I have been thinking about this protein poisoning, and I do believe it can happen. One of the things I remember reading, if the worms ingest food that has not decompose, the food will form gases in the worms' intestine. This will cause bloating, bursting or the string of pearl effect, being such delicate creatures. This will most likely happen with starchy food. I guess that would be things like rice, pata, potato or even banana that is not rotten. Mind you, I am no scientist. I am just guessing. If we eat rice , potato or pasta that is not completely cooked, we will have a stomach ache too. Imagine that happening to such a tiny worm compared to our size. That is also why I don't blend the worm food so they won't be able to swallow particles that are not "worm ready". I do chop, cut or slice them (the food) down to save space in storing and to make it decompose faster. A good thing not to chop or cut the food (i.e. apples and the like) if you are planning to go away. It will push the availability date to the worm further. We know they will not go hungry since they will keep reprocessing the VC and eventually eat the bedding, but ,,,,, My apology to the original poster. This should have gone under a separate thread. Otis

Why Kelly, so unlike you to jump to conclusions without a shred of factuality or even a reasonable assumption to be further investigated. I can almost always tell your posts before I know they're yours. In this case, I couldn't have guessed. With as much seriousness as I'm capable of mustering at any moment, I will tell you that my days of smoking anything other than a ham or turkey are way long ago gone, and probably one of the reasons I took up what I like to call gardening. Since my recent experience with my compost pile, I've decided to spend some time studying, you know, space, the last frontier after that foliar miracle, ACT. Chuckiebtoo

How about ... Put the pantry beside the fridge where you currently show the trash. On the oven wall, move everything down 18" to fill in the space where the pantry was. Then put the trash pullout between the lazy Susan and the 24" 4-drawer. The would make the trash convenient for use at the sink and also more convenient to the range. It will also make unloading groceries more convenient with the fridge and the pantry beside each other. Find out the interior measurements of your different drawer stack options and measure what you will be storing in them. I had wanted to store all of our pans on edge in the drawer so they wouldn't have to stacked. Most of them fit, but the 12" skillets do not fit on edge, the interior measurements of the drawer is not tall enough. All of the other baking pans, frying pans, pots, lids, etc will fit on edge. But what to do with the 12" skillets - store them flat on the bottom of the drawer which uses too much space ? Store them somewhere else in the kitchen ? Ugh. Also, my big pots do not quite fit 2 of them in the depth of the drawer from front to back. It will fit 1 big pot and 1 med pot, but not 2 big pots. If only the drawer was 1" deeper. There is unused space in the back of the cabinet where the drawer could have been deeper. And my cabinet line allows for size customizations, so if I had known, I could have requested this. Another thing they may have been able to do would have been a slightly lower toekick, which would have left room for the drawers to be taller. Someone on Gardenweb has done that before and is very happy with it. Another option may have been to have toekick drawers. If it was our primary residence, this is what I would have done for the 12" skillets. Plus, lots of other things would be great in toekick drawers. But, it is a vacation rental property and I just don't think the renters would be able to easily find that drawer.

Very good! Maybe if you do it often enough (enforce your boundaries), maybe your DH will catch on. When she started ranting at him about you, he could have told her that it has nothing to do with him & he isn't going to listen to her talk about his wife that way. First, she doesn't make the rules for who can attend a public function... at school or anywhere else. and personally, if my DH called me up mad about that before I had given him the information on the fundraiser... I would have to just realize that I am too darn busy to find that info right now, but he is welcome to come home and find it himself. Glad to see you are creating your boundaries with BM & DH.