Born and raised in northern IL, currently residing in central IL... we did pick up one gardening zone moving south a bit. I'd give anything to live in central coastal Cali, but I'd never get my husband to agree to moving. He claims to like the winters, and does have a good reason... the cold kills off a lot of bad things, and keeps nature genetically strong. I'll buy that, but I still don't enjoy the bone-chilling cold! I get chilled in fall and don't thaw until spring! And the older I get, the more the cold bothers me physically... I'm old enough to dislike winter! The only way we'd ever move to warmer climes would be if our children moved their families there first... only then would my husband agree to a move. So, it looks like I'm stuck gardening in IL... where I must emulate a warm climate to grow orchids and other tropicals, dragging them out for summer and back in for winter... but I do get to enjoy lilacs, peonies, tulips and other bulbs and plants that are deciduous or require a chill in order to bloom. I guess it's not so bad... we have white Christmases, germ killing cold, and can enjoy plants that need the lower temps... and summer brings all the warmth and humidity that makes the garden bloom so beautifully... It may make orchid growing a challenge... but real gardeners aren't afraid of a challenge, and in fact, we welcome the chance to prove our prowess! What the hey, my Epi is still alive... I must be doing something right! :-)

IDrive: NEVER EVER BUY A WD IDRIVE! Heres my story. Two doors, each purchased directly from WD local store (company owned). First installer shows up, its her 2nd job since being hired! I ordered IDrive ( HUGE MISTAKE) She had never installed an IDrive before, or a Wayne Dalton system. She had worked for other door companies. After 3 hours a 2nd installer arrived. He was to be with her orginally, but overslept (or somthing to that effect). Ok so by 3:00 pm the have the tracks in and the door panels installed. Inform me that the next day the opener guy will be here to install IDrives! Two days pass...still no installer. Finally, after rearranging my schedule they guarantee me he will be there. Since I have a garage full of tools ( more on that later) I make arragnements to have someone at my home. Again a no-show. Finally I call WD corporate. Within an hour I get a call from the local store: He will be there first thing in the morning. Another day lost, as I am unable to have someone at my home to cover for me. Well at least he shows up. Within 15 minutes he askes me who installed the doors? WD , I say, and he begins to argue with me! Turns out the install was so far out of plumb and that the I drives, he said, would not work. Mostly it turns out the overhead tracks needed to be fine tuned and raised/lowered. How do I know this? Heres where it gets fun. I tell the guy how upset I am about the service and he goes banannas on me. Ranting and raving, complaining about his drunk manager and on and on. I finally tell him he has to leave. I take pictures of the install and the subsequent repairs. I then redo the install myself. I complain to WD headquarters but to no avail - its a local issue and they will have a district manager call me. After about four hours I have the door tracks perfect. I have the openers still sitting there so since no cooperation from WD I go ahead and install them. Not that difficult to do and overall I'm pretty satisfied. Now about the refund for WD failure to install. Make a long story short: Small claims court, pictures are invaluable! Local WD must pay me for my time etc.! Corporate has to cut the check. I get a call from the office asking why they were cutting me a check for a court ordered settlement? Check you own phone records and complaints. To say they were rude isn't even coming close. They send the check ( yes it cleared). Three months later the west door IDrive acts up. I call customer service and a very knowledgeable lady walks me through the set up and viola - works perfect. Two months later the east door acts up. I call again (since I hadn't written down the entire sequence). Again the door works but she asks what part number on the circuit boards I have. Turns out WD knew that an entire production lot was faulty and I have the faulty circuit boards. They agree to replace one. This means I must use the orginal installer -their own company store. Guy shows up, muttering about IDrive crap and POS they are. Within 40 minutes he has the board installed and its working OK. He then trys to collect a service call fee from me. 20 minutes of arguing he learns this was under warranty. And he is ticked at me! Two months later...yep you guess it; the other door fails. I call WD. This time its entirley different. They have my phone number attached to technical service calls. And due to my sucsessful small claims action against they, they bar me from any help! Even their technician was stunned. So much so, he told me, once again what to do and sends me a new circuit board, under warrnaty. He tells me that they have nothing but problems with IDdrives etc. He was sorry that I had been treated so shabbily. He actually apologized for his coporate bosses actions! I install the board upon its arriveal (took about 20 minutes) and for a year both doors worked fine. Then, once again the west Idrive fails. I call tech service ( why bother with the local store?) and they tell me they are not allowed to provode me with any help (phone number). OK..I say - no problem. I wait a week and call from my neighbors house, and with the information taken from the 2nd circuit boards I am able to talk with a service tech. I am told that lot of boards was defective and that I could get a new board under warranty from the local company owned store. I had to chuckle, as the tech had no idea what I had been through. Of course I tried to get the borad from the local store and they refused. Oh I am still, as of this writing under warranty. For the past year one IDrive does not work. I am having the same reocurring problems with the second unit. Fortunately, I only need 1 side of my garage to open. Recently I called the local store and talked with the secretary. She knew who I was and I asked if there was any way I could get the door repaired. She informed that the manager had been fired, and she would figure a way for me to get it serviced as she knew how screwed I had been. She said aI would have to pay a $75 service call though. I described the problem: the motor is running but no engagement: thus no opening or closing. Local gal is qutie familiar with this problem too - motor shaft most likely has broken. "Happens all the time". Oh and before someone says the door is out of balance... its not. I have held off as I am planning on remodeling my home and will address the issue by going with another brand. Now the kicker: I am a licensed General Contractor in two states, Florida and California. I have over 30 years experience in all phases of construction. I have never had to take any supplier to court - ever! In fact, I have never had a lein filed on me, or been sued, and only once have I fired a subcontractor during the course of a project (drinking on the job). 30 years of business! The way I was treated by Wayne Dalton was disgusting. I urge you not to buy the IDrive - it is a piece of junk - even their own employees know this, and for that matter any Wayne Daltin product - period. To this day I am unable to get customer service to assist me via phone; a clear violation of their own warranty and guarantee. Despite WD firing the manager (who was resposnible for the faulty install) and the subsequent small claims suit - they hold me responsible. Remember their corporate philosophy that Wayne Dalton has for its customers. Thanks for reading this. Oh and by the way, our company no longer uses Wayne Dalton products, and I have convinced several other builders ( the local builders assocation) to not use their products. That wasn't all that hard to do --thanks WD. Somewhere in Florida.... As for what we've been installing: Liftmaster. No customer complaints or call backs. Average home value of install: 3.2 mil. Way to go Wayne Dalton!

One of the things that we would love to see changed, would be that ALL children take the SAME standardized tests. As a parent, it makes it very difficult to compare between a public and private school because the students do not take the same test. So you cannot compare whether the students in the private school are actually scoring higher, and getting a better education. IMO, there are some private schools handing out A's because they want the parents happy so that the tuition/donations they are counting on, keep coming in. The parents end up with more power than they should have, because they threaten to pull their kids out, and the school does not want to lose the tuition/donations, so in some cases they "cater" too much to these parents. Many of the public schools have their classroom sizes way down, so you may be surprised at the number of students in a class. Also, public or private, much depends on how good the teacher is. Both private schools and public schools have good and bad teachers. We panicked with our first born and put her in a very elite private school, foolishly worried about the influence of children from the guests on the Jerry Springer show.LOL We then started hearing so many great things about a certain public school, that we decided two years later to just try it for one year. We were so worried that if we gave up our "spot" at the private school, that we would not be able to get her back in. But we took the chance. We never regretted the change, and the public school has been every bit as good as the private school (with the exception of one teacher two years ago, but the rest have been truly excellent teachers). Granted that this is a public school with alot of parental involvement, in a better neighborhood. Our state grades the schools in how well they are doing, and this school was rated an A. If you have really good public schools in your area, take a look at them. Talk to other parents. What are they happy with? What would they change? But find out how their students/school as a whole scored on the standardized tests.

judiegal, your husband is wrong on two counts. First, there are square-edged prefinished hardwoods available. There is one problem with the square edge - you can get something often called "sock-catchers" if the subfloor is not perfectly flat. There are many different depths of bevel available nowadays. We had the microbevel in our previous house to avoid "sock-catchers" and it did not collect debris. I could get the floors completely clean with a microfiber dustmop. (My current house has 107yo heart-pine floors, and I am getting all too familiar with catching debris because it has gaps over 1/4" wide between many boards. Maddening.) It peeves the living daylights out of me to hear people refer to engineered hardwood flooring as not "real" wood. It is just as much "real wood" as solid wood. Call solids solids if that's what you mean. We chose an ashwood engineered flooring for our previous house because NH has massive swings in humidity (we did not have central AC - it would have cost well over $12,000 to install) which can create problems with cupping, buckling, or gapping, and were extremely pleased with it. I cannot TELL you how many dealers and installers tried to bully us into site-finished flooring, even though we could not afford to vacate our house for a week plus, and there was no way we could stay and try to work around the construction and finishing (I would have almost surely been very sick from the stain and finish odors, and let's not even talk about trying to keep the cat and dog hair out of the finish.) Here in New England, the attitude of "we've done it this way for 100 years, we're not going to change now" is rampant! We did not have any problems with the floor delaminating from cat barf, spilled beverages, tracked-in snow, that sort of thing, and the aluminum oxide finish was very durable. The manufacturer, Robbins, did NOT recommend putting any additional finish on after installation. They were nailed down, not glued (the installers checked with Robbins to make sure they could be nailed instead of stapled). The reason why johnatemp thinks she can always spot engineered flooring is because CHEAP engineered floors use a rotary-cut veneer, which looks like plywood; better-quality engineereds have sliced and even quartsawn/riftsawn veneer layers. Another frequent myth about solid wood flooring - it cannot be refinished as many times as people are led to believe. You can only sand them down to the level of the tongue, which is usually less than a third of the thickness of the board. Old (50+ years) floorboards can often be flipped and reused if very carefully pulled up, but that is quite rare in modern flooring. Our floors were warranted for three full refinishings; the veneer layer was a third of the thickness of the board. However, you don't need to completely refinish a hardwood floor unless you have deep gouges or want to change the color. These days, if you want to refresh the finish and remove small scratches and scuffs, you just do something called a screen and recoat. It costs a LOT less than a full refinishing, too. Here are a couple of pictures. The floors are, as I said, from Robbins; style is and color is Tigra.