Nancy, the turtles are about 5-6 inches long, which is just about the same size as most of the fish. The fish actually bump the turtles to push the them out of the way during feeding. The turtles are adults and feed mostly on plants. Along with the hyacinth roots, they eat watercrest, lettuce (not water lettuce), peas and carrots. I don't think they would bother the fish if they could even catch them in the first place. Painteds seem like very gentle creatures. Dave, you can see a 5-6 year old photo of my pond if you click on my name or My Page listed next to posted by at the top of the post. The only changes have involved the waterfall. I don't have any current photos of the entire pond.

G.M., I always share recipes. It's not like it's going to hurt me if someone else makes the same thing. It is a recipe I found on the internet, but then I had to change it up just a little bit. It gives roast a bit of a different flavor, and we just love it. Here's it is: one 6-lb. roast 4 T. butter or margarine 2 medium onions, chopped 16 oz. sour cream 32 oz. chicken stock or chicken broth 3 T. dill weed 1 and 1/2 t. seasoned salt 1 t. red pepper flakes Pour the chicken stock, sour cream, dill weed, seasoned salt and red pepper flakes into a crock pot, and stir together. Cover the crock pot and turn it on. Let the broth ingredients begin heating up. Melt the butter or margarine in a dutch oven on top of the stove and then brown the roast on all sides. While it is browning, chop up the onions. Remove the roast from the dutch oven and place it in the crockpot. Saute' the onions in the dutch oven until they are lightly browned. Pour the onions/butter mixture into the crockpot and stir well. Set the crockpot on low if you want to cook the roast all day, or on high if you want to cook it for a half-day. Cook, serve, enjoy. The longer it cooks, the more the liquid cooks down and thickens. Sometimes, if I only cook it for 6 hours, the liquid is a little runnier....more like au just when I want it a little thicker like gravy. So, to remedy that, I pour about 80 percent of the liquid into a saucepan and simmer it on the stove for a while to evaporate more moisture. Then I pour it back into the crockpot and stir everything together again. (Usually, while I am doing that I am preparing the side dishes.) If I cook it all day on low, the moisture usually has cooked out and the broth is thickened up the way we like it. A roast this size makes the four of us a couple of big meals, and there is usually some meat left for sandwiches. I like to make open-faced sandwiches like the open-faced roast beef sandwiches at Cracker Barrel. Just chop up some of the leftover roast beef and heat it and the sauce. Serve over thick slices of sourdough bread. Yummy! And the tomato plants.....well, the ones I have more or less match what I thought I was raising. I have to finish the comparison tomorrow, as I got distracted by a movie DH was watching and sort of stopped in the middle. There are a few tomato plants that weren't on the original list, which isn't unusual. Often, after starting my seeds in late January, I come across a variety that sounds delicious and decide to start "a few more tomatoes". LOL And, of course, sometimes a few seeds don't sprout, or sprout and die, or sprout and get eaten by the deer or rabbits when I leave the flats sitting outside at night. (sign) Tomorrow, I'll let you know how much the list changed. I know I did add Ramapo F-1, which is back on the commercial market for the first time in quite a while. I ordered seeds from the New Jersey Agriculture Extension Service at Rutgers University (in January, I think) and they didn't arrive until March 10. I started them right away, and they are now about 3" tall and have 2 to 4 true leaves, so they'll have to grow a little before they go into the ground. Still, with the very warm weather we're having, I think they'll reach planting size pretty quickly. Sometimes I think back to how easy it used to be before I started raising my own from seed, and think that life was so much simpler then. (smile) But, I do love the huge variety of colors and flavors, so I don't really mind. I want to plant a lot Monday, so I'm free to run down to Ft. Worth the rest of the week to see Mom in the hospital, especially if they start the tests Monday. I think the oncologist is going to try to diagnose the probable cancer without extracting bone marrow (due to her age and lower bone density), so it may take a few extra days to get a definite idea of what is going on. We also have the annual Fire Dept. awards dinner Saturday, and have to do some running around one day this week to pick up plaques and other awards and stuff and get ready for that. I hope for a rain-free Monday so I can plant, plant, plant, since the weather seems good in the extended forecast, and it may be the only day I have "free" this week. (At least the recent rainfall has kept down the number of grass fires, so I'm not having to drop everything and go!) Dawn

Congrats on learning Excel. It's almost a never ending process though once you've got the basics down it becomes much more understandable. I took quite a number of Excel course levels prior to my retiring and I always enjoyed them. I had one spreadsheet that was so detailed and interconnected to hundreds of pages of data and hidden macros I was always afraid to let anyone touch it in case they ruined something LOL Therefore the biggest TIP... always always always hit the SAVE button every once in awhile as you work just in case. AND when you're done ALWAYS make a duplicate copy of the whole spreadsheet and keep it in a file under your name separate from the main file, just in case. Nothing worse than finding your work lost or wrecked. But being smart you have "your backup" LOL Regarding keeping genealogy/historical data I'm thinking that Excel isn't exactly the best program for that. Microsoft Access is more geared to sorting, sifting and printing documentary data whereas Excel is more for numerical data. The better part of Access is that data entry is much simpler, you create a "form" with fill in the blanks and just type away the name, date, birthplace, year, etc and it magically compiles it all for retrieval however you want it. With Excel you have to go filling in all those little boxes on the spreadsheet. I highly recommend taking the MS Access course as well.

It's not that much different. I've been using QBPro for years. Let me know if I can help.