Oh, the season of giving is truly here! Hubby came home with a substantial gift certificate for one of the big electronics stores. (Back story: DH has been fuming about our phones for a long time. We have several cordless phones including one rather good one with an answering system and one phone with the cord. He has always refused to learn the control buttons on any of them. He had repeatedly demanded I get new phones but refused to tell me what kind he wanted so I have been saving to give him a new system for Christmas in the form of a certificate. I also got the wires etc. to run new wiring anywhere in the house he wants to put them. That was going to have to wait until I get over this back problem.) Well, he announced the certificate was going to the purchase of a new phone system and I said that messed up my gift to him and it was a good thing I had not yet purchased one and gave him the cash I had saved along with the list of phones that I had been looking at and their ratings. After a long perusal of all those, he decided they weren't good enough and he found a really high tech system with an answering machine that will take up to 8 extensions to the base unit. It came home last night (thankfully for our bank account with only one extra extension) and my technophobic DH presented it with the announcement that it was the first time one present covered gifts for both of us. So here I sit with 40 pages of instructions to figure out and apply to the new system before I try to explain to DH how to answer the phone, make a call, retrieve a message or find a number in a menu. Hopefully he will read the instructions but I won't hold my breath. Merry Christmas, every one. I hope you have all the parts and the instructions are all in the right language. Sandy

Hey Jim, did you see the "June Gloom" article on the front page of today's (Sat) Times? Sigh. excerpt: ------------------------------ Brace yourself for lower-than-normal temperatures, rain and cloudy days this month, the National Weather Service says. And don't expect a warm July, either. "The three-month outlook for Western Washington shows below-normal temperatures mid-May through July," said Jeff Michalski, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Seattle. The prediction that temperatures will be "below normal" means they could be only 1 or 2 degrees below average  or as much as 10 or 15 degrees below average, as they've been for the past few days. On the brighter side, it's supposed to rain a little less than normal this summer, Michalski said. ------------------------------ Here is a link that might be useful: June Gloom all through July

Thanks everyone. You gave me exactly the answer i was hoping for! I do love the variation in the natural materials (one of the reasons I prefer the real stuff to the synthetic), so I was thinking that mixing would work. Thanks! caligirl, what are you using for the base? Are you running the subway to the floor, or using a ceramic or marble base? I looked into marble base but at $21 a linear foot I couldn't swing it. I just want something to give it some definition. I'm using basketweave marble on the floor, subways up the wall, a decorative strip of carrara and nero squares, another row of subway, and then a pencil liner. (pencil liner is instead of the chair rail I'd originally wanted). Are you also doing marble on the countertop? I'm trying to decide what to do there. Mine is a kids' bath so marble seems like a bad idea... anita

Where do you live, Amy? Typically the seeding window opens when the end of summer temps start to fall in the evenings. That's usually a sign that the daytime temps will soon follow. You can't really look at the calendar to determine when it is. If you have several weeks left with temps in the 60s or higher, your window is still open. For example if you live near the coast where the temperatures are influenced by the ocean temperature and morning dew, you would have time. New grass seed does not need a wonderful bed of loose soil to germinate and take root. It needs sunlight and moisture. If you bury the seed under top dressing the seed-to-soil contact will be better but you've blocked out the sunlight. Hopefully the germinated grass seed will pop a blade of grass through the top dressing to get sunlight quickly. The way Mother Nature seeds new grass is to have grazing animals knock the seed onto the ground, and then they walk or run over it. It has been observed by farmers that seed sprouts most quickly in the footprints of hooved animals and less quickly just an inch away from where it was clearly stepped on. What that means is the heavy footprint of the animal pushes the seed into the surface to get better seed-to-soil contact. If you follow the Mother Nature logic, there is no need to aerate, dethatch, rake, top dress, or any of the other processes that have become normal in many places. The best thing you can do is scalp the existing grass down low, scatter the seed, and roll it down with a water fillable roller. If you just have a small area to seed, you can simply walk on it and get the same effect as when the animals walk on it. Believe it or not the pressure we put on the soil is about the same as what cattle put on the soil. Their weight is distributed over larger feet than ours, so it works out about the same.