Beth, I forgot about freeze dance! You're right-- kids love it! I used to use Tae Bo . . .back when I had a VCR, I think (haha!). That is a good one, because it doesn't talk about being "sexy," I think . . .that's my big hesitation of doing workouts (other than things like yoga) w/the kids, because I don't like them hearing the message of weight loss, being sexy. fat = bad, etc. Outside, I was all set to buy them for home use-- went shopping with a friend who has always exercised in so many ways (gym, home, kayaking, caving, etc.) and she talked me out of them. She said I should just stick to weights. But, of course, traveling is a good reason, so I will get them. I have seen the GoFit brand-- good to know it lasts!! Bonnie, yay!!! That is awesome that you got yourself back on track. That is what counts. It's weird how we "think" not exercising, not eating how we wants. etc. is going to be better (because it seems like more fun!) but then we really do feel worse. RE: the step-- how is that on knees? More motivation . . . Have a great Memorial Day weekend, everyone!

Aw, mobuddy, thank you! I feel pretty happy these days, my life has never been better. I've got my share of neurotic anxiety, but far less of the latter than in years past. I do love my little house, I always have, and now it's sooooo much better than it ever was before! blfenton - good idea. Thank you. I just put a gray and a brown Sharpie on my Amazon wish list. They were really small scratches, but still. When my counter arrived, I noticed a very small scratch/chip near the sink. The install guy used a Sharpie on it, and the flaw pretty much disappeared. Let me know if you have Living Room advice over on Home Decorating.

We have those "master meters" that cover a whole block (or so - I haven't used one yet). Thankful that I have both the health and the energy to be able to park, free, blocks away from several of my destinations. Which includes the main city library, where I can get my parking chit cleared for two hours free, but I like to save them that expense, so they can put my contributed dollars to more important use. I'm thankful, too, that my cash gift to that library was credited before the end of the year, so helpful to reduce the income tax, and some mailed ones weren't postmarked till Jan. 2, so not useful for 2018, and I need them, as I had some unexpected income last year and need every credit I can dig up. Should have taken some charitable letters into the post office on Dec. 31 to get 'em stamped! (Or, just possibly, written cheques and mailed 'em earlier, e.g. before Christmas?) Or, even better, made the gifts long enough before Christmas that the agencies could have helped needy families around Christmas? The winter is an especially difficult time for the homeless ones in this cold area. ole joyful

Farmgardener, I am so sorry about your tomato plants. Being rural with lots of herbicide-loving people around, we get drift every year and, yes, it is heart-breaking and frustrating beyond measure. Some years we get it once or twice and other years we get it 5 or 6 times a year. So far this year, I think we've had it only twice, and only tomato plants were affected. One year they got virtually all our okra and watermelon plants, a lot of flowers and some of the tomatoes. I grow peppers near my tomatoes and they rarely get damaged. I don't know if it just luck on the part of the pepper plants or what, but they always come through it in much better condition than the tomato plants do.For years and years it seemed like we only got Round-up Drift because the people nearest us were using Round-up along their fencelines to control weeds. After about 5 or 6 years of that (and I don't know why), everything abruptly changed (maybe they were hiring someone new to spray) and the use of Grazon-type herbicides exploded here and everyone began using that crap and now we seldom see Round-up damage, but we get broadleaf herbicide damage several times a year. It is heartbreaking, and I now raise about a dozen tomato plants a year in large containers that I have tried to strategically place where no drift can reach them. They still were damaged last year, but so far this year, the tomato plants in containers haven't been hit like the ones in the garden have. There's just a couple of hundred feet between them. Jennifer & HU, The survival garden looks great! Y'all are going to be getting some great harvests out of that. Y'all know that you can grow lettuce indoors on the same light shelves where you raised seedlings, right? Or microgreens. Or sprouts. With all the heat we have here, that's about the best option for fresh, home-grown summertime salad greens. HJ, Lilies are fascinating and we grow more and more of them every year because our granddaughter, Lillie, believes we should. : ) I am amazed at how much further ahead were here this year with the blooms of the lilies, but perhaps it is because ours bloomed really early considering far south we are. They finished blooming here about a month ago. I think the warm of days in the 90s in late March or early April set them off early, and once we returned to cooler weather, it didn't matter---they already were set to bloom early. We have them in a lot of different colors, including white, pink, red, yellow and peach, and I have to grow them either in containers or in tall, hardware cloth-lined beds because voles will come out of the woods and into the garden and eat all the lily bulbs if the bulbs are not well-protected. There are not many types of bulbs that voles won't eat (mostly allium, garlic and daffodil) so I'm limited in what I can plant. Well, also crinum lilies never have been bothered, and neither have cannas, and daylilies. I think they can and sometimes do eat daylilies but just haven't done it in recent years. Nancy, I've always gardened for the pollinators as well as for us, but we have ample sunny space, plus we never wiped out the native plants that existed when we bought our land, so that made a huge difference. All I had to do was plant to supplement what was here to begin with. In our first handful of years here, the old farmer crowd gave me hell for growing "weeds" (i.e. herbs and flowers) in my garden, telling me that Tim and I couldn't eat those. I just had to point out that the pollinators could and would eat them. Those guys meant well, but were trying to turn me into a row farmer with monoculture rows of veggies and no herbs and flowers and I wanted to be a raised bed gardener with all of it mixed together. So, in that sense I won....but it was, of course, the pollinators who won. Later on, I had more of a monoculture row garden in the back garden after we built it in 2012, but then the voles are a terrible plague back there, so that area is not utilized as much as I'd like---it depends on how much I want to fight the voles. The girls and I spend endless hours outdoors when they are here, and they love the butterflies and moths as much as I do, so much so that they hate to see bad caterpillars, like army worms, put to death. Now, I'm trying to teach them not to be afraid of the seemingly dozens of kinds of bees we have here, while also teaching them to respect the hornets and wasps and give those guys a wide berth. Yesterday when the kids were out of the pool for a snack break, a butterfly came and sat on Lillie for about a 15 minutes and she was so mesmerized by it. It sat on her bare skin part of the time and on her neon bright bathing suit the rest of the time and was in no hurry to fly away. Jennifer, I think that if the only flowers we had were the front wildflower meadow, the pollinators still would be deliriously happy, particularly this year. Between the overseeding of that area with a wildflower mix from Wildseed Farms last spring and the abundant moisture, we have the best mix of wildflowers in there that we've ever had. It is starting to drive Tim crazy---usually he can mow the wildflower meadow down after the Spring wildflowers have gone to seed and before the summer wildflowers are coming on strong but this year the spring flowers lingered a bit longer than usual and the summer wildflowers started up already, so his need to control the meadow by mowing is dead in the water, and the wildflowers and I are delighted. He had to content himself with mowing only the yard and the back pasture yesterday, where there were not nearly so many wildflowers this spring, perhaps because of drainage issues back there and all the standing water. Perhaps I need to overseed that area back there with wildflowers next fall. Would that be too diabolical? It might interfere with him mowing in that area if we got a better stand of spring wildflowers back there. I would think just the acre around the house would give him enough mowing to keep him happy, but he could be happy mowing all day long. He starts twitching and practically breaking out in a rash when I discuss our plans to replace lawn around our house with hardscaping and raised beds. He is afraid I won't leave enough for him to mow, and I keep telling him that having less to mow as we age will be a blessing and to just wait and see. Nancy, We live in what is usually a dry grassland area, so I've never wanted a weed torch. I think they can work for people in some situations, but am not convinced I am one of those people. Maybe it is because we spend so much time fighting grassfires in our county in the summer, winter and autumn...and sometimes early spring in the dry years. We also don't have stone pathways to maintain and I can see where one would come in handy there. Marleigh, You've got to kill whatever you've got to kill to keep your garden going. Over the years I've found I have to kill less and less because all the beneficial creatures take care of a lot of it for me. There is a huge difference in wet years like we've had in 2015-2020 so far, and the dry years that mostly plagued us from 1998 when we still were clearing our land prior to building the house all the way through 2014. In the dry years, the pest level rises along with the drought and I spend far too much time and effort on killing excess damaging pests. The way I grew up was that you planted about four times as much as you wanted/needed so that the wild critters could have what they wanted and you still had enough left for yourself, and that seems about right here in OK. The only area where planting extra for the wild things doesn't work is with fruit---they want it all, no matter what, and you have to fight them so hard for every bit of fruit you grow. I have gotten to where I grow less and less fruit as the years go on because I get so tired of the endless fruit wars with the wild things. Our cats have become much more indoor cats than outdoor cats over the years. As they age, most of them have seemed content to sleep in the sunroom, where the sunshine and views of the great outdoors are endless, and now are happy most days just to go out for a quick hour or two and then come back indoors. They don't bother wild birds much because I trained them (with a water gun....everyone needs one Super Soaker to blast cats away from little wild birds) to leave the wild birds alone. Now, when I am out and the cats have done the brief tour outdoors and want to come in, they come and find me and meow for me to come up to the house and let them come inside. This year's perpetually wet, puddled ground probably has contributed to that a lot. Tim and I joke that our cats have become too conditioned to the great indoors---dry "ground", no snakes or annoying biting insects, no bobcats or coyotes chasing them around, and perfect climate control so they're never too hot or too cold. There's a lot of truth in that though. Even Pumpkin has become very much an indoor cat even though he's not as old as they others. When our cats are indoors and the coast is clear, the feral cats, neighborhood barn cats, etc, come over to visit and hang out. As long as I grow catnip, we'll never be cat free. We were outdoors more than we were indoors yesterday and the weather was just perfect---clear, sunny skies, not too much wind, and neither too hot nor too cold. I think most of this week will be that way, but our highs are moving into the 90s by the end of the week, so it looks like June weather is arriving right on time. I was looking forward to mealtimes as a way to use up a lot of tomatoes---BLTs for lunch, tomatoes on hamburgers at dinner time, chopped up in salads, etc. but then I harvested more tomatoes and brought in just as many newly harvested ones as we had used up in our meals so the pile of tomatoes on the counter is the same. I haven't even harvested the cherry tomatoes yet this weekend, but I'm going to do that today. You know that the tomato harvest is going well when we're looking at the tomatoes on the counter and hoping we can hurry up and use them up before I bring in more. lol. That's a change from looking at them longingly on the plants and wishing they would hurry up and ripen. We're probably about to get to the point of needing to make salsa in the next couple of weeks just to stay caught up on the harvest. The tomato plants in pots are doing great, and the ones in the ground that were planted much later because of the nonstop rain are coming along pretty well. Mosquitoes are a huge issue now, and I am sure that will continue for weeks until we get good and dry. It is the end of May and we all survived it, with a lot less weather disruption than we have some years. Well, the heavy pounding from the rainfall was disruptive, and so was the hail when and where it fell, but it seemed like we had a lot fewer tornadoes statewide than usual. The nights still feel kind of cool to me for this late in Spring, but I bet that's going to change in June. Dawn