Yes, Woodnymph, I had a circle pin after I was married and got quite a few comments about it. I paid $1.00 for my old book, The Shepherd of the Hills by Harold Bell Wright with illustrations by F. Graham Cootes, at a family estate sale. It gives a copyright date of 1907 in the front and says "Published September, 1907." I thought I had made a clever buy but found that there are a zillion copies available. It is in very good condition, and the bookshop owner who looked at it for me said it might bring $10. In it, though, were two postcards with postmarks that I can't make out. They have 1 cent stamps on them and very pretty handwriting. One has a picture of a young couple rowing on a lake and the other of the Masonic Temple in Bloomington, Illinois. That one says the writer is not going to school that summer but is saving herself for San Francisco in 1915. I don't know who either of the senders was but did know the recipient who was the aunt of my aunt-by-marriage. When my daughter was young, we did manage to acquire a complete set of The Little Colonel series, some of them from a private owner who lived in Peewee Valley, the setting of the books. The books themselves are not all of the same set, but some of them are the oldest edition. They are not in good shape, but she is proud of them and keeps them carefully on her bookshelves. I feel like Methuselah on this forum. My mother was a primary school teacher in one-room schools at the beginning of her career. In them, classes ran Grades 1, 2, 3, and 4 every year with 5 and 7 offered one year and 6 and 8 offered in the alternate years. If you started at age 6, you went straight through, but if you started at 5 or 7, you either had to repeat, go ahead and drop back to pick up the year you missed, or skip it and go ahead. Since I was the oldest child, my mother taught me to read at 4 and took me with her to attend first grade at 5, meaning I had to either repeat 4th grade or go to 6th. I did go on and never had 5th grade, which may explain why math was always my poorest subject since that was the year that long division and common fractions were introduced. At any rate, that meant that since my birthday is in July, I graduated from high school at 15, starting college in the fall of 1952. We had the suite-type dorm mentioned above, and my roommate was my best friend from high school (and still is). We had the rules about signing in and out, curfews with later nights on weekends, no one smoked, boys couldn't step foot outside the living room of the dorm. We did our personal laundry in the bathroom sink, but there were ironing facilities in the basement. Housekeeping gave out one clean sheet every week, and you were to put your top sheet on the bottom and the clean sheet on the top each time, taking the other one back to be laundered. We wore stockings and hats and gloves to church and formals to the dances held in the gym. It was certainly another world to...

I'm laughing because my "editor genes" haven't left me since I retired; they've just slowed down. I woke up this morning with the realization that I may have typed "reign" instead of "rein" in a post I wrote two days ago. It's a common mistake that always jumps out at me when other people do it, but then I went and did it myself. Correction made. Not to worry, Nutsaboutplants--I'm still absorbed in the book. I did move it downstairs, and I actually want to finish it quickly. I'm interested enough to want to know how it ends, but I find it disturbing. It's an unsettling book.

I think you have done a great job with the space and configuration that you have. There are things that could have been done better, but you didn't know what you didn't know. You can beat yourself up for not knowing, but that is water under the bridge. Focus on building a home filled with love and creating wonderful memories for you and your family. The smallest home I lived in was a 2 br, 1 bath, 600 square foot bungalow that I lived in with my husband, my niece, 3 dogs and 2 cats. We had no garage or basement or attic storage. We also were young and just starting out and had no money, but we had each other and we had friends and I have wonderful memories from that time of my life. We lived there for 9 years. As the years passed my niece moved back to PA. (I grew up in PA and moved to Southern California in my early 20s). My husband and I moved to a much larger, much nicer home. Two people living in 1700 sf with a 2 car garage! It had huge windows, a nice yard and was light and bright. I loved my home and had built a wonderful network of friends, but still missed my family in PA. My husband loved his job and was quite successful I ran a small business that I loved. It brought in a good second income, but I was working with animals and providing services to people who were disadvantaged, homeless, terminally ill . . . It was more about the fulfillment of the work than the money. With his income I could travel to PA 2 or three times a year and spend a month/6 weeks with my family and I was good with this. Life was pretty darn good. Then my husband lost his job and fell into a deep, chronic depression. He couldn't function, couldn't work, couldn't do anything. I had to get two additional jobs to make enough money to pay our bills. I decided that I couldn't keep up this pace forever and decided to go back to school and get my IT certifications as a network engineer and DBA. For two years I ran my business, managed road shows for Costco, worked as a merchandizer for Red Star Yeast and went to school full time. I'd fall asleep while eating dinner or taking a bath, sometimes I'd doze off if I had to stop at a red light. I had no time for anything or anyone. I had no life and I had a husband that was angry at me for not spending time with him, angry at my success and spiraling down into deeper and deeper bouts of depression. Turns out that being happy had nothing to do with having a bigger or nicer house.

That’s pretty funny. Weird, but funny. You could give the kids squrt bottles of mustard, relish, and ketchup (“hi, I’m bpath, I’m from Chicago, and I put ketchup on hot dogs.”), and let them ”dress” the passengers!