Hello again, hello. I sent the photo to an animal tracker that I met up with on the internet last year and he agrees that it is a rabbit. If you look at the last photo (not my pictures, but from a tracking website) you can actually see the 4 little paws together. My photos were taken after the snow was a little melted so they aren't as clear. But it's definitely a bunny. Anita

Ok, all of the people trying to say that this is a double track, least of all some kind of deer double track, have clearly not seen it. I have seen several of them around a muddy creek in Marshall TX. Out in the Nesbitt area. Both left and right prints, and they were everywhere. There's no way that they could all have been any kind of double prints. There's also something stalking the wood around Nesbitt that doesn't sound like anything I have ever heard. I have lived here since I was a kid and sit outside at night all the time. My mom used to take us owl calling in the middle of the night when I was younger and I gained a great fondness for the sounds of nighttime animals. I have never heard anything like it before. Whatever it is, there are several of them that call back and forth to each other and only very late at night.

No the kitchen does not HAVE to be situated in any particular location and certainly not so that it has a view into the backyard. Think about how you want your kitchen to work and use that to guide your floorplan. Getting groceries into the kitchen is usually a good reason for making the kitchen (or a large pantry) easily accessible from the garage. If you have a formal dining room, you'll probably want it to be reasonably near the kitchen so that you're not carrying dishes over long distances. Do you want a family room or den nearby so that whoever is handling kitchen chores is still close to the "family action"? If so, you may want an "open plan" kitchen or one that is connected by a wide doorway to the family room or great room. If you do lots of backyard barbeques then you might want your kitchen to open to the back yard. Likewise, if you have small children that you expect to be playing in the backyard and you want to keep an eye on them while you cook then you probably should try to locate the kitchen so there is at least a window to the backyard. For me, over the past 20 years we've been living in a house with a very tiny kitchen...too small for more than one person to work in comfortably! But, it has a pass-thru over the sink into what was probably planned to be a breakfast room. About 10 or 12 years ago we turned the breakfast room space into our computer room and DH and I quickly developed the habit of talking over our days via that pass-thru while one of us cooked or did dishes and the other caught up on email or websurfed. I didn't want to lose that "talk time" so, when I was designing our new home, I made sure that the new kitchen and office are connected via the same kind of pass thru. Our pass-thru and having the kitchen and office next to each other is probably not something very many other people would necessarily want but building a custom home is all about getting what works for you and your family!

Hello all, just wanted to post a follow-up on my new w/d set. Lowes replaced my Whirlpool Duet w/d just this past week. My wife and I picked out the Bosch 800 Nexxt Series. The unit themselves looks nice but once again we are not as pleased as I thought we would be with a new set. As you will see from my previous post, we had a problem with the washer shaking violently and moving all over the place knocking into the wall etc. So to deter that from happening this time, we put down a rubber rug mat first and then an area rug on top of that so that the washer would be less likely to walk when in the spin cycle. Well here are the facts, the washer and dryer are both level (I check with a level myself both side to side and front to back) and when it enters the spin cycle it seems like on low to medium spin it is just unbelievable the amount that it shakes. You can here the thing vibrating the floor and walls of the house from any room on the bottom floor. Although I must say when it finally reaches the highest point of the spin it settles out and just moves a very little. So my biggest issue is getting to the high rate of spin when it gets there it is just fine. I read a lot of other posts and people were talking about loading one piece of clothing at a time to balance out the load. Usually we just throw a handful of clothes in a time and don't worry about it. I certainly don't think you should have to take sock by sock, shirt by shirt, etc and load the machine but maybe you do. Then I thought the drum might not be balanced but not sure what the liklihood of that is since it's a new machine. As soon as we did our first load and noticed the erratic shaking on low to medium, my wife and I just looked at each other and said oh no not again. We are really seriously beginning to think that no front loader out there is going to be right for us because of the way they shake when spinning. I think if I had it to do all over instead of going with another front loading model we would have went back to top loading, I just can't take all the racket. Now we are thinking about making provisions to just do clothes when we don't have company or setting the delay and having it wash while we sleep. It's a shame you have to do that with such expensive equipment. The only other issue that we had was with the new dryer. We kept getting the error of clean lint filter. After cleaning the lint filter 5 times during one dry cycle, I decided to contact Bosch to see if they had any suggestions. The lady advised me that my exhaust hose might be bunched up causing the machine to get warm thinking that lint is clogging up the filter. So I looked back behind the dryer and it was pretty warm back there and the hose might have been a little bound up but nothing to where I thought it should cause any issues. I wanted to leave a decent amount of length to the exhaust hose just because it makes it easier to pull out the dryer if you need to without disconnecting the hose because you have plenty of length. So as a work around or potential fix, my wife and I slid the dryer out a little from the wall to ensure that the exhaust hose was not being bound up or crunch up at all and I just completed a full load without any error messages claiming that the lint filter needs to be cleaned so I guess we are on the right track. If anyone has any suggestions or comments about either situation/example, please let me know. Thanks for all your help, Michael