Ljmiller, yes, Vallejo is a warm place. But it's also a wet place in winter. It doesn't freeze often, maybe twice a winter. We do get frost more often than I thought would happen. We are zone 17 (same as San Francisco and Lisbon), but it's not quite the same. Microclimates abound here. I do tend to treat bulbs as an annual. But it's surprising how many things hang on. I have two callas and three dicentra that have been with me for five years (bought near the Keukenhof in Lisse). What survives, survives. I just can't live without my spring bulbs. fgilles - I had the airport "Rape of the Bulbs" experience myself once. I'll avoid the scene altogether by having the nursery ship them. I don't need someone patting my rear-end down at Schiphol looking for crocuses, thank you very much. Dank u wel, Jap. Ik zal erg goed slaapen, denk ik. Ik ben doodmoe omdat ik heb de hele dag in mijn tuin gewerkt. Danku ook voor het link. Forty minutes until Desperate Housewives. One hour and Forty two minutes until I hit the sheets. Ahhhhhhhhhh.

I highly second the "get one of each and see how they both feel and look in person" suggestions. The ones I loved the look of felt horrible and didn't look right held up against the cabinets at all. One of the other ones I liked alot felt great and looked great with the cabinets. It is somewhat of a combination between your tapered and your square edge...but with a fuller "foot". Check out the Atlas A826 if you want to see what we have selected. I think I have purchased about 7 different pulls to find the right one for us. Good luck!

Ancestry just had a special. Go ahead and join when you are up to it but cancel as soon as your 14th day rolls around. In the meantime, after you've made a free account somewhere is the option to sign up for the free newsletter and I think it's a different box to check for specials. Read everything on the subscribe page so you don't miss it. They don't send a lot of mail and the newsletter is very worthwhile. There will probably be a 6 month world special for $99. If you don't need access to anything outside of the U.S. I would just go with a discovery subscription. I caution you about the ancestors who have been traced back to 1400. You will HAVE to do your own detective work to be sure you have the right people. You always start with yourself and work backwards. Finding one family with joe as the husband and mary as the wife and they have a boy jim and a girl sally is not going to be good enough. You have no idea how many people have those names, even in the same place. And the farther back you go, the harder it is because the census didn't require the name of everyone in the household until 1850. Before that it was head of household and hash marks in age and sex columns. It's not as easy as it looks on TV. I do want you to keep your enthusiasm but I don't want you to think this will be solved in a year or two. My cousins have elected me chief researcher because I'm more careful than they are. They run things by me that they've found for me to fact check. I'm trying not to put my arm out of joint patting myself on the back but I want you to go into this knowing it's going to be a lot of fun work! Get yourself some three ring binders at the Salvation Army or Goodwill. Next time Staples has a case of paper on sale, buy it. Get some cheap ink from Amazon.com. Print everything that you think fits most of the parameters of your search. It's a lot easier to print it now than find it again later. Citations. If you haven't heard it yet, you will. I didn't do it when I started because I was "only" going to look up my grandmother on my dad's side. Well, let me give you the best piece of advice I can think of. When you save something, make sure you write on it where you found it and everything else so that if you were to look for it the next month you would be able to pull that sheet out and know exactly where you found that information. After I got serious I had to go back and do it all over again. Not fun! Second thing, and you could do this now, subscribe to some genealogy blogs. There are so many you will find a few you like. You probably won't understand what they're talking about until you do some research yourself but in a short while you will. And they know where the other resources are. Ancestry has a youtube channel full of tutorials. Go there and watch a few. Have your eyes glazed over? It happens to everyone I talk to!!

Can you compare the coil counts on the mattresses you are considering? It seems to me that there are no 'firm' mattresses sold today. What's called extra firm is a little firmer than 'medium' and so on down the line. I guess that is because people lie down on a truly 'firm' mattress in a store and yelp that it is too hard! Hotels buy rather soft-top mattresses because that's what guests like -- for a short stay. They also replace them after two or three years. Any mattress with a foam 'topper' will feel softer -- better for side sleepers. However, the 'topper' attached to the mattress will deteriorate over time. An option would be to get a firmer mattress and buy a foam topper you can discard/replace.