Most recommended windbreaks around here start with an outside row of caragana, then lilacs, poplar and finally Colorado blue spruce all oriented in a relaxed V with the wind hitting the apex of the V.

I just read Gone Girl, I think I picked it up from a recommendation here. It was good, I really liked it. Lots of twists and unexpected turns. I even paid the rental book fee instead of waiting on the list. It's $3 for a 21 day rental. I figure the library needs the money so I splurged. I usually just wait on the list but I couldn't find anything else I wanted and the title jumped out at me. It was definitely worth $3 to read it. My library just put a kiosk, like a vending machine, in at my community center. It has movies, kids book, and adult books. I can take out a book, from the vending machine, while I'm at the gym. How cool is that? The kiosk books are free, the rentals are extra copies of the extremely popular titles and are kept in the main branch. I imagine it's a nice little money maker for them. I did make a note of a few new books from this thread. Thanks.

Netla, the first book that came to mind, though an old classic was Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life by Mrs Gaskell, written in the time of those 'dark satanic mills'. Modern writers from that area include Val McDermid, popular crime writer and Jeanette Winterson Oranges are Not the Only Fruit; she has become an increasing angry lesbian so don't know about her other work. ;-( You will love both Durham and York, both small enough to easily walk around and with beautiful church and other buildings. There is The Story of Durham by Douglas Pocock which looks interesting (though pricey). The site below gives some eg's of books set in/about York. Loads of history . . . Roman, Viking, railways, chocolate-making etc. Whitby is also interesting. Look out for anything from Saint Hilda to Captain Cook . .. and Dracula! Hope this helps a bit. Here is a link that might be useful: Books Set in York

I only rarely listen to music now days. Unless driving and trying to stay awake, or nerves calmed. Even then I prefer talk radio or audio books. The only bluetooth audio device I have in my house is a headset which I've used mainly for audio books while walking. I didn't realize bluetooth didn't have the bandwidth to keep up with higher bit rates. As a test, I just now tried transferring a 17 minute 772 kbps flac song over bluetooth to my laptop in the same room and it just barely kept up. The image shows 102 kilo BYTES(capital B) per second which would be 816 kilo bits per second. The song is 772 kilo bits per second so if it had transferred at the same rate beginning to end it would have just barely kept up. But I noticed it was initially transferring at about 91 kB/s (728 kb/s) so it would have been dropping a few frames, stuttering, or however it handles the loss. But it should be plenty fast enough for (even 320kb/s) mp3 quality songs though, right? ETA: Just for the heck of it I just transferred the same song back from my laptop to my desktop using wireless wifi. 20 seconds or less over wifi as opposed to almost 20 minutes over bluetooth. Now I remember why I never use bluetooth to transfer files. It is (relatively) slow. Or at least mine is. :)