I expanded the garden beds in the fall. Trades are done and my seed list is all organized so I know what I've got. I've got some good seed starting mix at hand and plenty more scheduled for pick up in January. For now, the "work" is thinking about all of the goodies on my seed list and falling asleep each night thinking about my garden and how it might look next year. Then in January I'll sow the hardy perennials over the course of about 10 days. In February I watch for a day with a big snow coming in followed by a week of cold temps and when I get one of those I direct sow perennial and hardy annual seed out in the hills in goatland. Not quite sure on when to do my WS hardy annuals. I guess late Feb, early March and keep an eye on when Bakemom does hers. March/April, watch the garden beds and wheel hoe them up once the soil is thawed enough to work it. Relocate some perennials from last year. On April 15th I'll start watching the extended forecast and sow tenderish annuals whenever the 10 day forecast is starting to look like freeze risk is very low. No problem if I have to end up holding off until May 1 for the tenders if the forecast looks like serious cold or frosts in late April. If it looks like April will be warm and wet I'll start plunking and running with any perennials that look like they are ready to graduate to the garden bed. If it's cold and dry, that might wait until May. Early May, watch weather for incoming rains followed by 10 days of warmish temps and direct sow tenderish annual seed out in the hills of goatland. May to June - plunk and run like a crazy lady. Start pawning off over abundant plants on the mail carrier and on the neighbor up the hill. Consider selling plants to the strangers that pull into our driveway to ask if we are a garden center that sells plants. Hoe hoe hoe the gardens a bit each day to aerate the soil and let the intentionals grow while keeping weed levels down. June - check T&M site daily for their end of season half price sale. Hoe hoe hoeing continues. June to August - run around the garden with a watering can like a crazy lady. July on - run around the garden with seed collecting containers like a crazy lady. Try to eat, can or freeze produce as fast as we can harvest it. August - start planning end of season humongous trades with other WSers. September- start checking Value Seed website daily for the day when they go from 2 pages of seeds to 13 or 14 pages. Watch the oak tree and stop hoeing before the acorns start to fall. Let garden paths get packed down so I can maybe just sweep up acorns this year instead of picking up each by hand. October - clean thousands and thousands of acorns out of the garden. Make more acorn wine and some nutty acorn bread. Wait for the massive leaf fall to start. November - ugh. Leaves leaves leaves. December - hunting season. Confine goats and cow and toss edible annuals over the fence for them to snack on. Use spare time to huddle over seed list and get ready for January. Of course, I hope to also have a bit of time in there to sit on the porch and enjoy my gardens. Lynda

We love this range.... & would buy it again! As with every new appliance, there are new things to become familiar with.... the induction cooktop is very straight-forward (and we had used an induction plate prior to buying this range, so induction wasn't a new concept to us), but the oven seems to maintain more humidity than my old one, but I have learned to use convection more since I last posted... so for things that i want a drier or crisper result, I use the convection option, or open the door a bit to let the extra moisture/steam out. I haven't found it takes noticeably longer to preheat than my old self-cleaning oven, but I see others have complained of this. The oven interior is slightly smaller than my old one, but I've gotten used to that, too, now. I recently used the bread-proof setting which worked like a charm. If I had a wish list, I would put a small hob at the front, since I use the small hobs a lot, and if you are stirring or tending the pot, it is nice not to have to reach back quite so far for an extended period of time. There weren't many choices available in my region when I bought this range. It was either this one or a GE cafe induction range. I'm sure there are more to choose from now, but I'm better with fewer choices, otherwise I'd never be able to make up my mind! Wait for the big sales if you can... stores sells these for $1000 - $1500 off the regular price, & I've seen these big appliance sales more than once each year.

Thank you everyone! SS had a tolerable weekend - little yelling and no spankings; it sounded like he was pretty much ignored again all weekend. When he told her we went to Disney she asked if he had brought her a present; when he said no she told him that if she went, she wouldn't buy him anything than either!!!! I suggested she might have been teasing; he said no - but this didn't faze him because as he pointed out, she very rarely buys him anything anyway. And she, again, tried to send him home with a kitten from the latest set from one of her half-feral, unspayed cats. So just the usual stupidity and nothing egregious by her standards. So I think this will a very good day to try to start implementing all of your suggestions. I went over the whole weekly schedule with him this morning, and which special classes he has today (art and science). I think today the big one will be the homework. I don't think his homework is usually too difficult for him and it's more to get attention. So, DH and I talked about all of your suggestions this weekend. First he had been doing his homework at the dining room table while I was usually in the living room (which connect); this will change to homework in his bedroom while I am upstairs in my office. I'm still close but not sitting right there. Secondly, I am going to check homework once, mark wrong answers, and then that's it. Since his pattern seems to be to get them all correct but then decide that he doesn't understand the last one or two, they will be marked by me and either he corrects them or he takes them to school that way. Homework is graded for being done, not necessarily correctly, so it won't affect his grades to have one or two wrong - hopefully his pride will cause him to correct them once he realizes that I am not going to help him (unless he is truly at sea on something). Mom2emall, SS will pick helping me to clean! He loves to help around the house. Of course what he does not like to clean is his own room - so that has been my counter-offer before and I think will be so again. :-) lovehadley, one would think that young children can only visit a relative in prison - but that's not the case at the one he's at. Maybe there's too many BF's or Dads who aren't on the birth certificate or something, I have no idea. I don't really think she's going to take him there because I can't imagine she'd want him there as a distraction from her visit but DH really worries about it. PO1, I have this suspicion that the schools are becoming so accustomed to parents "helping" their kids with homework that they're basically doing it for them that half the homework is designed that way anymore. SS would come home last year with regular nightly homework that involved inanities like "Collect leaves from five kinds of trees" - due the next day! Seriously?! It's a city school - half the kids are in after-school care until after dark; were they supposed to be set loose in second grade to wander the streets alone at night looking for trees in second grade? We'd manage to get things like that done but he's one kid; that's impossible if you've got three or four.

Off the tip of my tongue, I could ID twolittlefishies, A2gemini, laughablemoments and robo. I was surprised that badgergal,rhome and deedles didn't show up in my initial search, I suppose because those are kitchens I can immediately identify anytime I see them and I reference them frequently. So many others I recognize, like the guy who built his cabinets himself (not Mushcreek, this was a few years ago) but I don't know his name. Or the one who bought her (grandparents?) cottage and re-did the kitchen in white. Like many of you, I can recognize kitchens but I can't remember names which presents problems for me when I think, "someone did a reveal with a U shaped kitchen, glass cabs next to the sink filled with jadeite and a unique backsplash, gah!!!! who was that again!!!" Oh well, with enough correct details inputted into the search parameters, I can usually find what I'm looking for. ;) Good job heatheron, raee (you should feel proud, YOU did it!!), funky (I'll always remember your kitchen b/c of the glass blocks), LL, autumn (your BS looks great BTW!) Mushcreek, sounds tasty, feel free to send me the leftovers! Oh, and post a KAW pic too! I just love what you did with the space! Mgmum- that IS a good topic suggestion, stay tuned for next week! Since I'm (finally) pretty much done, I'm having a hard time coming up with topics. One day, I'll do a reveal when the entire space is clean and cleared of family clutter. ;) Perhaps I should just take localized pics, moving the clutter from one space to another to get my pics! ;). Just kidding.....only slightly.