Luckygal pretty pic! "Subsidized Housing" hmmmmm - no actually it's very expensive to live in metro-west Boston. I pay a pretty penny for the privilege of experiencing New England winters in a money pit with $500 heating oil bills and leaks from ice dams! Somethings wrong with this picture! Hopefully in a couple years I sell out, and move somewhere that gets less snow. Today I went to dump the compost bucket in the bin at the end of the path. What a mess! Frozen kitchens scraps scattered around by the critters. I think the crows are the guilty party. The bin in chock full and there's not much settling or decomposing going on in this weather.

I grow veggies - that's how I got started as a gardener, and I can't imagine summer without a veggie garden. Most years I do some freezing of tomatoes and pesto for the winter. I also put onions and potatoes into the root cellar and grow more garlic than we can eat in a year, even though we use garlic in relatively large quantities. I also grow leeks and have begun experimenting with heavy mulching in the garden in the late fall and then digging them in milder winter weather and early spring. Last winter they wintered well, though the snow was so deep I couldn't dig them until much of the snow melted. This winter I don't know how it will go, since they weren't as heavily mulched and we had some relatively cold weather, 0 degrees, with no snow. Prior to last winter I tried storing them in the cold cellar or the fridge, but it never worked too well. I'll eat most veggies, but my husband is like Dee in that he doesn't like many veggies, and except for onion family vegetables, unfortunately most of what he does like are warm weather veggies like peppers, eggplant, and tomatoes, so they aren't good storage or winter crops. I'd still like to try wintering over root veggies and some greens in a hoop house/cold frame at some point. I have a few blueberry bushes and cranberries, but haven't been successful with strawberries (the chipmunks get them just before they ripen!), so I get them as well as tree fruits from local farmers. Around here it's quite difficult to successfully raise tree fruits like apples or peaches without a heavy duty deer fence and the orchards use IMP to reduce their pesticide use to a minimum while still getting quality fruit, so I'm OK with that. Good resources for those who want to grow winter crops in cold frames or unheated greenhouses are Eliot Coleman's books, such as 'Four Season Harvest' or 'Winter Harvest Manual' which are great as far as when to plant crops for winter harvest, what can be grown successfully, etc. At some point in the future I would like to try this.

I think it is overpriced myself, but I don't know what the real estate was worth at the time and the construction is steel like a large commercial building so its hard to know what construction costs were. Stylistically, there is enough about the exterior of this house that I don't care for that is not made up for by the glass box interior. The immediate neighborhood was awful up to about 5 years before the house was built: not dangerous awful, but a number of unnocupied properties in semi-open condition. (Well "dangerous" is relative...some six hundred arrests in a nearby block per year and an infamous murder nearby in the decade right before this house was built--but it didn't keep regular folks out of the neighborhood)But Philadelphia is unusual in that huge houses were built on the East West Streets, houses for merchants etc. were built on the number streets and in between, houses as smally as 1/10th the size of the mansions occupied the little alleys in between. So from the beginning the demographic has been really mixed. A great-Aunt of mine lived across the street where I am now in the 1960s when the neighborhood was a slum. She worked, she lived on the remains of an inheritance, and she was respectable. She just locked her door at night and stayed in. I still have neighbors that lived here back then--thats just how it was. So it had some precedent that this house was built in the early regentrification of this block. However, the block got a bit better, and then a series of events made it stall, and now its probably slightly worse then when the house was new. As is typical, some of the current hottest restaurants in town are just steps away, just not immediately surrounding this house. Philadelphia has always been full of strange juxtapositions, and this is just one of them.

Oh Dody! Hugs to you. Please try and gain some perspective and recognize that this is a terrible ordeal you are going through, that your emotions are all awhirl and that you are functioning only on reserve power. It will take a lot of time for you to regain your footing and find a new way for yourself. You will develop a new routine in time. Give yourself plenty of time to heal. Be kind to yourself. Don't expect too much of yourself at this point as you are going through one of the toughest transitions I think there is. I think taking care of your living and financial arrangements is very important because, once you have that done, the stress in your life will be significantly reduced. And if it helps distract you from your emotional turmoil, that's a good thing. Stay strong! Sending you thoughts of comfort, courage, and peace.