the onion shrinks down to nothing, and the moving together of the scales sort of seals the onion closed, so to speak, to keep moisture and rot from entering it through the stalk end. It is too bad you didn't get more rain. I wouldn't mind my onions getting wet at all if it meant the ground got moisture. As for the grasshoppers, they'll eat anything. Sheila, Let them dry out some. How much a heavy rainfall would hurt them would depend on how well cured they were or weren't at the time it rained. Since you know they got really wet, dry them out well before you store them in order to keep the wet areas from rotting. If they already were well-cured and the neck of the onions had thinned down and dried down, I doubt the rainfall would hurt them at all if they already are on a table, screen, etc. drying and curing. If they were in the field, I'd be worried rot could set in, and I'd get them out of the field ASAP. Dawn

This is an important thread. I'm going to add my 2 cents and bump it back up for people making choices now.. I would have made the uppers where I store my glasses and plates 13 or 13.5" deep instead of the standard 12". One inch would not make a real difference visually or in the usable counter space below, but it would provide better storage. I would have put the wall outlet for the coffee maker horizontally and very close to the counter so the cord wouldn't go up the wall. I would have put more embedded outlets in the bottoms of the cabs. I wasn't thinking about the possibility of a permanent appliance plugged into the outlet, but my DH very thoughtfully got me a CD player/radio, and now the cord goes up the middle of my BS. I would have checked that the paint was actually the exact same color as the sample before they painted the walls and installed the granite. I would have made my GC give me 24 hours to make all decisions so I could check in with GW. (I actually did this part way through.) I would have purchased everything myself so that I had receipts. I'd have watched what he was doing more carefully to avoid the mistakes he made. I would have put everything in very detailed writing. (He was kind of absent-minded.) I would have insisted that he finish the floor before the cabs went in so I wouldn't now have grout on the toe kicks. Or else made sure the grout was removed from the toe kicks. I would have bought the fiber optic switch online instead of from my appliance store, where it was more than twice as much. Also, I wouldn't have wasted money ordering the adaptor (with expedited shipping)that Waste King told me I needed to make it fit the granite but couldn't use because it didn't fit through the granite. If you get one, just drill a 3/4" hole in the granite and silicone the thing on. None of those is earth-shattering, though. Thanks to GW, it turned out pretty well.