On the local TV news the other night, they were reporting that many farmers in southern Oklahoma and northern Texas have lost 100% of their crops to excessive moisture in the form of rainfall/constantly wet soil/floodwaters. So, I was thinking to myself that a lot of us may be getting less of a veggie harvest, but at least we haven't lost 100%, right? Ilene, I have talked to lots of 'old farmers/old ranchers' who live in our area (many of them, sadly, have passed away in recent years ) and many of them have told me over and over that all they had to eat in their early years in Oklahoma were whatever crops they could raise or find via foraging/hunting/gathering and whatever game they could shoot. They said that it was a constant struggle to survive, and of course, none of them had any problems with weight gain or obesity. They also said that if one family or another suffered a crop failure, the other local families tried to share what they had so the family would survive. How very spoiled we are by comparison! My dad was one of 11 children. His family was, by his own description, 'poor, white sharecroppers' in the Spanish Fort (Montague County, Texas) area in the 1920s/30s. He said they pretty much lived on whatever crops survived. They usually had a good crop of pinto beans and corn, which they dried and stored for winter. He said they often ate corn meal mush for breakfast, cornbread and whatever else was available for lunch, and cornbread and pinto beans for dinner, day after day after day. How many of us would do that and be glad to have even that food? He did say that they often had good veggies from their own gardens all summer and fall, plus whatever they could put up for winter, and meat was more of a 'treat' or a 'condiment' with veggies and bread being the main portion of the meal, and only small portions of meat available. During the good years that they made a good crop, they would have enough cash to buy salt, flour, baking powder, etc. During bad times they had beans and corn. They usually had their own milk and butter from their own cow, but usually the babies and youngest children got all the milk. Once a year they each got one orange to eat--at Christmas--and that plus a couple of nuts and one or two pieces of Christmas candy was their Christmas gift. Local folks here who are slightly younger than my dad remember a similar lifestyle up to World War II, which gave many young men a chance to get off the farm and earn some badly needed money to send home to 'the folks'. They say that growing a big garden that produced a lot of food for the family was considered a HUGE mark of achievement, and that the local families were quite competitive with one another to see who could feed their family best with what they raised. Frankly, I don't know how they did it. I raise a lot of fruit and veggies, and have great success most years, but if we had to live ONLY off what I could grow or find by foraging (wild berries, fruit, etc.), my family would all be stick-thin! Thankfully we don't have to raise all our own food nowadays! PURPLE CHEROKEE--now that is a great tomato and one of my all time favorites. We just love them. This year they have been HUGE, about twice the size I usually get, and fairly tasty--their flavor isn't quite as good as it is most years, but it is still not as watered-down as many other tomatoes are this year. Black Krim is still our favorite. Brandywine would be our favorite based on flavor alone, but their low productivity keeps them from being our #1 tomato. I am going to (hopefully--and if the weather works with me and not against me) yank out a lot of the spring-planted tomatoes this week, and replace them with new plants for fall tomatoes. I don't usually take out the cherry, grape or currant types as they produce well all summer anyway. The tomatoes that are removed are sort of removed in the order in which they began fruiting--so those that produced ripe fruit beginning in very late April are already gone, those that produced ripe fruit in May/June will soon be gone, and those late ones that are just now producing ripe fruit will get to live until they stop producing, or until the July-planted tomatoes start producing. Sagenscotties, My paste tomatoes have only been so-so this year too. In general, paste tomatoes are more prone to both blossom-end rot and foliar disease when it is excessively wet. However, I am getting tons of big 'uns so I have been using a mixture of big 'uns to make spaghetti sauce and other tomato-based meals like chicken-tortilla soup or taco soup. The larger tomatoes take longer to boil down, of course, since they have a higher water content--especially this year--but they make tasty cooked tomatoes. I'm probably not even going to plant the paste tomatoes I have raised from seed for fall unless we have a sudden drying trend here. I don't see any point in expending the energy to plant them if they aren't going to do any better than the spring-planted paste tomatoes did. There are a couple of exceptions--Orange Banana has produced quite well, and so has Bisignano #2. Dawn

Clothes pins are still usable. We, machine knitters, use them all the time to hold yarn tails down. I also use them for other craft projects as well. Manufacturers should not do away with them ever! Pammyfay, you story is cute. It reminded me of when this young cable salesman came by my home tried to sell the service. I politely told him "no thanks". He responded back by asking: "who do you use to watch TV?". "No one. I use OTA", I replied back. He looked puzzled and asked me: "What's OTA?" in which I said "Over the Air channels". Still looking puzzled, I explained further that we use a roof antenna to pick up these over the air channels. He then asked me: "How much do you pay for the service?". "None, it's free" I replied. His final comment was: "Oh, we can't beat that price then" and walked away. LOL...

I'm not English, but I lived there for several years. So I'm going to have the appalling gall to speak for a country that is not even mine. I heartily beg their forgiveness. We have enough trouble with our presumption as it is! I think it's just a different attitude. (If I get into it, I'll just get snarky.) Some of it is an acceptance that there's beauty in wear. My favorite decorating book is "The Well Worn Interior" by Tim Whittaker and Robin Forster, and English book available in the US. Most of the people on this board would sniff at it and think it was the most horrible thing they'd ever seen. People here even like their Shabby Chic newly made to look shabby! But I love it. I wish I could have a 600-pound pitted, porous, lichenous stone trough for a kitchen sink! (Oh, was that sound the entire "building a home" forum fainting dead away?) You can have wood around a sink, and keep it there for 100 years, if you like, if you just accept that it's going to wear. That's how all drainboards used to be. In the middle stages, it might even look kind of crappy. But eventually, it may look amazing. Or not. And they're not as germophobic. Don't get me started on THAT. Also, different things are available there, and different things are cheap. I always think it's funny to drive down the road and see a sign that says "Traditional custom joinery: Furniture, kitchen cabinets, coffins made" I just got this month's World of Interiors, an English design magazine that's available at Borders. It might give you some perspective, showing 2 very different unfitted kitchens. It has a feature on the kitchens at Petworth House, a stately home that prepared over 30,000 grand multicourse meals a year in a kitchen that's big, but I bet some people on this board are planning bigger. It also has a truly tiny eat-in kitchen of a Parisian doll clothing designer. There are restaurant kitchens smaller than yours. It requires more thought than shoving everything in 2000 sq ft of cabinets, but if you have the time, maybe that urge to simplify is telling you something. Plan your kitchen like you're packing a suitcase for 2-3 weeks: what things do you really use that often? Plan first for them. Make a list. You don't sound like a Costco junkie who needs tons of nonperishable food storage, so it's just setting a limit on how much space you're going to allot it. Two people don't need 40 plates and glasses (like what's a dishwasher load?). Decide on a number. Then move on to stuff you use less often. You can always go to the basement or garage once a month or so for the big soup pot or the mixer. My older aunt has lots of cool storage on her back stairs, so she doesn't have to go all the way to the basement for the big bag of onions. Because you cook a lot, you really know what you need and what works for YOU. If you bake constantly and want a huge bin of flour in the middle of your floor, do it. That's the nice thing about unfitted. You can always move it. As long as it's a thoughtful solution to a real problem, it'll be the right one.

Well I live in Southeast Missouri, our yorkie Good Golly Miss "Molly" passed away about 4 months ago. She was extremely tiny 2.8lbs. She was 4 years old and it has been extremely hard on our family. After grieving a bit we called the family we purchased Molly from and it just so happened that she had kept Molly's sister and she was the one pregnant. She had 2 baby girls and we took the bigger of the 2 she is 7 weeks and 2lbs. she will probably be between 5-6lbs full grown. There is one baby girl left and she is adorable. My 11 year old daughter has no idea about Piper. I am picking her up Christmas Eve. We are going to tell my daughter we left a bag in the car and ask her to go get it and there she will be. I am so excited about Piper, and that the bloodline will be so close to our Molly. *to the person that commented on the zipper, the cover does not have any zippers in the front, the flap just lays down nicely. There are gaps on each side of the flap, I just tried to close them a bit for the pictures. I agree, zippers would not be a good idea. Thank you to everyone for the lovely comments. Freckles