Wonderful garden! Good rock work too! I'm only an hour away and hope to see your garden some day in person. Cher, the leaves appear to have come from Arbutus menziesii. They normally shed during the summer, beginning in June. It's nature's way of dealing with our dry summers. AKA Madrona, a broadleaf evergreen tree with peeling, reddish bark. We have several weeks before we see the real Fall. Mike

"It is easy when you have the right tools" Mostly the right tools. A smallk propone cylinder with a torch head screwed directly onto it is one of the worst things. Everything works adequately on 1/2 inch pipes, and maybe 3/4 inch pipe with two joints on a fitting. A 3/4 inch T is very difficult with an inadequate torch. The flux burns out of the third joint as the other two are completed. The lead free solder is a little harder to work with (it does not flow as easily as lead based solder) but has gotten better over the past 5-10 years with improved alloys (a very small amount of silver is one of the additions). If you are very green at seating pipe a plumber might be worth the price to avoid any chance of damaging the surround.

Dotmom, that's not unusual for allergies. When you get stuffed up, you naturally breathe through your mouth and then you'll get the scratchy throat and stuff. I keep the bottles of saline nasal spray around and a bottle of Dristan spray if it gets really bad, but the saline usually moistens things up enough it opens up the sinuses to breath easier. Keep an eye on your local pollen counts and see when you react. With the rain and stuff, everything is blooming. A shot of brandy wouldn't hurt either, would it? :) And 15 minutes of Bustertime should make things feel better too. Hope you're back to a full tank soon!

The naturally generated cycles take tens and a hundred thousand years to go through a cycle, but recent experience is that this has speeded up and so drastically that, lacking major changes in our operations, to cut down heavily on the generation of carbon dioxide, and especially methane, which is several times as harmful as carbon dioxide, it may become impossible for humankind to survive. Some are talking of mankind destroying the earth, but we have much more complex requirements for survival than do some others of the inhabitants of the earth, so a number of such species would/(will?) survive us. If we go, quite likely the rats and cockroaches, among remnants of other species, may well survive. On the other hand, I rather facetiously said a while ago that, at a conference of the plants and animals dealing with their concerns about survival, it was said that humankind was becoming an endangered species, and a number of participants, quoting how many species have disappeared in the past few centuries, said, "Good - the sooner that those humans disappear, the better, for their depradations have caused many of our species' disappearance." . ole joyful