Wow. You are emotional and totally taking what I said in the wrong way. I said "Really?", not the "Really?!?" that you quoted and it wasn't intended in a snarky, beat you down, imply you're stupid kind of way. Your original post described the situation as "standing sewage". With that description, it is hardly unreasonable to question a decision by an insurance company to want to salvage the appliances. Insurance companies are out for their interests, not yours. I wouldn't describe less than 1/16th of an inch of sewage in the kitchen as the "standing sewage" that you first described. That being said, sewage in the kitchen is a big deal. You mentioned you were planning on putting this home on the market in about six months. As you'll have to disclose this spill when you sell, make sure you document everything really well. If I were buying a house that had a raw sewage spill in the kitchen that required replacement of the floor and cabinetry, I would question why appliances weren't replaced. Hearing that they weren't replaced because the insurance company said they didn't need to be wouldn't be good enough. I'd want details such as the depth of the sewage and what steps were taken to clean the appliances where they came into contact with the sewage. This post was edited by Poohpup on Fri, Jan 4, 13 at 13:56

Larry, That is a beautiful and awesomely tall example of variegated reed grass! Maybe yours is going to get head high to the Jolly Green Giant? Jacob, If I didn't have the 8' tall deer fence all around both garden plots, the deer and I would not be friends. I think Bambi lost her mother, perhaps to a hunter. We have tons and tons of fawns this year---it seems that most does had at least twins this year and one that comes regularly has triplets. I love seeing them. If only the fawns could stay little, cute and adorable forever. People who hunt the property due west of us (it is the buffer that sits between us and the river, so they get a ton of wildlife) are getting pretty large bucks every year....say they sit on their property and wait for the bucks to come off our property. I rarely see the bucks because they feed at night, but I know they are there because every now and then late at night when we are out late, we spot them as we are arriving home. I tried for the first 8 or 10 years to have nice landscaping around the house/yard, which my husband stubbornly refuses to fence off with an 8' fence. The deer ate every single thing I planted, so I finally gave up. Now we just have trees, shrubs, trumpet creeper vines (because apparently the deer don't eat those), grass and some four o'clocks. Everything else? Hostas, hydrangeas, roses, perennial salvias, any annual flowers I planted for color, day lilies, etc......all deer chow. They even would eat the tough, prickly leaves of the hollies in drought periods, but finally the hollies are so big and old and tough that they don't bother those any more. If I ever convince Tim to surround our house and yard with a big ugly fence to keep the deer out, I will plant everything I've ever wanted around the house. I think his desire to not have a fence is much stronger than my longing for one. Where he grew up in Pennsylvania surrounded by woodland, nobody had fences so you could look out and feel like you owned hundreds of acres of forest as all the back yards and farms just sort of flowed together. So, he remains anti-fencing based on fond childhood memories from the 1960s and 1970s.....even though, if you go back there to his childhood neighborhood now, everybody has fencing and the farms and woodlands mostly are housing subdivisions with lots of fencing. I still think that someday I'll at least have a fenced back yard I can landscape. We'll see! Nancy, I am so sorry about your mom's passing. I know I don't "have to" comment, but I want to. Tim and I send you and your family our deepest and most sincere condolences. What an incredible, long life she lived, and you did everything you could to move her to the place that was best for her to live out her final stage of her life. You were a great daughter and I suspect it is because you were reared by an amazing mom. When y'all do travel to Buffalo in a few weeks, I wish you a safe journey. I do think Tiny Dude needs to travel with you so he can enchant and delight your friends and family who see his photos on Facebook and undoubtedly want to meet him in real life. Many cats travel well in a cat crate. Do they microchip cats like they do dogs? If they do, I'd get him microchipped in case he escapes from the vehicle, or at least get him a collar with a tag so you could put your cell phone number on the tag. Being close to the interstate where wrecks are frequent, we get lots of requests to watch for/search for pets that escape from a vehicle (not necessarily a wrecked vehicle---pets can bolt from a broken down vehicle when someone gets out to check and see why the engine is acting up or to change a tire or just when their owners stop at a gas station or fast food place). Sometimes you can find the pet, even weeks later, but it is hard by then to figure out which traveler passing through was searching for that pet if they aren't tagged. In my meager 20 years of living here, an early winter almost always equates to a bad winter. Or, for snow-starved southern OK, a really good winter. But, we don't get the ice storms that folks further north get in bad winters so what a lot of you might view as a bad winter, I might think of as a delightfully cold and snowy winter....if we get snow. If we don't get snow, then who cares? All winter without snow means is that we are cold and wet. I don't like being cold and wet, but I love snow. Not that I've had much snow to love. Our county does sometimes get the ice storms that bring down trees and power lines, but so far, that sort of weather never has come as far south as our house---it has made it down to maybe 3 or 4 miles north of us though. The bad thing is that if we get cold enough for ice and snow, then we get cold enough to lose Zone 8 plants that I planted here in order to see if they would survive here. They will survive here for a few years until we get an extra cold winter and snow. So, I sort of hope for snow, and sort of don't. I rarely plant Zone 8 plants here any more, although I planted a couple this past year.....which pretty much guarantees a cold winter is coming so it can wipe them out. I haven't seen a hummingbird since a week ago Thursday, but left the feeders up in case any were going to ride down on the big cold fronts. I haven't seen any, but will leave the feeders up until Monday or Tuesday, just in case, and then take them down. We ended up with the oldest granddaughter coming to stay with us for the weekend after her plans to spend the weekend with her dad fell through at the absolute last minute. We are always excited to have her come visit for a weekend, even if it wasn't planned. So, we ate dinner out with her, her mom and Chris last night, and then they headed home to get sleep before the busy work weekend with long shifts scheduled at work. We went to Wal-mart after dinner and bought everything we needed to stay home indoors and out of the rain today. We're going to carve pumpkins, which she has been dying to do....but I wanted to wait for cooler weather so the heat wouldn't ruin the Jack-o-lanterns. I think the heat isn't an issue any more. We're going to decorate Halloween Jack-o-lantern cookies (pre-baked and sold with a decorating kit). She has a long list of Halloween crafts she wants to make, including the Halloween version of a gingerbread house (we'll see about that one), so we'll work out way through that list as much as we can. I awakened at six and saw on the radar that the rain was almost here so rushed to get the dogs outdoors ahead of the rain's arrival. Whew! That was close but we made it. We're supposed to have rain all morning. How deeply into the afternoon the rain lasts is the unknown. I wish it would blow through faster, but it might be a long, rainy day here. We're ready for it and aren't planning on going out in it. I have some amaranth in the garden with huge flowering seed heads I'd hoped to have harvested and drying by now, but the relentless rain has kept me from cutting them. I keep hoping for a warm, sunny, windy day without rain so they can dry out some and then I'll cut them. I think if I cut them while they are so wet, they'll just mildew and look awful. I want the flower heads for autumn flower arrangements, but the rain may ruin that idea. When I planted the amaranth seeds in July, I wasn't expecting record rainfall in September and October. Have a lovely Saturday everyone. I hope those of you that the rain keeps missing will get some of this moisture plume left over from Sergio. The unfortunate thing is that it seems largely to be traveling over areas that already have had too much rain recently, so flash flooding and flooding likely will occur in those areas. The Red River is up and running fast and looked ugly last night, so this rain will just make that worse. I am thinking the winter wheat crop here likely is ruined. Too, too much rain even for seeds to sprout and grow, so it is more likely that if the seeds sprout, then the young plants rot. That's so unfortunate, but that is how life goes here on the southern plains. Dawn

Good Morning, Y'all. We only dropped to 28 degrees so, surprisingly, many flowering plants survived and look half-decent. When I looked at the garden around 7:45 a.m., I still could see flowers that looked fine on the Cape honeysuckle, begonias, lantanas, marigolds, some of the Texas hummingbird sage plants, mealy cup sage, autumn sage and the globe amaranth plants. The remaining herbs (rosemary, sage, chives, parsley and basil) also looked fine. Even some of the remaining zinnias looked good. Everything else probably is gone though. If the butterflies that were flitting around the garden yesterday survived the cold night, and it is likely they did, then at least they still have some flowers for nectar. Jennifer, I need to give our dogs a bath. Maybe on Monday. I have one grandchild here for the weekend, so just don't want to mess with bathing dogs while she is here. Larry, Mud has us at a standstill here as well. I'd say that I'm hoping we'll dry up in this cold, dry air, but more rain (and snow) are in the Monday forecast so I guess we'll just have more mud. You're quite a bit colder than us this morning, but then you're quite a bit further north. Our Mesonet station went to 26 but at our house the Min-Max only shows 26, and it still was at 30 when I got up at 4:40 a.m., so we really weren't at 28 degrees for more than a very few hours. A mole has tunneled across our driveway, from the neighbor's pasture to our yard. I hope he or she isn't planning on sticking around. When moles show up here, the cats usually take care of them so they normally aren't a problem for us. I kinda felt sorry for the mole having to tunnel through all the mud. Some people that I know dig up their regular potatoes with some sort of attachment they pull behind their tractors. I don't know if it is some sort of mechanical digger or what, but it merely turns over the soil and then they can easily find the potatoes. I wonder if such a thing would work with sweet potatoes? George, I bet y'all were cozy and warm with that fire going. Jen, That's a lot of dogs. Are you dog sitting? Jennifer, If you know what caused the injuries to the dog, I'd just explain it to the vet. I suppose if the vet questions why you didn't bring in the dog you could just explain you used your own holistic methods to heal the wounds? Lots of folks here that have lots of animals do a lot of the routine day-to-day doctoring of their animals (not just cows, horses and such, but farm dogs and cow dogs as well) and don't take their pets in for every injury--not if they can heal it themselves. Wherever the hair is not regrowing there probably is scar tissue. We've had that with snakebitten cats---the hair did not grow back in the snakebite area. Our cat, Shady, is 18 or 19 years old and still has a circular scar that is white flesh with no hair growing there in the same spot where he broke out in a copper-colored rash after a copperhead bit him in the abdominal/groin area when he was only a couple of years old. I just think of it as his copperhead bite scar. In the early years I did think that hair eventually would grow back there, but then it never did. Today is sunny and bright and it looks so nice outdoors, but it still is very chilly. Looks can be deceiving, I guess. The leaves on the red oaks look a brighter red this morning, so at least there's that. Everything that had yellow or golden leaves left on the trees has lost them over the last couple of days. I expect the red oaks will lose the rest of their leaves soon, although some of the red oaks have foliage that still is 95% green. It is odd how some trees are so slow to change color and lose leaves this year. There's not much consistency. The post oaks are still green too, but usually are about the last trees to lose their leaves here and some of them will hang onto their leaves all winter long before dropping them in early Spring so new leaves can emerge. We had a lot of hungry deer waiting for deer corn this morning. They remind me of cows standing near a fence waiting for the rancher to show up with cattle feed. I don't go back there and put out food for them until they've all moved far enough away from the feeding area that I feel safe. Generally, I feel safe if they've jumped the fence into the adjacent pasture and moved at least 30 to 50' away from where I feed them. Deer that are too friendly can turn dangerous in the blink of an eye, especially bucks during the rutting season, so I'm always extremely careful. I hope everyone has a good day. Dawn

Megan, I don't really know of any bird feeders that can prevent the issue of dropped seed---it isn't a problem here because our free-ranging chickens scour the ground beneath the feeders searching for dropped seed. I don't suppose you can have free-range chickens there? Actually, there are some seed trays that you can attach beneath feeders that supposedly will catch dropped seed, but I've always wondered what stops birds from kicking seeds out of the dropped seed trays? One year, I put a piece of plywood on the ground all winter beneath the feeders so I could sweep up seed that fell to the ground and landed on the plywood. That works, but it gets tedious.....although I noticed the chickens policed the plywood for me most days. When you live in an area as rural as ours, for the most part, the existing wildlife takes care of the other wildlife. I'm mostly referring to rodents....everything eats them....snakes, owls, coyotes, bobcats, ring-tailed cats, etc., so they are not as big of a problem here as one might imagine. During the day, our own cats will hunt them, especially Pumpkin who is the youngest and considers himself to be the Great Hunter, but our pet cats are locked up indoors at night, because pet cats that stay outdoors at night usually don't last long around here. Jen, I'm laughing about the Indian princess comment. It is so true. dbarron, Your connection to John Ross is fascinating. I've read quite a bit about him. He lived a very interesting life to say the least. Jennifer, You can get bogged down in that genealogy stuff, and I just do not even want to go there and get started on that so I stay away from it. I know if I ever started it, I would be obsessed with it and would drive myself crazy. It is exciting to think about plans for the 2019 garden. Rebecca, I do have some Burpee exclusives that I like to grow , like Brandy Boy tomatoes and Biker Billy peppers, so I have to order from them occasionally, but I try to only order once every 3-5 years and to just be sure I order enough seeds to last a few years. Their seed prices have gotten so ridiculous and before I order anything from them, I make sure they are the sole source for it. (I have found that sometimes a seed company will claim to be the exclusive source for a specific variety and they are not, so I always search for another source to see if they really are the sole source.) I think Jambalaya could be a good one for you, but I haven't grown it myself. It is supposed to bear early and often, so at least on paper it sounds good. Cajun Jewel is fairly dwarf as well but bigger than Baby Bubba, and Jade and Lee are two other varieties suitable for containers. Shumway's has Pink French Quarter and Red French Quarter this year and they both are dwarf, and look good in the photos online, but I haven't grown either of them yet since they are new. Last year my Stewart's Zeebest plants produced so much okra I couldn't keep up with the harvesting, so I want to grow smaller, less productive plants this year. I know that sounds crazy, but not being able to stay caught up on harvesting and using all the okra drove me nuts. Jennifer, It was cold. It felt worse, I think, because it mostly stayed cloudy. We got a little sunshine late in the day. This coming week's weather doesn't look too great. Oh well, it is winter time and I guess we just have to deal with it. To clean chicken (or any sort of bird) poop off anything, you need Poop-Off. You generally can find it in farm supply stores, feed stores, and in most pet stores in the bird section. Or, you can order it online. I'm sure Amazon.com has it. Here is what it looks like: Poop-Off It really does work, but if the poop has been there a while and has dried out long-term, you may have to go through several rounds of spraying and scrubbing to get all of it removed. Wear gloves and a respirator type mask---not because of the Poop Off spray but because of the possible pathogens that can be found in bird poop. I hate buying veggies too. That's why I try to fill up 2 or 3 deep freezes every summer, but still, they are things we don't grow or that cannot be preserved long-term (like lettuce, for example), so I just try to buy organic and still must remind myself that purchased produce never will have the freshness or quality of home-grown. Going to Central Market for produce helps---their produce is superb in quality and quantity and going through the produce section for me is like a trip to Disney. I have a good time. However, being a gardener, I'm always tell Tim when we are there that it still kills me to buy produce, even when it is theirs. We still have fresh onions from the 2018 harvest, but some of them are starting to sprout now so I don't know how much longer they'll last. I do have a ton of them already chopped and frozen. It isn't the same, I agree, but I'd rather take my own frozen produce out of the freezer and cook it in winter than buy it at a store. I have enough frozen tomatoes to last us another year, and they smell garden fresh when I thaw them out and have them cooking away in a pot on the stove so I can make soup or chili or whatever. It is about to be chili type weather again, I believe, based on our forecast. It is time to go start next week's thread for all of us to post on. I cannot decide whether to make it December week 5, or January week 1. lol lol lol. Decisions, decisions, decisions! Dawn