Charmion,

Don't you know? The cups breed at night when everyone's asleep. I bet you thought that gentle rattling sound you hear in the house at night was a train passing on the tracks a few blocks over--nope! It's the cups humping. The DNA is so complex that they come up with offspring with all sorts of messages and designs--progeny do not necessarily look in any way like the parents.

They're building retaining walls in the new housing development on the other side of our woods. I walked past slowly yesterday to get an idea of how they do it. I need to build one in front (semi-ornamental, but meant to front a berm I've built up in case any traffic decides to fly through the yard rather than stop at the corner where the road T's in front of our house.)

Kat, I have lots of great beads I've accumulated, and a number of good pattern books now. The process of simply lining them up in the bead tray or making a sample swatch is good to a point--getting the whole thing to "hang together" (pardon the pun!) is the trick, isn't it?

I found the doll furniture. The figures have moth-eaten clothes but are otherwise okay. The wood furniture looks good, though I had some inexpensive plastic furniture I'd added later that kind of stuck to the dolls--the plastic stuff is going in the trash. I need to clean it all out and do a few repairs and then this house will be ready for it's close up. No clutter in that house, at least!

I picked up a beer on the way home from running errands this evening, but I'm so tired from the trimming that I won't finish it. It'll work well to attract snails and slugs in the garden tomorrow. They don't care if it is flat from sitting open in the fridge.

SRS