Glo - Thanks for reassuring me! I hope your move is awesome! My husband has wanted to move us to Colorado for years and hasn't managed to quite convince me yet, although I think it's absolutely wonderful there. LOL So, Winter Solstice is the same everywhere? (LOL)... I guess you're seeing how little I know... Nancy - Thanks for the tip! I am gonna have to watch the lead hand myself as I way oversowed my cantaloupes this fall. The poor babies are fighting each other and giving me 2 to 5 inches fruits that don't look like they're EVER going to full ripen. I will be much more careful in the future. I'll try to not get TOO excited when I go to plant. LOL Carrie - Wow! That's some really good info. That's exactly the kind of thing I was worried about. I'm grateful for the heads up. Liz - LIZ!!! Hey, girl! Fancy meeting you here and there and now here! hee hee... The whole last paragraph of what you wrote is exactly what is concerning me. I know that I personally wear shorts through-out almost the whole winter except for those few crazy days that we see. 50's or what have you is not cold to me... We do get the occasional freeze, but then a week or two later at most you could have a 70+ degree high! All this in the same few days / weeks / months... it's SO crazy! Oh, and if they're having a plantswap around the 8th of December as well, I sure want to know as I'll be out that way. :-) Blessings, Angela

I really don't like granite. It's too speckeldy, too pretentious, too cold, too ostentatious, too expensive. And maybe it's just me, but doesn't most of it just look like rust stains? I also researched all the other countertop choices. Throughout our homebuilding we've tried to remain focused on our twin goals, Durable and Low Maintenance. And so we've come back to granite. What I found out is that granite showrooms only have a tiny selection of slabs onsite for you to look at. And most of those are ugly speckled rust stains. BUT, when you've found a company you want to work with, they'll hook you up with the huge granite yards where you go to pick out a slab and they send it to the installer. In our case it's a two hour drive to a huge city where there are a half dozen granite yards and acres of slabs of granite to choose from. You walk around for a couple of hours dragging your husband (who really doesn't want to be there and doesn't like anything unless it's cobalt blue) and your kids (who are fighting over a piece of gravel they picked up in the parking lot) and suddenly you turn a corner and find The Perfect Slab. And you hear a heavenly chorus that swells to drown out the sound of the kids squabbling and the perky salesperson who doesn't have a clue what you're really looking for (you couldn't tell her because you weren't really sure either.) And tears of relief and joy spring to your eyes, your husband drops to his knees in shock when he hears the price, and then you're done. Then you get to choose a backsplash!

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-Prep sink. This may be useful in a multi-cook household or a huge kitchen, but I hardly ever used the one I had and it was just once more thing to clean. -Garbage disposal. My worms do a much better job, don't take up electricity and never smell or require cleaning. -Fancy multi-function toaster, oven, rotisserie, pizza, etc. Does nothing well. -Trash can with a motion sensor. Everyone I know who has one has them break in under a year. Mine only took 4 months to break. A foot pedal is much more reliable and a lot cheaper to replace. -Stainless steel sink. What a pain to clean. You can call it patina, butafter a while they don't look clean no matter what you do. (The one in my apartment right now looks positively foul no matter how much Barkeeper's Friend you use.) Of course cast iron will eventually chip and I don't know if the granite composite sinks will stand the test of time -Range-top grill. Only pay for these if you have a bodacious vent system and no way to have an outdoor grill. They are better than the George Foreman-like grills but not a patch on a decent outdoor gas grill or charcoal. ---- As for sink tip-outs... since discovering them I have knocked the front panel off every sink in every home I've rented or owned and installed these. In the bathroom they are perfect for the tweezers and nail files and such. In the kitchen, the sponges, scrubbers, stoppers and the toothbrush you use for cleaning around the faucet plate are neatly hidden away but close at hand. Love 'em!