Jane. beautiful table! It looks so elegant. I love the branches with the lights. I'm filing that idea awaay in my little brain to try next year. Hope you and DH and your Dad are on the mend. This weather is bad enough without being physically sick too. Yacher, hope youre feeling better tonight too. On TV this morn, I heard them say that it was 54 days till spring. I thought I really didn't need to hear that this morn. We had a dusting of new snow this morn to go with what we seem to be hanging on to from last week, and are expecting more tomorrow night and Wed.I wonder if there are any empty houses near Karen, Luvs or OA? It sure would be tempting to go where it is warmer, but then I would have to leave my DGC and that thought is enough to make the snow and cold a little more tolerable. I hope everyone stays warm and safe during this coming storm. Janet

I refer to our two hundred year old home as a white elephant. I am in the greenhouse business and my husband is a rabid gardener, so the grounds are planted with rare trees and flower gardens and go on for acres. Over the years we have added a large gazebo and a spring fed pond. yadayadayada. Only a person who knows old homes first hand, and has the time or money to hire a professional full-time gardener, should ever buy it. There'll be lots of people to come look when it goes up for sale, but it would not be for the weak of heart. Heating bills. Put that at the top of your list. Even if you let the house fall down around you, they'll just keep coming. We've installed new double-paned energy efficient windows. Caulked. Weather stripped. Built a solarium across 2/3 of the northern exposure of the home for solar gain, replaced the roof, put in a new boiler, converted from electric to gas heat (yes we had to pay to have lines ran), and placed gas grates in strategic spots to take off chill or use when it wasn't too cold. Use reversing ceiling fans to distribute the heat. We've cut our heating bill IN HALF as far as energy consumption. But, rates rise and will keep rising. We still have six hundred dollar a month heating bills in winter. And this is an old farmhouse. It does not have fourteen foot ceilings. It also is nowhere near 6,000k square feet. And, until we put a small fortune in the energy efficiency items, a draft from a window on one side of the room could blow out a candle on the other. It's comfy now, and even cool in summer so we don't need air conditioning, but for the first fifteen years of my marriage you needed a wet suit to take a bath. Think also about the bones of the house. Redecorating is great, but get somebody in there who knows construction really well to look at the skeleton of the house before you even consider buying it. The last two winters, we replaced the beams and joists under our kitchen and dining room. They were logs with the bark still on them, or logs cut on site and hand hewn to nearly square. They were ENORMOUS,and likely dragged into place by teams of horses. We needed to chain saw them to even think about getting them out. We had to gut these rooms clean down to the dirt underneath and after we got new joists up then replaced floors. Moolah. BTW, we never thought about replacing joists and floor beams in this house. After all, they'd withstood two centuries before us. Then termites happened. LOL. The roofer left about a hundred bats homeless when we replaced the slate for modern shingles. We've put in a new entrance box and had to rewire the whole house and it has solid brick interior walls. The logistics of running electricals, and the plumbing for the boiler system were staggering. If you see fuse boxes that should send up a red flag to check out the electricals for modern wiring. Moolah. We had to restucco over the seventy five year old stucco over the bricks. (major, major moolah) We've had to repair or renovate chimneys and it's hard to find brickmasons here who are familiar with the old craftsmanship. That's another thing about very old houses. Nearly everything in seriously old house is done by methods not common to craftsmen anymore and that includes materials. If you have to replace parts of woodwork it's going to be something like oak or mahogany and large. Not box store kickplates. My walls are so old, it's not even plaster on most of them, it's a sandy almost concrete covering. If we put together all the money we have spent in the last two and a half decades breathing life back into our wonderful old home, we could be living in a really fancy new one. We don't want to. We love our old home and pretty much know it inside and out by now. But, it's like a marriage and yes.............we are the volunteer caretakers to an historic old building we couldn't see being left to ruin. But, it's going to take a very special person to want the job after us. Now, ask me about the plastering schedule where the doors and windows are. LOL. Old houses just keep settling. Not a door in this house even resembles a rectangle. They all have been trimmed or had wood added to them to fit the openings. Every window was custom made and no two are the same size. The house is nearly regained its integrity now, and I can see the end in sight of the major issues. But, if we had been forced to sell this at any point along our long path of renovation, and somebody else had to pick up where we'd left off, if they knew up from down, you can take it to the bank our money and sweat wouldn't have left much room for profit. There'd have been no quick sells. The end results perfect for us. It's rustic yet and even has a pitcher pump in the kitchen to pull up the spring water for the house. But you always live with a foot in the past where people lived simpler and made do in some respects. Some people can do that. Some people can't. It fits our lifestyle well.........simple and hard working. But, it was purchased because my husband wanted an old large home in a rural setting. If he'd just wanted "room" it wouldn't have even been in the game. Good luck whatever you decide.

In 2006, when Ina's "Barefoot Contessa At Home" was released I attended a signing at the Stonewall Kitchen flagship store in York, Maine. She was engaging and personable for the hours & hours she greeted people and signed cookbooks. What surprised me most, seeing her in person, was that she was far more petite than I would have thought based on how she came across to me from her shows. I'd say she is about 5'2" (my height) and she has narrow shoulders and looked far more slender in person than I would have guessed. Also, and even more striking to me, was how beautiful and unlined her skin was - though not in a Botox-y way (she still had natural laugh lines around her eyes, etc.) She had a remarkably lovely complexion and appeared to have been wearing minimal makeup. She wore a dark wool jacket with a gorgeous periwinkle colored scarf around her neck. A number of women wondered aloud after seeing her that they'd love the "recipe" for whatever she uses to keep her skin so glowy. That's 5 yrs. ago and she might have begun to show more signs of aging since then, and I'm guessing the magazine used photoshopping regardless, but I can attest from first-hand scrutiny that Ina's skin is (was) enviably youthful for her age.

I agree with Alice's husband. I find her voice and manner annoying. I've never tried her recipes but the few episodes I've watched, she reminds me of the other obese female chef (forgot the name) who also seemed to throw excessive amounts of butter and cream into everything. One look at the chef tells you it might be better to try other sources to find more healthy (or less unhealthy) options.