Hope you all get to enjoy some fall color. Locally I was able to enjoy stellar but brief coloring. We are about 90% right now. But my yard is about 20% if that. I got 30 and 31 for lows in mid-Sept which didn't do much as it was only for a couple hours. I was hoping the forecast would improve for tonight but its supposed to dip below freezing @ 1am and continue to drop to 24...26 @ 7am, still 30 @ 8am. An 8 hour freeze will surely kill off the leaves on most plants. My Ginkgo are SOOO green right now! 50 day precipitation is 0.7". Haven't seen any decent, yet well below normal, rain since late July and early Aug. In fact mid August is the only 1" or greater rainfall I had since...wait for this one...November 9th 2011. A disgrace. That is 11 months with only one 1" rainfall.

Porterhouse grew some huge tomatoes for me and quite a few of them. I had one that was over 6" across. I never weighed it, but I would estimate well over 2 lb. I thought they tasted pretty good, but I just tasted my first Earl's Faux (actually the second to ripen, as the first went for seed) and it is definitely the winner in my book. Pretty good size fruit also and the plant is LOADED. But obviously it is very late. I gave my buddy a plant also and he told me today how good those tomatoes were, but his is just ripening within the last week also. They will definitely be back next year.

I used to draw floor plans on graph paper so that the room would be to scale. Is there a software that does this? Counting grids is so tiresome. I read previous posts on floor planner and home architect that do 3D and 2D modeling. But 1) I don't need or want 3D stuff. And the 2) the 2D stuff is confusing. The print outs don't have grids for easy counting and no measurements are displayed.

Hi--When we redid our kitchen 2 years ago I had some of the same questions you do now. We have med-dark cherry cabinets & a small island. My husband wanted absolute black granite for the counters & I wanted a WOW. So we thought seriously about the WOW on the island. But the cost made us change our mind. We had to pay for a whole slab of the WOW even to use only a relatively small piece. In fact the cost was prohibitive. In retrospect I wondered how much the whole kitchen would have been in the WOW. We didn't price that, but in the long run it might not have been too bad considering we would have had to pay for a whole slab. So, just a thought. Check prices (if you are watching your budget) before you get your heart set on one certain thing. We tried looking for pieces of a WOW @ a local stone yard, but no luck.