I'm so glad some of you remember a lot of the things I do. Some of my most cherished memories are when my playmate two doors down (Ellen) and the girl our age (Mary) across the alley would play in a little lean-to playhouse built against the north side of Ellen's garage. They had a huge wooden sandbox. People don't like the tracking and what it takes to fill and maintain sandboxes, but I've got to tell you it was heaven on earth. The sandbox was under a slightly larger pergola. Over the pergola grew Concord grapes. How beautiful it was under the shade of the leaves and when the grapes hung down as we played in that sandbox. Sadly, Ellen whose parents had the sandbox died from cancer a few years back; we had been separated for years as she taught school and moved to Michigan. The other girl, we parted ways after kindergarten, and she went to the Catholic school. We made new friends and lost touch with one another. A few years ago I found her how? The internet but somebody must have given me some clue, didn't even know what her current married name was. I met her when I was 3. She lives in NC and is such a lovely person. I cannot remember the last time I saw her, before I was 10. We correspond regularly and share these precious memories. Right now I have heard that her husband is facing a terrible ordeal with cancer and his pacemaker; her health sounds good. Tears flowed from my eyes when I read that, and I need to answer soon. I didn't have a video camera, but one beautiful fall day, I walked the old neighborhood with my wide angle lens, walked up the middle of my street and back (there were low hills on both ends of that two-block long street), walked back down then around and up the alley we shared, then around and down her street, clicking all the way. I put the photos on a cd and sent them to her. She was so grateful for them. I'd never met her sister who was older and away by the time I met her, but she sent those photos to her sister, too. I'm so glad I did that. This is the same street from about the exact same spot and one of my photos from that day. The older one I took with my brownie Kodak when I was about 8. The second one was Oct 2005. My house was the one on the right that is yellow now (hard to tell the color) with a red roof and the white rails. Ellen's house was the first one on the right you can see, a grey house with red trim and grey roof. There was a small one in between that isn't visible. I presently live about 1/2 mile from there. The oddest thing is that apart from the cars, trees and a few cosmetic changes to the houses, it has changed very little. 55 years then and now.

Seems to me like the less stuff you have to "tear out" prior to replacing it with something you like, the better. For floor tile, if you have a concrete slab, can't you just tell them to skip tiling the floor entirely and just leave you with a bare concrete floor? There are enough concrete floors out there that getting a certificate of occupation with concrete floors shouldn't be a problem. Sure, most people who have concrete floors have them stained and polished but I doubt the city is going to care if YOUR concrete floor are "ugly" when they're inspecting for you CO. Then, when you're ready to put in the good tile that you like, you won't have anything to clean up first. And, if your builder says he won't give you a credit for the tile flooring that he won't be installing, INSIST that he has to deliver the tile that he would have used to you b/c, even tho you have decided against installing it, you HAVE paid for it and you have another use for it. (You can always sell it on Craigslist.) Or, if you're tiling your shower and tub surrounds, offer to let him NOT deliver the floor tile to you in exchange for a credit for the value of those tiles that you can apply to upgraded tiles for the shower and tub surrounds. (You pretty much have to go ahead and tile your showers and tub surrounds and pulling that stuff out and redoing it would be a major expense. Ditto with kitchen backsplashes. Why put in ANY backsplash at all just to have to tear it out later? You can live without a backsplash - I know b/c I still haven't picked something out for my kitchen backsplash even tho we've now been in the house for two years! - and getting the CO shouldn't require you to have one. So, just tell the builder to skip installing a back splash at all and slap a coat of paint on the wall there. That way you don't have to worry that you'll tear up the wall board trying to get the unwanted tile backsplash down.

Something bad happened that actually was a very, very good thing... After following breiaj's instructions to the letter, two of the floor tiles in the bathroom popped up a couple of days later and wouldn't stay stuck. When I pulled them up the rest of the way, I found a leak! If it hadn't been for those tiles unsticking, we wouldn't have found that leak until it did a LOT more damage - like made a big ole mess of the kitchen ceiling. So here's one way in which vinyl tile might actually be BETTER than sheet! A few notes WRT breiaj's instructions... I admit to dropping back to $3.99 paintbrushes because they became unworkable so quickly - the glue would start to dry up in the bristles while we were working and it would become more like a paddle than a brush! We didn't have any problems with bristle loss. 2" flat-ended paintbrushes were just the right size, a wider brush seemed like it would save time but was really more awkward to work with, especially with cut pieces. Don't bother wearing rubber gloves in hopes of keeping your hands clean, they stick to the tile's adhesive and to the adhesive you're spreading on and just generally irritate the crap out of you. :-) The adhesive - Armstrong's anyway - is kind of hard on your hands though, and contrary to the label does not wash off with soap and water! We ended up using a "painter's wipes" product we had on hand to clean up our hands about every hour because we would get too sticky to work effectively, and our fingertips were pretty raw and sore afterward. Even though it costs a bit more it's a lot easier to work with the smaller containers of adhesive using this brush-on method, because the bucket gunks up something awful. If you're laying more than about 100 square feet, seriously consider coughing up for the vinyl tile cutter (homedepot.com has one for about $50, or you can rent a superduper heavy-duty one for about the same for a weekend)... scoring and snapping with a utility knife sucks after a while, it's slow and hard on your hands. Make sure you have a comfortable utility knife no matter what though, and a LOT of blades. Stanley makes a really nice knife in their FatMax line, with a rubber-cushioned handle. A jamb or undercut saw ($15) makes dealing with those door jambs SO much easier than trying to cut the tile around them! We removed the baseboards; we were going to replace them with vinyl cove but the damn stuff just would not cooperate so we patched the baseboards with wood filler galore and put them back, and it looked SO much neater than butting the tiles up to the baseboards. deeje, I've checked around with several manufacturers of vinyl tile and the biggest deal WRT moisture is not to slop around too much water when you mop - contrary to popular belief, you don't need a gallon bucket full of near-boiling water and some vile chemical to get a floor clean! Try a well-squeezed-out sponge or terrycloth/microfiber mop instead of a sopping string or rag mop instead. Those microfiber cleaning cloths fit on Swiffer handles really well, if like me you are too cheap to buy the Swiffer cloths. :-) ctaylors6, the instructions in the Cryntel box agree with the Lowes guy - wash well-secured vinyl very well, rinse well, allow to dry thoroughly. I'd use something like TSP that would destroy any gloss on the existing floor. Our vinyl was trashed so we couldn't leave it, so I can't speak to the adhesive method on top of vinyl. We still haven't gotten the kitchen floor laid down yet. We had to tear out some of the subfloor and replace it, and then do a lot of leveling and sanding on the rest, got diverted with a day of electrical work, and to top it all off DH has been sick as a dog. :-( Cross your fingers for this weekend!

LOL! Too bad about the chicken. Was it not tasty? Long stewed chicken can be luscious or just plain overcooked. :) My mother always used a darning needle to sew up stuffed birds too, but she made sutures. :) My first thought for stuffing is always matzah. We almost always had turkey for Seder. It's easy to make for three dozen people at an indeterminate time. My mother would have loved to have made rice stuffing but my father's Ashkenazie family would have freaked. :) Recently I figured out that my failures with matzah stuffing were the brand. I like Yehuda best because it doesn't taste like cardboard, but Manischewitz absorbs the stock and fat much better and is ideal for stuffing. Even better if there are also mandelin and various varieties of matzah besides water. Freeze overs from the year before. Bread stuffing is an American tradition probably because in the old days stale bread was plentiful and cheap. Oysters in stuffing definitely gained a name because of that. It's odd to think of now, but oysters used to be so extremely plentiful in the Northeast, just waiting on the beach to be picked up, that they were thought of as poor people's food. Other regions make cornmeal or cornbread stuffing, probably also started because it was plentiful.