Oh little lady! Around here it's used when men mean to be polite & is most often used by men of a certain age. When we were living in Dallas a young couple bought a the house next to ours. It had been vacant for about a year & before that was a rental property, so it wasn't in the best shape. One Saturday the parents of the husband were there helping to work on the house. The dad was scraping paint off the outside woodwork & soffits as I was leaving to run some errands. I told him he should be wearing a face mask as the pain probably contained lead. He sort of blew me of with the attitude of "this woman doesn't know what she's talking about" & I went on my way with my own stereotype thinking he was a stupid geezer. The next weekend he was back & he stopped me during my work in the front garden. He told me that I had been right! That he had gone home & the next day was coughing up all sorts of "junk" that he'd inhaled. He looked at me & said, "I just told my misses, that little lady knew what she was talking about" Yeah, I was the little lady, but he was also admitting that he was wrong & I was right, so how could I get angry?

robyn-I read your post and thought, hmm, so much really has happened since we started that I'm not even sure anymore! It seems to go very fast and very slow at the same time? I think illini's pretty much got it down as I remember. I am all about 'give me 3 choices', that would make things much easier, lol! The trick I think might be making a decision and then sticking with it. Hahaha! Will they send you pictures of the progress? It'd drive me crazy to be so far away (not that you can help it), but your builder sounds fantastic. illini-if it makes you feel any better I thought the electrical walk through went really smoothly and not near as challenging as I thought it might be. The electrician had some really good suggestions as well and we did defer to his experience on many things. Some things needed discussion but most placements just made sense, ya know? BUT, I will say that afterward, as in the very next day I went back and already started getting confused on this and that. Hahaha! Did we do this? What is that? Do we need a plug here? Lol! jdez-I like the brick you like on your other thread. And OF COURSE it's out of budget, that is just how it goes. ;) I'm with you though, if you can find a way to get it IN budget then it's definitely worth investigating.

Dinner here! Are we being realistic about what we can whip up on an outdoor trip? I'll be. Since I'm flying in, as soon as I land, I'll throw some pre-seared hamburgers (blue cheese or cheddar can be added later) and whole wheat buns wrapped in foil under the cowling and cook them up with the residual engine heat. They'll be nice and toasty by the time we get settled. I'll pop a red grape, feta, candied walnut, pear, and apple chopped salad with a (little raspberry vinegarette on it) in the cooler before I take off. We can have that and some baked BBQ Lay's---I haven't had chips in a while, but this sounds like a great occasion to dive in! I'll bring a few sticks of fatwood to get the fire going so we can get the coffee (and tea) on for after dinner and have coffee and toasted marshmallows for dessert. ************************ I am on the island today. Someone highjacked out internet connection while we've been gone but my genius DH took in back last night, so I am wired! I am spending the next 2 days here in the attic room of the house---where it's quiet---writing. I have a 6 page paper due tommorrow in climates and a fair amount of homework due by the end of today. We turn out homework in through a homework site that checks for plagerism. I love it bacause I can turn my work in remotely! YAY! I have another paper due on Wednesday---my Philosophy final paper. I'm writing on Infant Euthanasia: Moral and Ethical Pros and Cons. Sooooooooooooo, I'm going to be busy. The good news is that I have wonderful weather to look out the window at and the water is calm, water birds are talking and and the sea planes are taking off and landing regularly---their rotary engines humming a beautiful tune. :) DH and DD have agreed to help me out and watch the little ones for the weekend. I better hold up my end of the bargain and get writing!!!!!! Have a great weekend!

Jennifer, I hope that Finbar came in. Our cats must have felt the weather coming because when we got home late Friday afternoon, they all came right indoors, including the one who usually stays out after dark and makes me worry. Larry, I know people eat the tender vines/shoots of regular English peas and sugar snap type peas, so I don't know why you couldn't do the same with Austrian winter peas. I hope you and Madge can catch up on your rest and stay healthy while you're busy taking care of sick folks. dbarron, Pouring down snow? Like thundersnow? That would be so cool. I love thundersnow. We have two dogs who bark and howl at the thunder, and one who goes into the bathroom and hides from it. Currently our 2 barkers/howlers are howling at the sound of emergency sirens because there is a serious motor vehicle accident near our home (not really close, but close enough that the dogs can hear the sirens from the fire trucks, police cars and ambulance). Tim is gone to that, so they are watching out the window for him to come home and, in the meantime, doing their howling thing. It is impossible to sleep through anything in this house. Once the sirens stop, the two dogs will stop. Or, I can tell them to stop howling and they will stop. For a minute. Then when they think I've gone back to bed or whatever, they start up again. They try to be good but they love to howl. We used to have a dog named Biscuit (RIP, sweet doggie) who howled along with opera music and truly loved to sing along with it, but other than that, he never howled at anything. These two blue heeler mixes we have now believe they were put on earth to howl at everything---sirens, the howling of coyotes, the howling wind, etc. When the fire pagers woke us up around 3:40 a.m., I looked out the window and heavy snow with big, wet fluffy flakes was coming down like crazy. The temperature, which was around 58 degrees right around midnight, now is sitting right there at 32 degrees at our house, but shows 33 degrees at the nearest Mesonet station. The snow covers everything....the ground, the evergreen shrubs and trees, the lawn furniture, and even my greenhouse. I don't know how long it has been falling. What the forecasters had said was that if any snow fell this far south, it likely would be mixed with rain and would not accumulate. Well, there's no rain mixed with this and it is accumulating. Our ground is pretty warm (the mesonet map shows our soil temperature is 47 degrees at a depth of 2 inches) so I would think the snow will melt away pretty quickly---perhaps even before sunrise, so people here might miss seeing it unless they're awake in the middle of the night for some reason. So, I got the longed-for snow. I don't think we'll be outside tomorrow building snowmen or anything but I am enjoying watching those big flakes coming down. It definitely is not Spring yet here, notwithstanding yesterday's official high temperature of 69 degrees. I checked our weather just now, and the NWS extended the Wind Advisory, which had excluded southern OK, to us at 3:13 a.m. I had been amused by the fact that the Texas county that surrounds our part of our county on three sides had a Wind Advisory and yet we did not. Was NWS-Norman thinking the wind would just stop at the Red River? Even before I went to sleep last night, we had wind gusts as high as 40 mph, while the folks near us with a Wind Advisory had wind gusts in the mid 30s. So I suppose after several hours of those higher wind gusts, NWS-Norman finally decided to add us to the Wind Advisory. Better late than never, but who is awake at 3:13 a.m. to notice such things? NWS-Norman always does this, by the way, adding us later on to Wind Advisories long after NWS-Fort Worth put the Texas counties surrounding us under one. This is a persistent thing here, and I don't know why it is that way. When the Fort Worth Stock Show folks last evening cancelled the scheduled Saturday morning Stock Show parade for only the second time in its history (and people on FB instantly were outraged by the annual parade being cancelled), I knew that they were expecting snow or sleet down there because someone mentioned they didn't want the horses to slip and fall on the dangerous, slick roadways. I had explained to Lillie earlier in the day that Friday was the opening day of the stock show and we'd try to take her and her younger sister down there to the stock show one day during its run if we didn't get the traditional Stock Show weather of ice and snow. While they had a gorgeous sunny and warm day for the opening day, it appears they have snow/sleet/ice for the first night of the show. I doubt it will last for the three week duration of the show. Dawn