The text is pale gray, the tiny headings that say 'Garden Forum Garden Topics Garden Junk' that you might use to navigate are pale green. You probably missed that altogether, it is so hard to see. The improvements are that you don't have to use code any more to insert a photo or make your type bold. There is a tiny line at the bottom of this page where you should be able to switch off the emails -- tiny green letters: Click to switch off notifications. We can go or we can stay.

I just found your blog while doing my initial research on pool builder (found it in your Yelp review). I loved reading about your experience and seeing the pics along the way! Thank you so much for the wonderful insight. I have to say that your pool installation has made me so excited to pull the trigger on our own, and now when I need a break at work, I go to your blog -- my new "Happy Place".

Steph, I hope you are recovering well from your surgeries and that they went well for you. Eld, did I know you by another name? That was another thing that happened when Houzz took over - we did not know who we were talking to anymore! Steph, is MObound somebody I know by a different name, too? Here is the big bathroom done. I think you saw it already, Steph.Wheelchair accessible vanity I designed with pull-out storage in the left leg, a drawer, and shelf storage for the toilet area in the right leg. Wheelchair accessible shower. We took 8 to 12 inches from the bedroom nest door to get it this wide. Wood shelves where the old med cab was, and two new med cabs that hold all the stuff for grooming. The other end of the shower and the new cupboard. Because we moved the shower wall, the bedroom closet that sits behind the new cupboard became extra deep. So I stole some back to make a cupboard. The closet now has 12" deep shelves above the cupboard and behind the clothes hanging rods. I do upper and lower rods in my closets. We widened the bathroom door and three bedroom doors to 36", so two walls in the hall had to be moved to allow this. Those pictures come later, first I have ones of our bedroom. It still had wallpaper from the previous owners (blue striped at bottom, floral band at chair rail height, with textured white paper at top) and ratty blue carpet. Jim took that up, screwed the floor to stop squeaks, leveled the floor, and laid down this nice off-white cork for me. They stripped the wallpaper, fixed the walls, and painted. I had them install these lights over our closets so we could see our clothes better. The sconces are ceramic and painted with the trim paint. The lights are LED. The room door here got moved when widened. See the little jog-outs from the other two walls at the ends of the diagonal walls? The old walls came straight out from there, so that it formed a short wall going from the wall on the right, It met another short wall that started at the other end of the diagonal wall and came straight at us. The room door was on the side that faced the wall on the left of the picture. I had a small bookcase on the wall that would have faced us. So a big triangle about 3 ft x 3 ft was added to the interior of our bedroom This rug was one I bought for my "bachelorette" living room when I finished college at age 34, after being divorced. I had a pretty floral chintz sofa, rose swivel rocker and blue and cream plaid chair and this rug tied it all together. The sofa got old and worn and the rug got cleaned and put away for 15 years. I have always planned to bring it up from the basement and use it here, if we ever got our bedroom done. It fits well sideways and our bed sits on it under these windows. The bedroom that got made smaller is next to ours and it is now a violet color called "Plum's the Word" I am in the midst of setting that room up as my exercise and craft room. Here is part of that room when it was serving as our bedroom during renovations. This room also got the cork flooring.Here is a photo showing the new cork flooring up against the older linoleum that is in the rest of the house. Here are the doors! from left to right, bathroom pocket door, Plum Room door, our bedroom door, and linen closet door. We can't see the smallest bedroom's door that is to the left of the bathroom. That is a new light fixture. And finally, we have the bathroom door on the right, the smallest bedroom door in front of us, and the hall to the foyer. This bedroom lost a 3 ft x 3 ft triangle of space when the door got widened, This wall used to be perpendicular to the bathroom next to it. See the corner? Yes, when you enter my house, you leave the foyer and you either turn right to go toward the kitchen and family room, or you end up in the bedrooms. I can stand next to my bed and see the front door, now! There is a living room off the foyer that serves us as Bill's office/music room/library. So, these are the last of the renovations. Other than having a shed built, there is nothing left to do to my house!

Woodnymph, re Middlemarch: She [your friend] claims it is the greatest classic in the English language, and an early feminist work. Do you agree with my friend about "Middlemarch"? Your friend agrees with Virginia Woolf who famously said of George Eliot's magnum opus that it is "one of the few English books written for grown-up people." AS Byatt, another writer who admires Eliot, says "it's one of the greatest novels of all." It has undoubtedly been interpreted as an early feminist work -- at least it was later adopted by feminists who have chosen to see the feminist angle as Eliot's main intent. I don't necessarily agree with your friend or Woolf or Byatt or the legions of readers who subscribe to the feminist interpretation. While it seems to be true that Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) chafed under the strictures on women during the Victorian era, there is also good evidence that her political and religious stances were just as important to her in her writing. Mary, I've had problems with everything I've tried to read by Eliot. Her style is didactic. She also tended to get preachy, although she eventually disavowed formal religion. Many readers during the nineteenth century had a higher tolerance for slow development of story/plot, minutiae, and flowery phrasing than many readers have today -- I'm one of them. To me Middlemarch is a slow soap opera. Another problem I have with Eliot's style is it ignores the writing dictum of "show, don't tell." For instance, Eliot tells her readers (in third person) that her character Dorothea Brooke is a paragon -- over and over she reminds us readers, lest we forget -- but I don't think she shows us very often how or why Dorothea is an exemplar. Eliot makes similar pronouncements about many of her other characters. Middlemarch is long and it has so many characters that I have a hard time remembering most of them. I suppose it might be a worthy book to study -- taking notes, drawing up lineage charts, putting certain aspects of the development of 19th century British politics, cultural mores, and the Industrial Revolution in rough chronology. I didn't find, however, that Eliot's style (by itself) made these things clear enough. It didn't entertain me enough to help me find those subjects memorable, either. Of course, it's a matter of an individual reader's taste and mood. I don't particularly want to be told that a work is classic, when I want to make up my own mind about it.