Thyme- The Hidcote lavender has worked really well. Great fragrance, very winter hardy and keeps the deer away from the rest of the garden. Lavender, salvia, cosmos, alyssum, they all seem to be keeping the deer away. Also, the lilacs, butterfly bushes and blueberries have kept them out of the fairy garden...at least, so far. Now, I just need to find some garlic to get rid of the aphids that have suddenly appeared on my roses. I have ladybugs, but they're all in the kitchen garden on the weeds I'm trying to get rid of this weekend. Maybe I can move the ladybugs up to the front garden, by shaking them off the weeds and onto the roses :) I'm not saying lavender would keep out hungry deer, just that these deer don't like the smell...and they're not hungry deer, just curious. Very cute, though. Two moms and three babies (who still have their spots) that travel back and forth, along the creek, between our place and a few other places down the road.

GreenDesigns, This was the kitchen design that I uploaded over in the Building a Home sub-forum back on Jan.31 as part of my first draft. Renovator8 made a useful comment - "A double loaded work space is a counter across from another counter that allows a cook to turn and use either surface quickly with a minimum of steps involved. This ability is essential not only for productivity but in order to avoid a disaster. Unnecessary walking in a kitchen should be avoided even if you are alone." His comment has steered me away from G-kitchens precisely because they all seem to have a lot of space in the middle and have the counters on the perimeter, meaning a lot of walking through empty space to get from A to B. Your design, while avoiding the mistakes on appliance placement that I made with my G-kitchen produces the same outcome that Renovator8 was warning about. Doesn't it? You guys are both pros so I'm not really in a position to see the nuance that makes your plan work but which sets off warning bells when I have a lot of open space in the kitchen. Lisa_a, I hope you won't mind some gentle critique. . . . It's precisely because of criticisms that everyone is kind enough to offer than I keep coming back and subjecting you all to more long-winded posts filled with new variations on plans. I am taking the criticisms to heart and they do percolate in my mind as I'm reviewing the problems with the plans, so please offer gentle and not so gentle criticisms. It's all good food for thought. For instance, the majority of people aren't keen on a powder room right next to the front entry. Don't I know, I've tried to avoid that but it's there because of a series of trade-offs. I have a copy of every single iteration that I've created on this plan so if I ever want to post a case-study on "The Evolution Of A House Design" I could demonstrate how each problem discovered shifted the plan to a new look and then the next problem again shifted the plan and so on. Here was the very first plan which had the master on the first floor and before I realized that I had way more space on the 2nd that I had absolutely no idea what to do with, which pushed me towards a smaller first with 2 bedrooms on the 2nd. Note where the powder room was. Note the lack of "birds on a wire seating" note the appliance placement. What I've been struggling with is that the first floor has 3 principal rooms, LR, DR, KI, and then I need to fit in a powder room, stairs, elevator, mudroom and central fireplace. There are only so many design options one can play with when you have 3 rooms and also want to maximize southern exposure. So I understand the drawback of placing the powder room right at the front, but because I wanted a wide-spanning gable roof on the front, I needed some space opposite the centered doorway to counterbalance the living room. Besides, the 2nd floor cantilevers out over the porch behind the powder room, so absent the powder room that porch would be very deep. I thought of putting the powder room next to the basement stairs, in the back of the house, next to the garage, but that would create the problems I mentioned above. I like your kitchen design. I like the big island. I like the appliance placement. However, ever since LWO made his comment about "birds on a wire" I realized that I agree with that viewpoint. I tried to avoid that situation in my very first plan and now that I've played around with banquet seating I think I want to stick with that instead of island seating. To refer back to what I mentioned much earlier about all sorts of hell breaking loose when I played around with the walls, your moving of the "fridge wall" now creates all sorts of misery on the 2nd floor and especially at the roof level for that wall was a load bearing wall essential for roof support, but there was no way for you to know that. I'm going to keep your kitchen design in mind as I once again mull over starting with a blank slate for the whole house because I'm finding that if I pull on one end of the string somewhere then matters on the other end of the string start to unravel. As for the back deck, that was there principally as a wood storage location. The main entertainment and relaxation would be on a tiered stone backyard - I'm really dealing with a 3 dimensional area back there, so it will be very engaging visually, with stairs, slopes, tiers, terraces, etc. Kind of like this but much more involved. I understand your reason for making the mudroom door be part of the back hall but now I lose the airlock quality of the mudroom. I'm up in the mountains near a major ski resort, so I'm dealing with snow and cold and I'm really wanting to isolate the heat loss from opening doors. As for the exercise bike, it had to be next to a counter so that the grain mill and motor have a place to be stationed. I'm not really looking forward to balancing the grain mill in my hand as I peddle the bike. I joke, but I really am looking forward to the ability to get a morning "ride" in when it's miserable outside and do double duty by milling fresh flour for the day. Of course this isn't an iron-clad must have but I'm going to be living in the house solo far more intensively than I will be using the house for entertaining, so I can always move the bike temporarily when it would be unsightly to guests. Putting the door there and removing the cabinet works for guests in the house scenarios, but for a single guy living alone it doesn't give me an advantage. The challenge I'm facing is that, unlike with a game of poker in which many different hands are possible, I'm playing with a deck of cards that only has 3-4 cards, say, so the limited combinations of rooms and purposes is really cramping me up. I do like your big island, principally because I like the surface area it gives me to work with. I'm going to keep the short and squat idea in mind rather than the long and narrow that I was working with.

Interesting subject. I suspect that correct culture and the genetics that are bred into the cross may have a big influence on bud and flower production, and also blossom numbers....especially the number of flowers that will open all at once, and how long open blossoms stay on the plant. It seems that Adenium breeders (I'm just guessing here) release plants for sale that are NOT perfected, and that would be culled under other circumstances due to bad genetics. I think if blossoms looks different, have novel, or new colors, have double/triple petal count, etc...in short, any plants that will sell, get released by major breeders. Nowhere have I ever read, or recall, on any Adenium breeder's sites, any Adenium forums, noted by any seller, that Adeniums were specifically bred for bud/flower count, flower substance, bud retention, for disease/insect/rot resistance, fertile blossoms...etc. I recall not one thread, at least I can't find them, that discuss the virtues of any particular cross or the progeny, resulting from that selected cross. Dimmitt comes close, with his breeding lines, but where are the Dimmitt plants, and where do you buy one? Ko's seeds, and seeds from other noted breeders might produce some superior flowers, but what about the other important aspects of plant genetics that were mentioned above? It seems that when it comes to Adeniums, flowers are the goal, and little else matters. Are we just growing some inferior mongrels that have pretty flowers, and poetic names? Just asking. Perhaps all the dogs, inferior plants, do in fact, go into the Adenium compost piles, before any selected and named Adenium hit the open market....but I don't know for sure if we are buying and growing the best of the bunch. My cynical guess is that motives for profit, allow some lousy plants, but, with nice flowers, to be released. Frank NYC/7b

Another vote for The Wire as best TV show ever, and we have rewatched that, with our DD, when she was in 8th grade or so, but we don’t watch many series, although if we run out of options, I would rewatch The Americans and when I’m old and fully retired, I’d like to watch Better Call Saul and then Breaking Bad so I can compare and contrast what they got right in the prequel. We also rewatched a few seasons of Hill Street Blues and WKRP (I happened on the DVDs in a thrift shop) and they held up remarkably well, considering they are, ahh, of a certain vintage. Growing up reruns were on daily, and I’ve seen every epidose of MASH, Hogan’s Heros, Cheers, Beverly Hillbillies and the like a 100 times over, that’s what happens when the TV was always on, not something I’ve ever wanted to replicate, that’s why I’m a ”one and done” for the most part (The Wire being the notable exception).