I dreamed for years regarding my strawberry plant crawling into my window, it was sending out runners, I now have French Strawberry plants. Okay Jo Jo if you want send the picture with the seed and plant to me directly to my email address. I will ask John Trager, Now I really want to know. Guessing doesn't count. Tell him where it was found, in what state and city you purchasedi, and Nursery. I can't wait to find out. It not growing like a vine to me, it is growing too straight.The leaves do remind me a plants that I do have, and I just saw the seeds for the first time Mon. so perhaps? Norma He's pretty good at this an very accurate.

Hoi An looks fascinating; I wish we had gone there. I bought mine in Saigon (oops, HCMC). You should have seen me pantomiming what I wanted to the hawkers. I'm sure I was amusing. But once I found people selling kitchenwares, a woman understood exactly what I meant (even though I sort of had it sideways) and went rummaging through a mountain of stuff -- I was afraid of an avalanche -- and pulled out a bundle of them tied together. I knew that was it; your description of a leaf-shape was perfect. It seems to be called a "dao bao." Here is a link that might be useful: article with a picture of dao baos

We are getting a GE AG Cafe range ($2500) and I would have been perfectly happy with a GE or Frigidaire slide-in ($1600), but DH is "splurging" on the Cafe. We want a panel-ready DW, so that's going to be about ~$1000, but it will probably be a KitchenAid or something. We are looking at a few different standard depth SxS frigs in the $1500-$1800 range, all very ordinary. We are leaving shelf space for a GE convection MW ($500), but may make do with our $120 Sharp for awhile longer. Our Faber Cristal hood ($550) is Italian (ooh-la-la) so I'm not sure if that's regular or not, but fairly inexpensive. Altogether that's about 6K - less if we can make some smart buys - and I can't say I feel like I'm doing without. All you have to do is look at the Sears flyer every week to see what most people can afford. DH and I briefly toyed with the idea of a Lacanche range because they're so darn beautiful. The more we talked about what else we could do with that $$$ (mostly outfit the kids gameroom that is part of this addition), the less attractive the Lacanche looked to us. We also would have felt a little silly, because we're really just "regular" cooks. Our friends who are "good" cooks all manage on ranges less expensive than the Cafe. If we really step up the cooking when we retire 20 years from now, we may revisit that beautiful Lacanche though.

This: "It may not be the most attractive pantry out there, but it’s functional. It doesn’t need to look like a magazine photo." So smart! People get hung up on the Pinterest-worthy "organization" pictures, but more of those aren't -really- organized; they're pretty-fied. I'm so glad fo ryou, that you're able to focus on the functionality. Lazy_gardens highlighted one of my own main themes: too much space between shelves. Brilliant solution, your shoe shelves! And this: "We became empty-nesters and I had not kept pace with the decreasing demand. My daughter was a late-night impulse baker and I’d kept things on hand for her." I think this happens to us all. That we have one paradigm, and then when life changes for us, we are slow to update. You've gotten a big head start on redefining your storage. I'm in admiration of this: "The only place where I retained the stacking bins was on the shallow wall-mounted shelves. They were already working for what I used them for" Good for you, for recognizing something that's working, and not tossing it out just because.