Oh My...I began to spread alfalfa pellets about 5 years ago. I spread them under the bushes and small trees. I do not bother to dig them in nor sprinkle them with water. I give a handful to anything shorter than my tummy and 2 handfulls if taller. I do this once in the early spring and once in Mid-August. Kim, your post is making me wonder. Our 2 cats eat hardly any cat food in the summer. I am aware that they eat mice, voles, rats, etc.... Wonder if the alfalfa acts as a magnet for them...lol. Now if only it would attract moles and goffers... I also do a spring tonic which is alfalfa, molasses, rabbit poops, horse manure, fish emulsion and anything else I happen to have around. This goes in a 100 gallon horse trough with a cover...water before covering. Let sit for a week. Spread by the bucket load..1 per plant. It just plain stinks to high heaven and the stink lasts till the next rain. Sure seems to work much quicker than the sprinkled alfafa pellets. Have a good evening. Jeannie

Those are very nice chairs, ML. I agree that they could go in the living room as easily as the dining room. I like the wavy "x" legs, especially. It gives them a little something extra. I have studied your diagrams and read your descriptions, finally. Ran around all day yesterday - went and got a Holter Monitor at the cardiologist's and then hit Salvation Army, where I got a sweet little bakers rack - solid metal, welded seams - for $35! Just needs a little 3M Rust Reformer. I think you have shown us the kitchen design before. I remember the sink across from the Bertazzoni, the big garden window, the baking area. I am not sure if you had the nice indentation there for the cook to have a safe zone, though. I do remember the sitting area outside the bedroom, though. It is neat to see the diagram of your home after all these years of seeing photos of little parts of it and imagining how it all fits together. The nosy neighbor, is he on the side with the clawfoot tub and your clothes closet? Is the new vestibule in the front new this time? I don't think I remember seeing that. I am also a bit surprised that you gave up on the storage/pantry units on either side of the window seats. I like your idea of base and wall cabinets with your favorite solid surface counter there, though. Does the table that you use in that space have extensions that you can use to fill the dining room if you have a large group? I am now struggling with an idea I have for my family room. We now have a nice (but huge) 1990s TV unit with the doors that slide out to shut the TV behind. Which I never do. The thing is 5 ft high, which is too high to place my gnome garden upon. I have my air plant garden up there, but it can hardly be seen. I want to ditch the furniture, get a larger wall-hung TV (old eyes can't see small print) and have a furniture piece that I can set things on and under. Craigslist had an beautiful console table for $230 that was under 2' deep at its smallest configuration that looked like a sofa table. It could be pulled out to 8' long! Yet it was only about 8" deep! I could set things on the floor underneath it, as well as on top. It did need a little restoration (it was from the 1930s), and I would not feel really comfortable putting a garden on it, as drips could happen. But since I made the entire kitchen into an island, I have no place for a table-height table, and thought I might want that option if I could ever talk DH into getting rid of the hunk o'oak that I once thought that I just had to have! I'd love to give it to someone to make into a nice play kitchen set like MamaGoose made! We could bring up dining chairs from the basement and have a sit-down meal if we wanted to. Currently, we eat at the island or sitting on family room furniture. I have a tea cart DH and I have used as a dining table, though. So I am imagining that you have the extending table that I wish I had! I hope that you are well by now, and that Marti is over her cold, too. I hear that both flu and colds are going around in Michigan, with Norovirus and RSV also hitting hard. We have been lucky, so far.

Sara, Ion beat me to it and gave you some good advice. I'll offer a bit more clarification on some questions you may have. It is a little difficult, as it's hard to discern how much knowledge you have in this area. I don't want to offer information which would be redundant to you. "1) Grounding of the furnace My generator's ground is connect to the ground prone of three prone plug(other two prone are not connected) through a 12 gauge wire and plug into an outside wall outlet. Is this good enough grounding for the generator? if I plug the furnace wire into generator, is this good enough grounding for the furnance?" Assuming you are simply using a pigtail on your furnace, as Ion mentions, do not connect your generator to any of your house wiring system. I would treat the system as simply a portable generator system for NEC purposes. Namely, simply plug your three prong pigtail into a three prong extension cord and plug your three prong extension cord into your three prong recep on your generator. No ground rod is required. Lastly, make sure the neutral in your generator is bonded to the equipment ground and the generator frame. Most generators are set up this way, but some aren't. It should say in your generator manual, but also do a check to make sure. You should see a wire bonding the generator to its frame. You should also see a jumper bonding the neutral to the equipment ground, but you may have to take off a cover to observe this. Your generator should have GFCI for the 120V receptacles. You don't need any other ground protection than this. Remember it's really the neutral that protects one against most faults which could cause electrocution. What most people call the "ground" is really a case ground (or equipment ground) which is ultimately "bonded" or connected to the neutral at some point. It's the "bond" of the neutral and case ground which really provides the fault protection when voltage leaks to the case. A ground rod doesn't really provide any protection in this sense. Let me give a real world example (I hope I'm not offering info. redundant to you here.) Decades ago, before case grounds (or equipment grounds) were installed on refrigerators, people were sometimes electrocuted from them. What happened was this. The refrigerator had a two prong plug - one for the lead, and one for the neutral (i.e. return current). The refrigerator would get old, wires would fray, or the motor would start leaking voltage. A lead wire would touch the case, or the motor would leak enough voltage the case/housing of the refrigerator would become energized. Maybe from time to time one of the family members might notice the refrigerator would "shock" them. It wasn't a bad shock, because the impedance was too high for the return path from the case through the persons body to the neutral. In other words, the path of electricity wasn't a good connection. They had shoes insulating them, etc. One day one of the family members, while getting some milk out of the refrigerator, spills some on the floor. It's early in the morning, so they're in their bare feet. They mop the milk up, but the floor is still wet. They grab the handle to put the milk back, but now the impedance is much lower (the combination of a wet floor and bare feet make a much better path for electricity). The current flowing through the person causes a constriction of the hand muscles. They can't let go of the handle. They can feel they are being electrocuted, but there is nothing they can do about it (by themselves). After a few moments, the same current causing constriction of the hand muscles makes the heart labor to keep it's rhythmic beat. After a short period, it stops beating altogether. By installing a case/housing ground (i.e. the third prong on the plug) a low impedance grounding conductor provides a direct short in the circuit if there is a lead fault in the refrigerator housing. The path would be from the lead, shorted to the case, through the case ground wire, back the the main panel, where in the main panel, the neutral and the case ground buses are bonded (connected). This direct short will "pop" the breaker, or blow the fuse. So long as the third prong on your pigtail is grounded to the case of the furnace, and the neutral and case ground are bonded on your generator, you won't be electrocuted from your furnace. You could still be electrocuted from your extension cord lying in a water puddle, or wet from rain if the outlet on your generator isn't gfci, but all newer generators are supposed to have gfci receps. "Why all this precaution when it comes to wiring the furnace, like separate circuit?" NEC requires all stationary appliances to be on their own circuit. So the main answer to your question is that it's code. The reason for the code requirement is to avoid people putting a lot of appliances on one circuit, causing the breaker to trip. Let's say you have your refrigerator, deep freeze and furnace on one circuit. One day the breaker trips rendering all three appliances dead. It normally happens when you are on vacation, so you come back to your house with all your food spoiled and your pipes frozen/broken. As a bonus, the water thawed enough to run for three days, flooding your house. NEC code allows an exception for any associated furnace equipment (humidifier, condensation pump) to be included on the same dedicated circuit as the furnace. "Olpea mentioned electricity generated by generator is of poor quality and can damage furnace. a 20 amp surge protector can prevent the damage to furnace from happening, right?" Unfortunately surge protectors really do very little in this regard (I'm referring to the surge power strips). A good one will prevent a major surges until the material inside is "consumed". This can happen with one surge. They won't prevent voltage drops. They also do nothing to correct sine wave distortion and frequency stability, which are also hard on electronics. My main point was not to try to talk you into a new generator but to keep your generator lightly loaded if you need to run electronics like your furnace. That will at least provide more stable voltage. Re: Inverter generators When I mentioned inverter generators, I was thinking of high quality Yamaha or Honda inverters, which are pure sine wave inverters and known for producing the cleanest power. Ion is correct, cheap inverters produce a poor waveform (as do cheap non-inverter generators). I disagree with Ion that electronics are not sensitive to power quality. I believe the opposite to be true. This post is a lot longer than I intended. Didn't mean to write a book.

Thanks for the gentle touch, Sam. I know full-well I'm acting out of bounds here just a bit with my political content. I also know what's going on in this country and the real deal is what's happening in statehouses, while everybody fixates on the cartoonish national headlines. For further reading-should anyone give two sh*ts...you might google American Legislative Exchange Council, better known as ALEC. This secretive, very well-funded (think Koch Bros.) group is heavily influencing state govts. wherever the governor has an R after his name. They are-OK this is my opinion-an extremely negative influence on our society. One word of caution though for anyone that actually believes any of my words-this organization has started to get some bad press, and true to their nature, they have morphed into numerous splinter groups, the names of which hardly anybody is aware of. So ALEC itself may recede into the background.....but the big guys that run the show, the people that would actually like for the Clean Water Act, The Clean Air Act, and the EPA itself to disappear haven't gone away. They just got a little better at hiding.