What nice condolences from the Idylls on the demise of my late gazebo! It is however in a better place aka the county landfill . Though it was not visible from the pic the thing had serious rot issues and was listing drunkenly to the north. The whole thing collapsed with very little effort from the demolition squad (one guy with a crowbar) . It took about 10 minutes . Now I see that the removal of this object has completely changed the dynamic of the plantings around the perimeter. I have serious work to do to make sense of it. The shade it cast is also gone of course , so there are a couple of plants that may be unhappy-notably my 15 year old Daphne odorata and my variegated lacecap Hydrangea. Im going to spend this weekend trying to re-arrange and replant. There goes another couple hundred bucks ! Oh well. Good thing for my employee discount. By the way, I apologize for the duplicate post. I must have right-clicked one too many times ! I have to admit to going to work with a cold. However, I do try to quarantine myself in my office with my box of kleenex and stay away from the copy machine etc that is shared by all. I would also like to point out in an unrelated observation that it is 5pm and still light out. Yeee-hah ! Hey Drema, one of the names on my DD;s short list for Mister Baby is Charlie. Cindy, Ive started to purge my office too---I have stuff in there going back to ancient times. I want to leave my successor with a clean slate. Poor Chloe just when she gets rid of the guest-dog from hell ! Deanne, see above for the answer to whether I am taking the gazebo with me ! I did however keep the ball top that was at the peak. That is my gazebo memento to be put in a place of honor in the next garden. How very nice that you and Doug were able to help out the young folk across the street. Symbiosis in action ! Sobug , I vote for Sophie for the girland is Milo after Milo Minderbinder ??? See above for explanation of the gazebo removal. What is really odd is how the removal of this huge object makes my back yard look smaller to me. Maybe it served to obscure the boundaries a bit. Michelle, do we have pic of your cemetery gate ? I think old gates are just F-F. Chelone, where would you put a chandelier in the Salon with the boatload of lighting you have in there already ? Methinks your offer of 150 may be ok if the seller has had it for awhile-cash flow yknow. No injuries from your spill ? And its hard to imagine that what your hours are have any impact on the ability of the business to get the work done. Just think of the consequences if you were to walk away. Seems to me that you negotiate from a position of strength; you after all are a craftsman and as such have value beyond the basic worker bee. I hope your skills are appreciated. T, Boo is beautiful, and I must say you look like the mom and not the g-mom in both pics-with or without head ,lol ! Ok time to sign off Kathy in Napa

marineguy, bhshaman, It sounds like you guys have it pretty well figured out. My wife and I are expecting our first! Maybe things will change once the baby arrives but the way it's looking now it's going to be a footrace though to see who gets to spend more time at home with our child. She's a busy vet and of course I'm a doc, both professions with type A personalities galore but I guess we both feel like some things are more important than money or professional prestige. I wouldn't care if someone were to call me a "househusband". People on their death bed never say "I wish I spent more time at work." Don't get me wrong, we're not exactly slackers but the organization I work for asked me to head up a new clinic. I really had to think twice before taking it on. As I said in a previous post, our newest vehicle is Jenn's '01 Camry. We can bicycle to work so we don't put on many miles. We live in an established neighborhood near the university in our town. Many of my colleagues have opted for swanky new houses. As far as I can see all it's done for them is smaller lots and more restrictive covenants. We're lucky 'cause we have 3 non-taxable retirement vehicles. One that is paid for entirely by my organization, one that is matching and one that isn't matched but is also pretax. I also have some money in a Canadian governmental hospital workers retirement fund that not only grows with interest (guaranteed a minimum of 10%) but is also indexed to inflation. (If you live in Canada it is very advantageous to be firmly attached to the gov't teat. My sister for instance who is an ICU nurse and clinical instructor has received 1 year of 70% pay for each of her maternity leaves.) Two of our vehicles were bought new, one used but we plan on driving them 'til the wheels fall off. I agree with marineguy that it's often not worth it to pay cash for a vehicle. All our vehicles are paid for but if I was in need I would just wait for one of the no interst for 5 yr specials and leave my money in some interest bearing investment.

Kirts, I feel like you are being wise to plan ahead. With the continuing modernization of some countries, like China and India, where the demand for oil and gas and other petroleum products is increasing exponentially every year, I see our energy costs continuing to rise. Since the average item in a grocery store in the USA travels about 1500 miles BEFORE it reaches the grocery store shelves, obviously the ever-increasing energy/transport costs will keep food costs rising. The changes we are seeing in the commercial agriculture industry and the food distribution network may force a lot of us to try to eat more locally. In the slow food movement, I think they refer to the effort to eat only locally-produced food as being a locavore. In addition, when you consider that a lot of the chemical fertilizers used by commercial farmers are linked to the petroleum industry, it is easy to believe that food costs will continue to go up because of rising fertilizer costs as well. I think people will turn to organic gardening as a means of lessening their dependence on foreign energy/fertilizers. There are many ways to store food and I use several of them. We have a tornado shelter and I use it to store root crops like potatoes and onions harvested in the summer as well as winter squash harvested in the fall. I have even stored winter squash on a shelf in the garage/barn and have had it last as long as 4-6 months in there. We have a large pantry located under our home's staircase. It is about 3 feet wide and maybe 12 deep. The height varies from 8' to about 2'. Back in that 2' area I store odds and ends we don't use often, like the pressure canner and my set of 4 huge stainless steel stockpots I use a lot during the harvest season. I freeze lots and lots of stuff. I always chop and slice onions and peppers and freeze them. I can usually raise a year's supply (or more) in the spring garden. I usually freeze tons of corn (I could can it if I didn't have storage space, but I do have storage space so I just freeze it.) Some years I get enough corn from the spring and fall gardens that we don't have to buy corn at all. The same is true of green beans and black-eyed peas. I even freeze tomatoes--they go straight from the freezer to the soup or saucepot in the winter. Okra is a little more iffy. We eat so much of it that I don't usually freeze much. I need to grow more, but the deer have been an issue with it for years, although I believe we've finally solved that problem. Thus, I should be able to grow more of it in the future. Carrots do best for me in the fall garden. If you have them in a well drained bed, you can leave them in the bed for months and harvest as needed. Another way to store them is in a clean trash can filled with sand. Pour a few inches of sand into the container, then put down a layer of carrots and repeat until all your carrots are stored. You also can keep them in a root cellar OR a refrigerator for months. Carrots can be frozen and even dehydrated. I dehydrate a lot of stuff. I then store all my bags of dehydrated veggies in the freezer, but you don't have to put them in the freezer. If you are careful to get out all the moisture, you can store dried veggies in the pantry. Even cantaloupes, muskmelon, watermelon and other lesser-known melons can be frozen. I usually cut them into squares, or use a melon baller to make them into melon balls and freeze them. You also can slice them into rather thin slices and dehydrate them. Their flavor and sweetness are so intensified by drying them that they are like candy. Anything that you grow in the garden can be dehydrated although some things take a pretty long time. I've never tried dehydrating corn, but I am sure it would work. Shelled beans dry naturally without dehydration and so do black-eyed peas. Many herbs can be tied in bundles and hung in a dry, warm, dark location to dry naturally. Canning is a lot of work and can be hazardous if done improperly, but as long as you follow all the recommended procedures and are careful, it is a great way to preserve food too. Cabbage will store a long time in a refrigerator or in a root cellar type situation. Back when people HAD to raise all the own food, a lot of them make sauerkraut to preserve the cabbage for winter, but I am not much of a sauerkraut person. There's always pickles too. You can pickle LOTS of veggies, not just cucumbers. You can pickle peppers, onions, carrots, beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, watermelon rinds, etc. You also can make all kinds of relish and, there again, not just pickle relish but squash and others as well. Fruit can be frozen, dried or canned and you also can make preserves, jams and jellies. You can even make tomato preserves or marmalade. Storing food is not as hard as most people think, but it takes a lot of effort. If you want to expand your garden for next year, you could start building lasagna type beds this year. Although, as much as the heat bothers you and with your allergies, you might prefer to wait until fall to start laying out your garden beds. I like to clean out my garden beds in the fall and remove all debris. This is very important because many garden pests overwinter in plant debris. Usually I let the chickens roam around in the garden beds in December and they will dig and scratch and take care of lots of insects, insect eggs, weed seeds, etc. I also like to heap up tons and tons and tons of shredded leaves, gathered from our wooded areas, on top of the beds as soon as they are cleaned out after the first hard frost. The chopped-up leaves decompose into a lovely leaf mold or compost by spring. (If you don't chop them up, they break down a lot more slowly.) I also prefer to go ahead and add manure and compost to the beds in the winter months, so my beds are "ready to go" in the spring. Sometimes in a bad wildfire year, though, I stay too busy to get the garden beds cleaned up and replenished with compost, manure and leaves in winter. In those years, I really have a hard time planting on schedule because the beds aren't ready. I do all my planning and seed ordering in late fall to early winter. By the time the new seed catalogs arrive, I am usually about "done" although there is always something new that convinces me to order one more batch of seeds. Because my family understands and supports my gardening habit, my Christmas gifts are always handy useful things like gardening gloves (five pair last year, everything from goatskin to latex-dipped cotton to suede) and hand tools and such. One of my favorite garden gifts (I always ask Santa for this one) is a big cannister of electrical zip-ties. I use them to attach tomato cages to stakes, etc. There are several really, really useful vegetable gardening books and food preservation books that I find ESSENTIAL to my success as a veggie gardener. I have had most of them for years and years and years and still refer to them constantly. I'll make a list of them later. I'm off to the store to pick up some more food preservation supplies--processing all that corn wiped out my supply of freezer bags, and I need some pickling supplies before the cucumbers get out of control. I'll write later about corn and veggies. Dawn

Sorry about your birds. Do you have a hole in your overhang that makes a cavity for the Blues? If so I would plug the hole so they cannot nest there as it isn't a safe spot to nest. As far as the one left, the male will probably leave to find a new girl. They don't usually renest where there is a failed nesting however if you put up a properly mounted nestbox (conduit with a predator baffle) he may bring his new girl there to nest. Good luck. Donna