1. Favorite RED / MAGENTA - Maggie. I especially like the flatish (not high-centered) form that looks like nothing so much as a dancer's full array of bright rosy skirts. Even though it's a Bourbon, it's extremely healthy and easy to grow. Low in thorns, large in bloom size. The blooms last a long time in the vase, and you can stare at it forever without tiring of appreciating its beauty. 2. Favorite ORANGE / APRICOT - We don't have this color yet that I've seen, though tiny Crepuscle (noisette), when it gets large enough to bloom, will be a faint shade of this. Maybe. That's a low-thorns healthy rose with large blooms too. 3. Favorite YELLOW - Julia Child. I like its butter yellow color, but even in the summer when it fades some, you can still tell that it's a yellow, not a white. 4. Favorite PINK - General Schablikine. Often called a red, it has always been a dusty deep pink here, regardless of season. We've had it from two different nurseries and the color was a dusty pink in both cases. It's a beautiful, beautiful color that contrasts nicely with the lighter pinks that we have a good many of. Its form is flatish and full-petaled. Fairly low in thorns, good-sized flowers that keep on going late into the fall. Evergreen in North Carolina. 5. Favorite PURPLE / VIOLET / MAUVE / LAVENDER - Reine des Violettes, assuming it's going to eventually get around to blooming here. (I've read that sometimes it takes awhile to establish.) Low/no thorns, and so far the picture of health here. 6. Favorite BICOLOR (Example - Double Delight) - Cinco De Mayo. This is a party rose, pure party rose. If you plant Cinco De Mayo, you must prepare to take a bloom in the house, clinch it between your teeth, put on your dancing shoes and dance all over in a big ruffled skirt. (Guys can wear kilts, I suppose...) The rose's only negative is that it's a bit thorny. Otherwise, it's amazingly healthy, and beautiful in its combination of colors with ruffly edges. It blooms less once it loses much of its sunlight, but it never gets a bit of any kind of disease (grown organically, at least). 7. Favorite WHITE - Lion's Fairy Tale. Healthy, healthy, and will take a bit of shade and still bloom well. Large blooms. 8. Favorite CLIMBER - Madame Alfred Carriere. We don't have it yet, but I'm figuring on ordering it this fall. 9. Favorite FLORIBUNDA - Gruss An Aachen. It's simply a perfectly beautiful rose, and it smells wonderful too if you get it in just the right temperature. 10. Favorite GRANDIFLORA - Eutin. The pictures at Help Me Find are so heavy with the numbers of blooms in its bloom clusters that you'd swear they must have been Photoshopped, but no, those huge numbers of bright red blooms are actually what we're seeing here... growing next to our pergola in far, far too much shade. It is getting a little powdery mildew in all that shade, but a hard spray with the hose once in awhile gets rid of it instantly. If shade is your problem, this is your rose. A little bit thorny, but you can't always have everything, and its interesting foliage looks good in the landscape. Evergreen in North Carolina. 11. Favorite HYBRID TEA - We don't have a hybrid tea, but we've had two pinks (tossed due to Rose Rosette Disease) that show a lot of hybrid tea parentage and we'll buy those two again soon: Belinda's Dream and a tiny very attractive small shrub with a bloom that looks like a tiny version of another Belinda's Dream: Rose Rosette. 12. Favorite Old English, Rugosa, Romantica, or David Austin - David Austin's Mortimer Sackler, hands down. The blooms here have looked exactly like those featured on David Austin's website, and this rose is healthy, healthy, healthy. Beautifully delicate looking and lovely to sniff, too. 13. Favorite LANDSCAPE ROSE OF THE YEAR award (I just made this one up because there's no list that ought to leave out this rose!) - Mrs. Dudley Cross. If you can only have one rose, this one is it. It's luminous creamy colored blooms are breathtakingly beautiful and they're eyecatchers in any vase too. Give yourself a gold star if you buy this one, because you made the right decision! And add a second star if you can also buy General Schablikine to plant beside it; the pink of General Schablikine perfectly reflects the faint dusty pink edging of Mrs. Dudley Cross in cooler weather. They look splendid together in a vase. Quite healthy if grown organically. Evergreen in North Carolina. Ours is a no-spray anywhere any time yard and all these roses are suitable for growing that way, at least in warm and humid blackspot-prone North Carolina. Best wishes, Mary Here is a link that might be useful: Mrs. Dudley Cross

Gotta say I'm more than happy with my 36" RNB. I have been using it for just about a year now and have not had 1 issue. I did break the thermostat for the griddle while installing the hi-back guard and shelf but it was replaced very quickly, my fault. I replaced it too, no need for a service guy w/these machines, I adjusted all my burners too, easy. I also have a 30" Wolf convection and a Wolf steam oven but do use the BS oven for pizza, big hunks of meat and anything I want to use a big sheet pan for. The BS oven is the quietest when using convection mode and I love the ability to turn the fan off w/a switch, the Wolf fan stays on for quite some time after the oven is off and is LOUD. The steam oven fan is also relatively loud, we use that oven the most of any of them. I would absolutely purchase another BS range. I hadn't even heard of them until I was starting my new construction and ended up on this site. I read all the horror stories but with all the stellar reviews I figured I'd take a chance. Got a moss green range and matching pro-line 1200 cfm hood (talk about loud). Initially I was interested in the AR performer, the place I purchase from had Capital, AR and BS all right next to each other (didn't even consider a Wolf). I had looked at an AR at another place by itself but when I saw it next to the BS I didn't even look at it again. I may have been equally happy w/the AR but am very happy with my BS. Really the only thing I was remotely concerned about was the hot door as I have young twins (5 now, 4 when we moved in). When I saw my boy sitting on the floor in front of the range with his back against the door while it was on my worries were over, he was 'warming up'. Heck my Wolf lower panel gets hot enough to be quite unpleasant when it's on which surprised me as no one has ever complained about that. Having the 'known good' Wolf in the same kitchen as the BS oven I can say they've both been brilliant. However it does make the Wolf seem 'not soo special' since the BS is equally 'special'. I do most of my bread baking in the BS just cause I can fit more in there but have used all 3 (steam oven only goes up to 445 deg though), they all work great but the end product is slightly different in each which is kinda cool.

Scarlett, I don't think anyone has intended to give you "breezy advice", so I too am sorry if I have contributed to your hurt feelings. DH and I have been through several periods of difficult times. When we were first married, he didn't tell me he had debts from his previous marriage that he had walked off from when he joined the Navy. We returned to the same area after his discharge, and his creditors found us after we had acquired some cheap furniture and a car, on credit. Let's just say, at that time, "The Honeymoon was Over". The unexpected debt put us in dire straits because by that time we had a two-year-old and an infant. The car was totally an unwise purchase. DH wanted it so badly and he and the car dealer ganged up on me. I could've been the bad guy and refused to sign, but DH was getting lots of overtime at his job and I was lulled into a false sense of security at the ripe old age of 23. Of course the overtime dried up soon after. Then the car payment took all of one week's pay and then some. Shortly after that, there was a trucker's strike (this was in 1970) and DH was certain he would be laid off. So instead of waiting for the inevitable, he drove from KS to IN, where his brother lived, because his brother told him jobs were easy to find there and they paid higher. What he neglected to say was that the standard of living was somewhat higher there, too. DH found a job there and a house to rent, so we piled our meager belongings into a U-Haul trailer and moved. I was not one to run out on debts, so our landlord was paid what we owed and we notified our debtors of our new address. Of course this did not solve our financial troubles. It took me far away from my family and put us in an area where snow is on the ground from before Halloween to Mother's Day. We discovered our landlord was an alcoholic who was given to coming to my door and screaming at me for some imagined offense. His wife would let herself in while we were gone (they lived next door) and inspect, and leave me nasty notes. But I digress. I take the credit for getting us out of debt. I went to the library and checked out everything I could find about how to save money. One of the books I remember well was "Champaigne Living on a Beer Budget". It was then that I learned about how credit works, among other things. That first winter, I made my son's coat out of DH's Navy dress uniform. My daughter's coat was made from mine, as I had found a coat for myself at a yard sale. My mother had given me a bag of fabric scraps and I made my kids' clothes from that. I didn't have many clothes but I wore what I had. DH, for his job, had to have matching twill pants and shirts and steel-toe boots, so that took a chunk out of his pay. The first thing that I did with my new-found training, was to contact each creditor and ask them what was the least they would take to cancel the contract. I was surprised that they all had an amount right on the tip of their tongue. One of them quoted a realistic amount, that I could meet by arranging with the bank that held the car loan to just pay the interest for a couple of months. I shut everything down that I could. We ate a lot of macaroni and beans, drank nonfat dry milk. DH had no room to complain because they were, after all, his debts and he was in a long-term doghouse as it was. Getting the first creditor paid off was the hardest, but it was the "chink in the armor". With that payment off our backs, I was able to double up on the payments for another creditor, specifying that additional payment was to go ON THE PRINCIPAL ONLY. Before long, I had another one paid off. That following summer, we had enough money that I could use $20 every other Saturday at yard sales. When my $20 was gone, I was done. But I managed to buy, through that summer, jeans and coats and shoes for my kids, toys for the coming Christmas, tools for DH. When the magic day came that the car was paid off, it was like Christmas to me. Gradually we got on our feet. We bought a mobile home on credit and moved into a trailer park. It was our own home and the payment and lot rent was less than the rent we had been paying. Plus it was closer to DH's work. Then he was laid off. Then our son had an illness that landed him in the hospital and us with no insurance. DH got another job. He took a second job at a gas station. I used my skills to get things paid off. But it was hard because he still just "didn't get it". He thought he deserved something for all the hard work he was doing and kept buying things on credit: color TV's, expensive fishing equipment that he hardly used, an El Camino. I refused what I could, and we fought almost constantly. At one point it looked like our marriage was over. I was so sick and tired of being poor and him not taking it seriously. I took the kids and moved back to where my family was. He ended up selling what little we had and following, and we managed to patch things up, but it meant we were starting over again financially. I was able to get a job that paid pretty well, so at last we were able to have two incomes, but it meant the kids, by then 11 and 12, had no one at home with them. They got into so much mischief. If the neighbors weren't complaining, the kids were tattling on each other. But we were able to scrape together enough to buy a house in an older neighborhood that was not far from work for either of us. As time wore on, I doubled up on the house payments to shorten the length of our loan. Eventually I had the house paid off. We saved $17,000 in interest. Neither of our kids went to college. Our daughter dropped out of high school and our son, though he graduated, was not college material. DD made me a grandmother at the age of 42, and then didn't take her maternal responsibilities seriously, so we threw money at that problem for awhile. Then DH began having trouble with his knees and we discovered he had degenerative arthritis. Not long after, he became disabled. I had quit working, so I had to go find a job again. Shortly after that, it became clear we were going to have to adopt the grandsons. Then our son started having panic attacks and we had to throw money at that for awhile. And now, here we are. DH is 65 and I am 62. He has finally been able to have surgery, recovered well and is getting around better. Our grandsons are 18 and 19. The 19YO will graduate from HS this spring. The other is with DD and will probably drop out, not having applied himself and having nearly enough credits to be able to graduate any time soon. DS has managed to recover. We bought a small house that he lives in. He pays us an agreed amount every month and the house will be his soon. DD has just had bariatric surgery and then lost her job, so she is now looking for another. We bought another small house that she may end up having to move into for awhile. We are considering offering her the same opportunity to own a home that we offered DS. Neither of them have good credit so a conventional loan is out of the question for both. It seems everyone has to learn how to manage their money the hard way. But we are not in bad shape, considering all. We owe no debts. We own our own home plus the two little houses, free and clear. We own one recent-model extended cab pick-up. Signed our 12YO pick-up, that was well cared for, over to DGS that lives with us. We have money in the bank. I am now retired. My retirement check starts this month. It's not huge, but it's more than I thought it would be. Sorry for the length of this, but it illustrates the ups and downs of life. There have been times when I thought we were in such a horrible financial mess that we would never be able to recover. But we did. It took some know-how, but mostly just dogged determination. I shed many tears of hopelessness and frustration, spent many sleepless nights of worry. So trust me when I say "live within your means" and "Pay off all your creditors", I speak from experience. There is nothing breezy about it.

We English don't do love and romance very well (too screwed up I suppose) except for the lightweight Hugh Grant films or Barbara Cartland type of pink froth.Vee, I disagree. I think English writers have given the world some of the best romances -- Daphne of course, the Brontes, Jane Austen; and I can read Galsworthy's "The Apple Tree" over and over and cry every time (and I love the film adaptation of it called "A Summer Story"). I'm fond of several British romantic comedies, including "Getting It Right" (from Elizabeth Jane Howard's novel). That's the one with Helena Bonham Carter as the very unladylike Lady Minerva Munday, Lynn Redgrave as the seductive older woman, and Jane Horrocks as the junior hairdresser, all of whom are willing to teach poor Gavin -- a hairdresser in his thirties, still living with his parents, and still a virgin -- a thing or two. Gavin's mother cracks me up when she learns that Gavin knows a girl who has a title and is impressed even before she meets Minerva. If I thought about it longer, I know I could come up with many other English examples of love and romance. You've got to remember, Vee, that we Americans think the English are exotic. Cece, I adore the libidinous Pepys, though his Elizabeth must have found living with him sorely trying at times. I relish all his clothes descriptions, and he was very good with food, too. I've never managed to read his diary all the way through \-\- I always get sidetracked \-\- but I've dipped in and out of it for years. Norcal, I'm with you about the ballads -- one of my favorites is "Whiskey in the Jar" -- ooh, that Molly (or Jenny, in some versions) and her chamber! I'm not familiar with Nikki Grimes, but her cheek/as raw as red-brown meat...now that is descriptive. What's the poem about?