Thanks! We've been going up there almost every day to pick blackberries and swim until I have piles of bird photos I've not even posted yet. Every day I get more, so I keep falling behind, but I suppose that's the way it is in summer. 7-24-09, Poppy Mnt, 1rst yr male Blue-winged Warbler From 7-6-09 Poppy Mnt, farm 7-25-09, Poppy Mnt pay lake, fledgling Green Heron From 7-6-09 Poppy Mnt, farm I'll have to get busy and post them because yesterday at the fish hatchery, we were already seeing migrants coming through! 7-26-09, Migrating Forster's Tern at fish hatchery From late summer birds, 2009

I'm so sorry. You've had one stunning blow right after another, & you must be reeling from it. I don't for one minute believe that these are "real" dreams (ie, dreams in which it's really your husband communicating). No way would he show up to torture you. I think they're just dreams in which your inner self is expressing the dismaying sense of loss & helplessness (if you'd known on November 4th, what could you have done? nothing). I'm with Marie: find someone & talk & talk & talk. Cry & holler & blubber if you want. I'm holding you in my thoughts & in my heart.

Our internet service is back (it was the service provider, not us, who had technical issues after the storms) so I'm playing catchup and working my way backwards from the most recent posts. Amy, They all were rooted....they were branches that were creeping and crawling along on top of the mulch and putting down roots. So, yours should have had roots somewhere. Our dogs and chickens never have bothered tomato plants, so I suspect the plant parts taste bad---deer will eat them though. It sounds like you and your Wild Women of Owasso had fun. That dog needs the biggest most gigantic rawhide bone y'all can find---something the size of a tractor tire perhaps---so she'll have something to chew and maybe, just maybe, then she'll leave your plants alone. I haven't seen a true golden viola, but...California has a native viola that is golden, so it seems to me like someone could have bred a golden viola out of it. Also, there are some pansies that are golden yellow and the violas are close cousins to pansies, so it seems reasonable to think you could have a golden yellow viola. All the yellow violas I've grown have been more of a lemon or pale lemon yellow though. Nancy, We're so rural that I actually am amazed that the WiFi works 99.5% of the time. Typically, if we are forecast to get severe weather, I'm not extremely worried about hail, wind or tornadoes because they are only slim possibilities that might occur. The sure things that will occur if we have a severe thunderstorm? First, the Satellite TV will freeze and then go out. That will last until the storm has moved on. After the TV goes out, it is somewhat likely that the internet will go out too. It doesn't always, but when it does, we always have to wait a day or two to get it back. At some point, the power will flicker off and then come back on. This is only a minor annoyance. Only once in the 19 years we've been here have we lost power for even 4 hours, and that was just last year. Prior to that, our longest power outage had been only 2.5 hours. So, it is briefly annoying, but our local electric co-op guys are awesome and are out there working to fix things the very minute they know something is wrong. This morning, while we were at CostCo, Tim called our internet service provider to check on the outage and they said it was them and not us and that they had fixed it this morning. Sure enough, when we got home, it was working again. Long, long ago--probably 2001 or 2002, Tim figured out that as soon as I had empty plant flats, I'd start more seeds. Still, I think it took him a couple more years to realize that I constantly start more seeds from February through June no matter what. It wasn't as obvious when we had a smaller light shelf with only three shelves that only held 3 flats. Now that we have a larger one that holds a lot more flats, it is a bit more obvious when more plantless flats appear on the shelves that I have started a new round of seed-starting. I have a lot of flats sitting in the garden waiting to be planted. Then, I have a few more flats on the table outside the sunroom---mostly waiting to go into the back garden when I get the front one finished. Then, on the baker's rack in the mudroom, I have 3 or 4 more flats of flower seeds I just started yesterday, also for the back garden. I'll move those outside tomorrow so the flowers can sprout and grow in full sun from day one. I just don't want to move them out until today's rain has ended. Even after I have planted every square inch of space that is safely fenced off from the deer, I'll have succession crops of one sort or another started in flats. It is what I do. When I yank out a crop that is at the end of its productive life, I have small seedlings in flats ready to put into that space, so we have bare space for just hours, not days. Eventually, at some point, it gets too hot for me to care, so I rarely start new seeds in flats after June. Until then, it is just a seed-starting merry-go-round here. Jennifer, I see those strange black boxes sporadically, but they always go away quickly, so I think it is Houzz/GW and not your computer or mine. Coral honeysuckle grows fast in good soil and with good moisture. Mine doesn't grow much in bad drought years, but I planted it in unimproved clay....though I think that years of decomposing mulch should have improved the soil a lot by now. Still, it holds its own even with temperatures well above 100 degrees and no rain for 4-6 weeks straight. I only water it if it wilts, which it seldom does. A year from now, you won't believe how big yours has grown. Jacob, It is very common for our part of our county to get caught in a dry slot (I don't know why) and to have rain falling to our west and east simultaneously and completely missing us. I've learned to live with it. Once, when I met the spouse of a forum member at one of the Spring Flings, he asked which part of this county we lived in. I started to describe it in general terms and he said "Oh, you're in that dry area that the rain always misses" and he could describe our area right down to the road names. Turns out he worked for several years on a custom wheat harvesting crew and had been in our county fairly often. At least while other parts of our county had flooding roadways and power outages on Wednesday, we were fine---albeit dry. When it finally rained here yesterday, the same folks that had heavy rain the day before got heavy rain again....and more flooding, etc. Some of them had small hail on Wednesday and I was relieved that missed us too. We didn't even have enough rain for our part of the county to flood---though some roads a mile or two north of us did flood. It is hard to be patient and wait for the rain to find us, but yesterday it finally found us. Now we're wet and muddy, but at least we didn't have storm damage. Nancy, I wanted asparagus until I had it. I really, really wanted it and knew it needed great soil as it is a long-lived crop, so I waited until I had improved the heck out of the soil for almost 10 years before I planted it. This was especially important because it is at the northern end of a sloping garden, so the runoff all runs from the higher southern end of the garden to the lower northern end. So, now we have it and I am starting to think of it as a garden thug and starting to hate it. It grows like mad. I really think a lot of the irritation is a timing issue. In late winter/early spring when I am busy with wildfires and trying to plant and torn in two by the need to try to find time to do both, there that asparagus is, sprouting and growing like mad daily and demanding that I must drop everything right that minute and harvest it before it gets too tall. Once you harvest it, you must eat it, preserve it, etc. and then the next day there's a whole new crop of spears saying "Harvest me, harvest me....". The other irritant is that once you've harvested for a couple of months, there it sits, blowing around in the wind, flopping over into pathways, providing a natural trellis for bindweed to climb and just taking up space for the rest of the year......so, in some future year, if my asparagus mysteriously disappears, no one should be shocked. The only thing that will kill it is to cut it down to the ground repeatedly over months or sometimes years so it cannot grow and store energy for the next year. If I get tired enough of it, I'll do that. I'd just dig it out, but it has been there a long time and all the roots are grown together in one gigantic mass---it would take a backhoe to dig it out, and I'm not letting a backhoe get near my garden. I keep hoping the voles will eat it, but nope, they only want to eat things that I do not want them to eat. It is too late to plant more edible podded peas. They perform best at cooler temperatures---say when highs are lower than 75. The higher you go above 75 degrees, the more they begin to fade. Mine seem to stay fine as long as the highs are only through the mid-80s, but once we start hitting the 90s (usually that happens here in May), they begin to get powdery mildew and, no matter what you try for the PM, the pea pods are diseased and not fit to eat. So, when PM hits, I harvest all I can, yank out the plants and replace them with something that loves the heat. For years, I tried to fight the PM and keep the peas growing, but the PM hits the pods almost before it hits the foliage, so that was pointless. Often, since the edible podded peas are trellised, I plant icebox melons in their place when I remove them because the icebox melons can climb the trellis and produce marvelously on it. That is a space saver for me. You also could replace your peas when the time comes with a vining form of cucumbers, Armenian cucumbers, southern peas, lima beans (produce better in the heat for me than regular pole beans), yard-long beans, malabar spinach, vining types of squash or gourds or mini-pumpkins. or the vining annual flower of your choice. You can plant a fall crop of peas in late summer for an autumn harvest. Generally you'll get a great harvest of fall peas if you plant them about 10 weeks before the date of your average first frost of autumn. They will produce until your temperatures hit the mid-20s, at which time the plants do not necessarily die---but the cold can make the flowers abort, which sort of wrecks your chance of getting a harvest. Amy, Not to burst your okra bubble, but every single person I know who grows okra thinks that their variety is the absolute best and absolute most special okra in the world---far better than everyone else's. I don't know why. Perhaps because okra, when it is happy, can outcompete, outlast and outproduce everything else in the garden in the heat and the drought conditions. (Although it will do better with regular water.) So, folks who grow cowhorn okra think it is the best and the most special. Folks who grow green velvet think the same thing about that variety. Folks who grow one of the orange or red varieties (they all look red to me, regardless of the fact that at least one of them has orange in its name) think they are far superior to others, etc. People who grow Heavy Hitter are sure it is the best, and folks who grow Stewart's Zeebest think it is the best. I have grown a lot of okra varieties some years in order to compare them to one another, and they all did well enough. For what it is worth, I haven't had sharpshooters in OK. Maybe they are more of a TX thing. Kim, I hope you're feeling better and I hope the first market tomorrow is a big success! Tim is back from Salt Lake City, y'all, and I 'think' that was his last work-related trip for the next few months. The dogs were delirious with job when he walked into the house and wouldn't give him a moment of peace last night. One dog or another had to be almost in his lap or leaning against him for the rest of the evening. Thinking about how many times he has had to travel lately, I asked him 'do any of y'all ever work a week in the office?' (referring to him and the other three assistant chiefs), and he thought about it and said "not really". lol. Even when they are in town, they're constantly at multi-agency meetings, planning sessions, conferences, police academy graduation ceremonies, legislative lobbying sessions, FBI Academy classes, etc. I told him today that "while the men are gone away to play, it is the women (their administrative assistants) who are in the office running the show", and he was forced by his own honesty to agree with me. It is good to have him home. We went out for breakfast today and did our usual CostCo shopping run on Friday instead of Saturday, and we did it in the rain. There was a method to my madness, though, because I figured if we did all the errands and shopping chores today (and we did) in the rain, then tomorrow on a beautiful sunny day with highs in the 80s, we could (and will) go plant shopping. That is called planning ahead! Had the rain stopped, I would have dragged him and the carload full of supplies and groceries to a few favorite nurseries, but the rain didn't stop until we were almost home, so tomorrow I get to go plant shopping with an empty car trunk. I'm not looking for normal stuff tomorrow like run-of-the-mill bedding plants, but more for special accent plants for the containers or for perennials for the hummingbirds. There is not a lot of extra space left to fill in the front garden, except for the area currently overrun with native dewberries, and I'm going to take them out, rototill that soil, rake out all the roots I can and fill up that semi-shady area with flowers. Native dewberries are the bermuda grass of the native fruit world, so they just need to be completely gone from the garden. There is one thing in the dewberries' favor---they are attempting to take over the asparagus bed. It might be interesting to see them slug it out, but two garden thugs like them is simply one to many. Today Damon Lane and NWS-Norman both posted maps showing the path of the Norman tornado the other night.......it traveled alongside and crossed Paula's road (no wonder they were in the storm shelter!), though I couldn't tell from the map how close it came to Ken's and Paula's on its 8-mile journey. Dawn

The "washboard" floor is a bigger issue than the smell. The cupping in that area is substantial. Wood will show you the DIRECTION that the moisture is coming from. Cupping like yours (the centre of the plank is LOWER than the edges...or the edges are sitting higher than the centres) is and excellent indicator as to where the moisture is coming from. If you imagine the centre of the plank as an arrow head, you can see that the arrow head is pointing "down". That means there is a LARGE SOURCE of moisture sitting BELOW the floor. How that happened or why is another story. But the fact that you have moisture issues BELOW that section of flooring is "clear as day". I'm sorry but you have multiple issues going on here. I would agree that 4 coats is causing a curing delay = LONG TIME getting rid of the smell. And the oozing from between the planks is an indication there is FAR TOO MUCH product on this floor (again, causing curing delays = lingering odours). But the BIG issue is the lack of humidity control in your home. The cupping in your floors indicates there is too much moisture BELOW that area of floor (do you have a basement or crawl space???) that MUST be looked at. Dehumidifiers need to be employed to get the moisture levels DOWN. And the dehumidifiers need to be used in the space BELOW the floor (pay close attention to the area below the cupping planks). The bonus being the finish will dry FASTER and will help reduce the smell FASTER. You can use/rent temporary dehumidifiers running 24/7 (remember to empty the water tanks twice per day or you run the risk of a mini-flood = not helpful) for a quick fix. This will allow you time to find/pay for a permanent solution to the problem. Please, please please investigate the MOISTURE problem BEFORE you try to fix the finish on this floor. If you sand down now, you run the risk of doing ++ damage to the cupped planks.