So glad you solved your mystery! On another note: for many seasons I've had a bird feeder station with tons of house finches/goldfinches/house sparrows/etc. just a few feet away from my veggie beds planted with peas, without any noticeable losses. It sounds as though the birds in your area are hungry for protein, as nesting season's underway. Now they've learned to eat a handy alternative when insect populations are low: your poor peas! It sounds counter-intuitive, but offering them a feeder filled with oily black sunflower seeds might keep losses to a minimum. In my experience, they'd much rather have enticing, easy-to-get fatty seeds than the so-so peas. Other people's mileage may vary, of course. Since pea-prospecting is a learned behavior, bird netting is currently your best bet until the next few generations "forget" this food source. Best wishes for your garden, L

In addition to here there are some absolutely fabulous forums dedicated to ubuntu and you can do searches there and find pretty much all the answers to your questions because someone else already asked it. Ubuntu Forums and on there they have an area called Absolute beginner talk good place to start. You should have firefox on ubuntu if not you can easily get it and pretty much anything you need from the repositories. Repositories this site right here is awesome they tell you some of the programs you will want to get from the repositories and why, now this one happens to be for one of the older versions of ubuntu, there may be an updated one if you want to search around there but most of the stuff will be similar. The Perfect Desktop - Ubuntu Just skip over the install part and go to the rest. I think you will find your answers on how to set up the font sizes and all those kinds of setting preferences should be I think under system, preferences, appearance. Honestly I do not use Gnome so you are kind of on your own since you are using it. NOW LET ME EMPHASIZE THIS write down all your passwords and user names, especially the one you will need to access synaptic and Root, this should NOT be the same as the one you set up to get into your ubuntu log in screen. If you lose these you are really in trouble. As to your mouse that sounds like it is a special function of your particular mouse you might go into where the mouse options are and see if you can enter or find your actual mouse brand and model listed and select it and you may get those functions to work. I really suggest you use firefox as your browser, what are you using on it now? WebBrowsers Ubuntu Video Tutorials For People Just Starting Out Windows to Linux: A Beginner's Guide Linux is Not Windows The table of equivalents kind of old but can help you to figure out what program you need in linux to do what some program was doing in windows. There is some good reading for you, I was given those links when I first started linux by my guru and I always pass them on to new users. Jump in with both feet! there are several of us here that use linux so feel free to ask in general. In fact some that use ubuntu will be able to help you more than I can since I have not used it or Gnome in ages. But if you are serious about it I really do recommend that book I mentioned

you are very welcome be sure he also added that easylist to the adblock plus it really catches most of the ads. With the easy list on it should remove those green ones too. also there are some extensions that can sneak on that allow those green line ads, one is Play Brite another is game play labs, go up top to Tools then add ons and in the list there and in the plug ins look for that and delete it if you have it also look for any other ones that you did not add. Another option to add to your firefox is a helper for your adblock plus go ahead and add this one also, remember to restart firefox after you do that. Element Hiding Helper for Adblock Plus Another way to get the easylist subscription in case you had trouble with my first link is to click on tools up top then on the adblock plus in the list then filter preferences and select the easylist from the list. At the bottom of that box it has a check mark on allow some non intrusive ads be sure you uncheck that. Since this has happened a couple of times I suggest adding this wonderful little program to your computer it is called spywareblaster, many people use it, I have it on all of mine. It is super easy you just install it, nothing to set up, just once a week or so open it, click check for updates, update then click on enable updates so that the shield turns green thats it. It sits in the back ground and protects you from bad sites. here is the link for download of the totally free version. I use the third one brightfort or second one from major geeks, don't use the one from download.com Download SpywareBlaster 5.0 Installer

That looks very much like a shrew. I had them around my yard when I lived in western Massachusetts, especially where brush and leaves were piled up. Unlike the deer mice, which came inside in droves, the shrews never came in the house, but one did best the cat when he tried to mess with them -- clamped onto his lower lip and refused to let go! Fierce!