Bought my home 6 years ago...keep smelling dank odors coming up from the basement, discovered the drainage from the toilet to the septic was never vented through the floor/walls to the roof. There is a short 5-6inch stack just below the floor, leaving me with only 2 inches there. How to I vent this properly without having a pipe running through an upstairs room or hallway. Looks like no matter where we vent this to our roof, the pipe from the toilet to the septic isn't under any walls or closets to hide it. I wanted to be able to put a vent free propane heater down there if the furnace isn't working in emergencies, and I realized an open flame down there could be dangerous because of the gases coming from the septic and this pipe. How did this pass inspection?! How can I vent this damn pipe out horizontally, safely?

dedtired, Hints for seasickness... 1.) Look off the stern instead of the bow; 2.) Fix your eyes on the horizon instead of looking a few feet ahead of the boat (you'll be out of sight of land); 3.) Sip on cold Diet 7-Up; 4.) Many people do fine underway; but when drifting they start feeling queasy. Whale watch boats stop frequently for whale sightings. While drifting, stand at the gunnel stanchions & hold on to a rail if it's rough rather than sitting down...much better. Actually, more people get seasick in calm water than in rough seas (within limits, of course!) When there's good wave action your body gets into a rhythem. In calm seas, there's just a slight up/down, up/down that gets to some people. Beam seas are the worst! That side-to-side motion can do in even the saltiest of seamen! Since I've been a boater, I can't imagine WHY people stick babies in cradles! Inhumane punishment, IMO! Also, if you're focused on looking for the blow spouts of whales your body won't notice the rolling sensation nearly as much. We need Lori. She's more local to Newport...I'm about an hour away. But here's a place to start...a fun lunch spot in Newport is the Red Parrot. Allow about an hour just to read the menu & make your selection. It's also a great place to people watch. And go hungry! Parking is tricky. Don't be a hero & try to find a parking spot on one of the side streets...it's mostly "Residents Only". Just pay your $15 & chock it up to a good day in Newport. You can also rent the most adorable two-seater scooters in Newport. The shopping is one of two things...either touristy or very expensive boutiques, gallery quality art, designer jewelry, home decor, etc. There are also some great bookstores. History lesson on Newport: Did you know that most of early Newport was built with slave labor? Most people don't realize the extent Newport relied on slaves. The wonderful granite cobblestone roads, the houses, the ships...all slave labor. By 1770, the entire workforce was slaves mostly from Ghana. They came as children & were different than the southern plantation slaves. In Newport, most slaves lived in the same house as their owners often slept in the same bedroom as the owner's kids. They were taught skills & became highly trained. By 1830, most Newporters had freed their slaves. They went on to found businesses, become councilmen, teachers, policeman, fireman, & held high offices. But they came to America as slaves. End of history lesson. Follow the signs for Ocean Drive/Mansions & go to Brenton Park. It's right on Ocean Drive. On weekends, it's a popular place to fly those huge kites in different shapes. The water is right across from the parking (free). Actually, you could just sit in your car & stare at Newport Channel for hours watching the boats. You'll see many huge international & corporate yachts. The rocks at Brenton Park are also a popular dive spot. Look for small boats with a red flag floating in the water near the boat. The red flag means, "Diver Down". When's your trip? /tricia Here is a link that might be useful: The Red Parrot

Not so strange, actually. They have to sell out store fronts, storage rooms and the warehouse...not to mention anything that's already on order from suppliers. Notice the article below says "third-party firm," meaning they've already hired a liquidating company to handle the closing. When Shabby Chic decided to close, the stores were open for 3-6 months before doors closed. S&H will start closing some faster than others (depending on lease, sells and location). The store employees won't know about further discounts until the liquidator tells them - usually the day before another mark down. It will be done on a store-by-store basis, for the most part. Here is an article emailed to us from the Birmingham Business Journal on Thursday: Scotts Miracle-Gro Co. announced plans to shut down its 56-store Smith & Hawken chain by the end of the year. The chain has a store at The Summit in Birmingham. Jim Hagedorn, CEO of the Marysville, Ohio-based lawn and garden giant, said in a statement that "the combination of a weak economy and the lack of scale proved too great to overcome." For a year, Scotts had been exploring options for the high-end garden brand it bought in 2004 for $68.5 million but decided closing the business was the "best option available," Hagedorn said. Smith & Hawken is based in Novato, Calif. Scotts on Wednesday said storewide sales across the chain will begin Thursday and will be managed by a third-party firm. Orders on Smith & HawkenÂs Web site, catalog and call center will be discontinued Thursday. The company in its last annual report said the chain has consistently underperfomed since it was acquired nearly half a decade ago. Scotts "corporate and other" segment, which consists of Smith & Hawken and administrative expenses, posted a 23 percent decline in sales at $51.2 million for the six months ended March 29. That segmentÂs operating loss for the six-month period totaled $75.4 million, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Scotts expects to take a $25 million after-tax hit on the closure of the chain, mainly tied to terminated leases and severance costs. Most of those charges, the company said, will be taken on by the end of the year. Scotts (NYSE: SMG) in the year ended Sept. 30, 2008, lost $10.9 million on $2.98 billion in revenue. The company has about 6,400 full-time workers worldwide.

On a trip back to Cincinnati a couple of years ago when my father was in the hospital, it was unexpectedly colder than I had packed for so I decided to go to the mall right across the highway from the hotel we were staying in. The place was desolate. One of the anchor stores had just closed, another had apparently closed much earlier, and inside the mall at least half of the smaller store locations were vacant and boarded up, with no signs that other stores were planning to move in. While some of the blame for stores closing can certainly be placed on Internet shopping, there are many other factors involved. The rampant drive over the years to build ever more new stores and new malls, eventually reached the saturation point, where each customer at each new store is merely one that isn't going to the older store. Coupled with the overall decline in the economy in much of the country where all of the better-paying jobs were shipped overseas, until all that remains is various retail jobs, which frequently don't pay enough for the employees to shop in the stores where they work. Another big, big factor in many of the store chain closings, (Toys 'R' Us in particular.) is the merger and acquisition and buyouts that have been going on for a few decades. Another company or an outside organization or coalition come in and buys the company and finances it through massive amounts of borrowed money, secured by the real-estate assets of the company they are buying. In the case of Toys 'R' Us, three private capital firms bought the then struggling company, and burdened the company with $5 billion in debt, then between the millions in management fees they have the company pay to them, and the hundreds of millions in interest on the massive debt, devour any and all gross profits on sales, leaving little to nothing (or less than nothing) to invest in keeping the company running. I think in the last year Toys 'R' Us had over $11 billion in sales revenue, but between the increasingly thin profit margins due to competition, and the massive interest payments owed, it lost maybe $400 million. The private capital firms have squeezed all the juice out of the company that they can, have written off all of the losses and are tossing aside its dry, drained husk, and will now be moving on to the next plump, juicy company to parasitize and plunder.