The bloom opened. Pretty flower: loosely quartered (similar to Comte de Chambord), lightly fragrant, and clear lilac*. Good, strong stem. The color and fragance was disappointing but this is a first year own root plant. I'll give it another year or two for the plant to mature before making a final judgment. The plant itself is still tiny, but bigger than four other own roots in the same pot ghetto. Only the Bourbon DUEL DE DR. REYNAUD is bigger, and it is a climber. It is also one of the few babies that has foliage. I don't spray the roses in my pot ghetto because I want to be able to accurately access their black spot resistance before planting. You'd be surprised at how many of the babies never make it into the beds. * I define lilac as lavender with a noticeable pink undertone.

"Bad time to have a less than desirable house in a less than prime location..." Or even a nice house in a less than prime location! We've had two offers but one of them turned out to be pretty much a joke, and the other has a sales contingency with absolutely no sign of their house selling anytime soon. Up until that offer put a contingency tag on our listing and after we started mandating drive-bys before making appointments, we had pretty good traffic through the house, but it's dropped off drastically to maybe one a week instead of six or seven a week, sometimes two or three a day. What's a "5-4-doors"? A lot of what's in our (low) price range is split level; I think they're very unattractive so I would only consider it as a last resort. It would have to be a VERY good neighborhood! "Yup, I must agree about sellers being in denial & keep listing higher than 2005, rather than lower." We're priced at almost $50,000 less than our house was appraised for by an independent appraiser in 2005. Ouch. (Thank goodness we didn't take the full cash-out when we refinanced, like the bank was pressuring us to.) But, there's a repo across the road dragging us down; it has "issues" and is even closer to the highway than we are, but it is larger by 500sf, has one more bathroom than ours, and is $14k less. We simply can't afford to drop our price commensurately. And yeah, the keeping-the-house-perfect is a real drag... we went out yesterday and I said to hell with it, left the bed unmade and dishes in the sink. I just didn't care anymore right then. I have to go get vacuum cleaner bags today, we've gone through an entire package of them since Memorial Day!

I started driving a Ferguson 2-plow tractor when I was 13 yr old using it to plow fields in preparation for spring planting. One yr later, I was driving and maintaining our 2-door Model A Ford sedan. I had a provisional farm labor learner's permit and got full license by age 16. I also drove a John Deere Model B tractor for 2 seasons for another farmer. Most of my early driving was on dirt or gravel roads. My Junior yr of high school, I was working in a filling station for 3 hours after school and bought myself a 4-dr Model A. I was the head Grease Monkey. While working the filling station, I drove a variety of customer's cars when delivery was required. The most interesting of these was a 1950 Packard Hearse with an automatic transmission that took forever to get the vehicle rolling. After it passed 15 mph, the engine began to have more effect of accelerating the vehicle. The culprit was the fluid coupling in the drive line.

I wanted to come back and give an update on my Honda CRV 2018. My Collision Mitigation System (CMS) suddenly and without warning activated. I was driving on the interstate at about 65 mph in the left lane when the brakes went to the floor and we decelerated to 30 mph in seconds before the brakes released. I was terrified and truly lucky the cars behind me were able to slow or get out of the way. Honda's only answer was, "this has happened with a few cars, and we don't see anything in your computer, but we could disconnect your CMS." This is not an answer. I am waiting now for an answer from Honda of North America. I did not pay for the more expensive model with (CMS) just to turn it off and I don't want to be killed or cause anyone else to be injured or killed. Just a warning about Honda's. I will post a separate thread with the resolution of this issue. Hopefully Honda will fix the issue and do the safe and correct thing.