Hi Dottie, Well I guess you enjoy challenges, I kinda responded to this on my post but it deserves another response on here, your right about the cactus part and having too start over after summer makes perfect sense with the heat out there. I'm not sure how many succulents you carry but bringing them indoors is one thought at least for the hottest months but then again not sure if you have tons of them or not. Having to start over because of the scorching heat is terrible however... I could bring them to my house right before spring ends instead of letting them suffer. Just kidding of course but I have been known for plant sitting :) I know it gets up to 110ð & sometimes even hotter out there, I think the difference out where I'm at is that its not so hot for the whole day & night like it is in Indio, Ca. Another tip would be screens over a patio to shade them and maybe even some misters. I notice a lot of Restaurants out in Palm Springs, Ca. have them for the peeps who are brave enough to go out there in the summer. I'll keep my eye open for other suggestions too, in the mean time stay indoors, drink plenty of fluids and if you have to go outside stay in the shade. Greg

I'll reinforce some of the others' suggestion, and maybe change some. If you're looking for the cheapest possible way to create a landscape, try the following: Go to your library and check out some books on garden design. While you're there, get one or two about plant propagation. Read, read, read. Take notes. Plan on paper. Keep in mind when you plan that what you're planning isn't cast in stone. If the yard is completed slowly -- to accomodate your budget -- then you'll have plenty of time to change your mind. And in the end, there's something very satisfying about seeing a plan become a reality. Also, it's not necessary to buy nice paper or colored pencils. Printer paper and crayons work just fine. Or notebook paper (you can draw lines the other direction to make a grid and use the grid to approximate space in your yard so you're not overplanning the space). And if you have a computer, that's even better: I don't know about Macs, but the IBM version of the Windows operating system comes with a very basic program called Paint which works just fine, and you can change the layout to your hearts content without throwing away a scrap of paper. If your soil is heavy, start collecting leaves and plant material scraps *now* and create impromptu compost piles. Get stuff from your neighbors: grass clippings, fallen leaves, trimmings, etc. If your yard is unplanted you have plenty of room to create piles for composted material. With time, patience, a lot of hard work, some indulgence from your neighbors, and a few large and unsightly piles, you can have a decent amount of soil amendment for cheap or free. (Though you may have to compost for as much as a year to generate enough for your purposes). I definitely second the getting-cuttings-from-your-neigbors approach. Or drive (or walk) around town and find plants that really strike your fancy instead of limiting your selections to your neighbor's tastes. And make sure you understand propagation (getting and using cuttings) before you go, not just so that the cuttings survive and thrive, but in case the owner of the plant you lust after takes some convincing because they don't understand propagation and need it explained that what you're after won't damage their plant. For pots to grow cuttings in, yogurt containers work fine, and you can pot up to gallon milk containers when you need to. The things that will be tough to find for cheap or free are the hardscape items. One recomendation I have is for mulch paths (or mulch in general): you can usually get mulch from power companies when they have to cut down brush or trees for maintenance purposes. If you tell them you want the mulch from the next job, they'll make it and drop it free of charge (or exceptionally cheap), though you have to be willing to accept an unknown (usually large) amount and you'll have no control over the timing. If you're worring about getting too much, try making arrangements with your neighbors for taking any excess off your hands. With patience, time and (sometimes huge) effort, you can have a nice landscape for the price of rooting hormone, soil-less sterile mix (for the cuttings) fertilizer, and some hardscape materials. Now, you may not want to go about it in this bare-bones a manner, but I took my suggestions to the extreme just as a reminder that landscapes do not need to be store-bought and expensive. Good luck!

I kind of agree with both halfdecaf an kailuamom's perspective: first, I think that we can't really fault the original speaker because we don't really know what he said. There are some versions of what he said that make perfect sense to me, others that don't, lets give him the benefit of the doubt and not attack a "philosophy" that he, himself, has not explained to us.The original post's vesion of the speaker's words made me think of how annoying rote "sorry's" are *especially* when they've been demanded of a child, given, and then abandoned. I'm thinking of the kid who spills something at your house and never says sorry except that the parent demands they do and then...nothing...they run off and play and the parent cleans up. Or the kid who viciously pushes your kid in the park and says "sorry" when told to but then the parents and kid walk away from you and your sobbing, snot smeared child. I think we would all be in agreement that a coerced sorry is not sufficient and that an educational method that relied *only* on coercion to produce the word but not on coercion or serious practice to change the behavior would be at fault. I'd like to read the speaker's words in the most generous way and figure that he's saying that sorry alone is not enough and that we have to work, long and hard, with kids to make them the kind of people who can realize that they have hurt someone else and take affirmative steps to make the hurt right. It sounds like kailuamom and I have the same kids, or the same parenting strategy. Neither of my children has any trouble saying they are sorry--and really meaning it. I don't mean "sorry for stepping on your toe" or "sorry for being a jerk" but like this "I'm sorry, mommy, that you are having to take me out to my friend's birthday party when you aren't feeling so well. Thank you for doing it." Or "I'm sorry that you had to make me soup and crackers (because I"m sick) when you already made a different dinner for everyone else." In other words, their sense of what they are doing, their duties towards other people, extend far beyond "don't step on people's toes" to "don't inconvenience people" and "don't take other people's kind actions for granted." I remember another mother in my baby group with my firstborn asking me "how I *made* her so empathetic?" and I just cracked up, you can't make someone empathetic. but you certainly can work on them, and have to work on them, to make them attentive to those around them. So sure we start out, even when they are babies, saying "oh! I'm so sorry you fell down! let me kiss it" and saying to them "oh, say sorry to little dulcibella for grabbing her toy." But as they get older our strategies for working with them and modeling for them have to get more sophisticated because they are more sophisticated. Modeling the behavior you want is the first thing you have to do but how many of us are even more self centered than our children? How many times do we demonstrate to them that we take the actions, gifts, griefs, etc...of other people for granted? IF the only "sorry"s they see are ungracious they will be ungracious. If they see their parents courteously deferring to each other, to the grandparents, to strangers they are going to learn (eventually) that "Sorry" goes a lot farther than just a word said after an incident, its a whole way of thinking about the situation and the other person. If you are still ordering at ten year old, or a fifteen year old, to say sorry you need to rethink your educational strategy because its not working. By the time they are fifteen most social behaviors should be pretty well engrained--or else they are rebelling against them for reasons that need discussion and airing. At that point they are also old enough to experience the natural consequences of failure to observe social niceties, as well as failure to be empathetic. If you are a jerk to your cousins or your friends, well, they won't play with you. If you are a jerk to your older relatives or older people, well, they won't do whatever things you've been counting on them to do. If a ten or fifteen year old kid behaves badly and doesn't say they are sorry--or even behaves selfishly and seems unaware of it--then just forcing them to say sorry (though it may be necessary) j ust isn't enough. So I guess I'm saying that I can see situations in which the original speaker is absolutely right--of course if he really said what was described I think he's an idiot. But there has never been a shortage of idiot motivational speakers. abfab

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.