THINGS I'M GLAD WE DID We planned for the future and ran PVC pipe underneath all our concrete walks and drives so landscape lighting could be added later. Also ran pipe for electric wires out to the backyard where we would be building our barn the next year so we wouldn't have to dig up the yard again. Wired for an entertainment system in the basement (which we are finishing now -- 2 yrs. after move-in). DH insited on 400 amp service so we would have plenty of electrical for pool, barn etc. Splurged on the kitchen cabinets and appliances. It's one of our favorite rooms and is large enough for both of us to cook at the same time. Makes cooking & cleanup easy and enjoyable. Insisted on a pool bath with a separate entrance into the home. We fired our first designer when he insisted it was a waste of space in our northern home and would present a security risk because it makes another entrance to the home. It's great not to have guests walk across our wood floor when coming in from the pool to use the restroom. It's also a great changing room for the pool and hot tub and the shower is a great place to wash the doggie. Lots of very large windows to view the beautiful landscape and wildlife from everywhere in the home. What a way to increase the endorphins during an upper midwest winter. We used to live in a house where we could barely see outside. Our coffee area in the MB suite. We saw this in a parade home and had our second (and final) architect plan for this. It consists of some cabinetry, a small refrigerator and a bar sink -- perfect for making coffee in the morning or storing juice and sodas. It's located outside the bedroom, bathroom and closet area but still inside the suite area. Planned for a single, very large MB closet. It's 10 x 15 and is a perfect size for storing all our clothes and is also a roomy changing room. A covered lanai in the back of the house to escape the summer heat but enjoy the rainstorms. Our hardwood floor (Brazilian Teak) throughout the house. One of the biggest "wow" factors to people visiting. THINGS I WISH WE HAD DONE DIFFERENTLY Mostly small size changes which you wouldn't understand unless you were inside the house. A couple of feet here and there to make a room slightly larger. We actually cut those feet off the original plan to keep it just under 4000 sq.ft. Boy, I wish we had kept them. Really checked our cabinet layout. Our laundry room has a tight area when using the fold-down ironing board. It's mainly because we chose a front loading washer & dryer which are deeper than traditional machines. Try to visualize the cabinets and how they work in the room.

PK, I pulled it up as soon as I saw the first leaves emerge. When I pull up an invasive, I don't merely tug and yank, I get my hand weeder (or shovel) and go down deep to get the roots. Merely pulling the plant up usually leaves too much root behind. Even in places where I could not get rid of every bit of root, I just made sure that I cut off every leaf that sprouted, which insured the death of the plant trying to emerge. Diligently removing emerging foliage on pesky invasives (such as alstromeria) worked well for me because the little brittle roots were impossible to dig up. Molly

Never had a professional massage or manicure or pedicure. I don't like people I don't know touching me.....oh, wait...maybe that is a quirk?? ;) Never had a tattoo. Never watched many weekly series on tv...like Dallas, Seinfield, MASH, because I stopped watching tv for the most part when I was in jr. high....another quirk?? Never gave my baby one ounce of formula. Never been to a casino. Never been on a cruise.

I have a letter that I wrote to a pen pal when I was fifteen, and she saved it over the decades and sent it back to me a couple of years ago. She was in Brooklyn at the time while I was on a farm in Texas, but when she found me again, I was in Los Angeles. I finally got to meet her at her house in New Jersey last year. I do have a lot of poetry that I wrote when I was 15 to 18 years old, but the letter I wrote is quite different. My poetry was extremely serious, but the letters I wrote were evidently quite silly, although I did not think of them that way back then. When I read the letters, I could not believe that I had actually written them, and they were quite hilarious - at least to me. I have to wonder how Doreen took them, but evidently she like them, as she always wrote back and did save them for forty-odd years. The diaries that I've managed to save only go back to 1975, although I started writing them in 1968. The early ones got lost along the way. When I read my old diaries now, I can understand why people thought they were funny, even though I was dead serious when I wrote them. I may have been a bit overly dramatic at times, especially in my 20s.