Dorothy, From watching how the jetstream, I think it has persistently come close enough to your end of Oklahoma that you get the gray, gloomy clouds on the edge of the cold fronts that are dropping snow and ice north of you. Way down here in southern OK we've had more sun than last year, but in the last week or so, the sun has become increasingly rare. Keith, You're welcome. I'm getting pretty concerned about y'all up there in central OK. This is the driest I remember seeing your part of the state in winter in several years. I understand exactly what you did and why. I'd probably do exactly the same thing if I was a dry as you are. When my soil gets so dry in drought periods that rainfall or sprinkler irrigation rolls downhill on the surface of the ground and isn't even absorbed, I know I've waited too late to start watering. I think it is always better, even (maybe especially) in winter to water the dry ground. If it gets too, too dry and planting time is approaching, it can be hard to keep the soil moist enough for seeds to sprout. The big mistake I made in one dry spring (may have been 2003 or 2005) is that I planted and watered sparingly waiting for rain to fall to give the seeds and plants more water. Well, rain never fell and by the time I realized that I should have been watering more heavily to get them off to a good start, the were pretty stunted and pathetic. It was a hard lesson to learn, but it made me a better gardener in succeeding dry years. Don't even mention those photos of those big old black clouds. They are fascinating but in a horrifying and very scarey type of way. I hope and pray we've learned enough about conservation and no-till commercial farming that we never put ourselves in that predicament again. Can you imagine the mass hysteria, especially on the part of the media with its 24-hour-news-cycle nowadays if we had something like that occurring? If you haven't read the book about the Dust Bowl days that I've linked below, I highly recommend it. I reread it once every 2 or 3 years to remind myself of how bad it was and what all those folks went through. We throw the word "diaster" and "catastophe" around pretty loosely nowadays, but those people who endured the Dust Bowl years really lived through a catastrophe and it lasted for years. Some of the old-timers here have told me stories about what it was like here in our county, and it wasn't pretty. One of them lived on land adjacent to ours and she tried to explain what it was like to have the big clouds of dust ruin the laundry you'd just washed, or blow through the cracks in walls, etc. into the house and cover everything with a fine layer of dust. She was a very small child then so I'm not sure how much she remembers directly and how much she remembers from hearing her folks talk about it later on their lives. I just can't imagine what it was like to endure 8 long years of catastrophe. My dad did tell me about the pure agony of watching crops fail over and over, which was a disaster for folks who essentially raised all their own food. So, if couldn't grow a crop, you couldn't eat. One thing that sticks in my memory from photos of those days is just how painfully thin everybody was. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: The Worst Hard Time

Hi, Bob. IF I had to pick just one image editing software program to use, I would choose Paint Shop Pro. I have older versions going back to when it was owned by JASC and later by Corel. The biggest problem with the newer versions is that they DO have more features, but they are also larger programs that use more memory and hard disk storage. This is especially true for the latest version of Adobe Photoshop Elements version 5 .. which is why I purchased version 4.0 .. I wouldn't even be able to use Elements version 5 on my Dell laptop, it is such a memory hog. I also got Elements version 4.0 because it is compatible with my Logitech NuLOOQ Navigator (a hardware device to use in place of a mouse and in conjunction with a graphics tablet). I already had Elements version 2.0 on my computer. Adobe Photoshop 7.0 came bundled with some hardware I bought, possibly my WACOM Intuos graphics tablet. BTW that is a good way to end up with free copies of editing software.. watch the ads for which software programs companies are tossing in if you purchase their hardware.. graphics tablets, laser mice, scanners, photo printers, etc. Elements 4.0 is very good for making quick edits, Auto Enhance, etc. And a nice feature of this is you can also get a more detailed editing window if you choose to, where you have emore control over the editing. I think the big difference between Adobe Elements and Corel PSP is that there are more online places to go get free downloads and tutorials and Plug-Ins for Adobe Elements. Also, many of the Adobe Photoshp Plug-Ins will work in Elements. And some of the Plug-Ins from Adobe WILL also work in Corel PSP. There are more books written for the Adobe products, too. An excellent manual for Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 is "Photoshop Elements 4: the Missing Manual", by Barbara Brundage. This weekend, when I have more free time, I will go thru both my Corel PSP and Adobe Elements programs and give you a better comparison. I learned to Image Edit on JASC Paint Shop Pro so have the most familiarity with it. If you stay behind the latest upgrade by a version, you can get it cheaper once a newer version comes out. And you can buy used software at Amazon.com and eBay. It is almost annoying how fast the companies keep coming up with upgrades for their image editing software. Makes it harder to learn the programs and get a feel for what is where in the layout. Gail R (WNY)

DA I used to buy my cheater glasses at Sams they come in like a 4 pack, very good quality and usually have a case and cleaning cloth with them, excellent price. I could then have a pair in all the rooms I normally would be reading in. Now that I have my bifocals I don't have to use them, but I have been known to put a pair of the cheater glasses over my real glasses when trying to read something impossibly tiny. Unfortunately for most of us that are in the category I am in lasik is out of the question. But the surgery they are now doing where they put a multi focal implant lens in the eye is a very viable solution, this is a surgery that has zero cuts in the visual area of the eye, makes only tiny cuts in the white area for a tiny lens to be implanted, takes generally one stitch closure. This is the surgery I am looking forward to. Much safer and fully reversible, very similar to the same surgery they have been doing for years for cataract patients. The beauty of it being multi focal means it takes care of those cheater glasses as well! All in one lens. This is a quote description "For some patients then, rather than having a corneal laser eye surgery procedure such as LASIK, Custom LASIK, PRK, LASIK, Epi LASIK or monovision LASIK, a different type of refractive surgery can be used to better help them achieve their goals of being less dependent on glasses or contact lenses for not only distance vision, but intermediate arms length and close near vision. This type of refractive surgery is called Lens Replacement Surgery which includes ReSTOR, ReZoom and CrystalensÂ. ReSTOR®, ReZoom & Crystalens Lens Replacement Surgery is performed in a similar manner to cataract surgery. It is performed in an outpatient surgery center. With ReSTOR®, ReZoom & Crystalens Lens Replacement Surgery, your surgeon will numb the eye with eye drops much like with LASIK. He or she will then make a very tiny incision at the outer edge of the cornea through which a microscopic instrument can be inserted. Using ultrasound from the tip of the microscopic instrument, your surgeon will actually be able to gently break the crystalline lens into pieces small enough to be washed away and drawn through the probe and removed from the eye. Once your natural crystalline lens has been removed, it can now be replaced by a new permanent Intraocular Lens Implant. The new lens is readily inserted and placed in position through the same tiny incision at the outer edge of the cornea through which the natural lens was removed. In order to help you achieve your goal of being able to see at far, intermediate arms length and up close for reading vision, your surgeon will select from advanced intraocular lens technology available today which includes ReSTOR®, ReZoom and CrystalensÂ. Each of these advanced technology implantable lenses uses a slightly different optical design to help you achieve your goal of clear vision at all distances. Your surgeon and his or her staff will discuss their recommendation based on many factors in your consultation." Intraocular Lenses another amazing choice available that we never thought we would have!

I found the info and will paste at the end of this post but the picture can be pretty big. salbwil just tell us what program you are using to resize and right click on the picture and click properties on the drop down menu and tell us what size it is. Here are the posting instructions from the webmaster at hearth.com: OK, so hereÂs the deal - your member photos (in your member profile) is limited to a small size - about 150 pixels (dots) square. The little Avatar next to your posts is limited to the same or maybe 100 each way..... Regular pictures, like in this forum, can be fairly large - almost full screen (1000 wide by 1000 high) and up to 200KB (200,000 bytes). But, many folks donÂt know the basics of email and web pics - IÂll try to explain. Pictures sent to the web and by email are best at what is called "screen resolution" meaning that they somewhat match the size od the dots on our monitors. For our purposes, this is aout 72 DPI (or dots per inch)..... What the average person needs is an "Image Management Program" and NOT the one that comes with Windows! If you are a PC user, download the free program called Picasa - This will organize and store all the photos on your disk and also allow you to export smaller copies (for web, etc.) and to even fix the photos up a bit! Apple users already have an image management program, iPhoto, which comes with every mac. To prepare web photos in iPhoto, simply select the photo or photos, go to Export (or it might say Share in newer versions) and when the dialog box comes up use the part that says "scale no bigger than" to select what you want the size of the exported photo to be. For purposes of this board, a photo with a width of 400-700 is ideal. Now, with Picasa, it is pretty much the same thing. Select the photo or photos and go to Export to Folder- the box shown in the picture below will come up and then you can select the picture size - say 480 wide as in this example. The other slider will compress the file size so the picture loads faster. In most cases, anything over 50% is good. If you want to learn more about this stuff, dig around on the links at: http://www.hearth.com/hcc/ - these are links from a course I teach at night school. If you are a user of Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, use the "Image Size" dialog bx to convert your photo to 72 DPI and approx. 400-600 pixels wide (the height will work out automatically) - then use "Save for Web" and tryjpg "medium", file size should be really small. Of course, donÂt save changes to the original picture since you still want that big on your computer and for yourarhiving and storage.