Ken, the new enemy of plantkind on The Neighbor's Plot side is the punk 20ish son (or illegal tenant?) of the Chinese upstairs next door neighbor. Of the Friday night knock-down drag-out fights with his significant other. Of the chintzy 99 cent store signs he stuck all over the garden I had just created. He is a pig, leaving cigarette butts all over their side of the lawn and some in my garden. The first time I saw a filthy disgusting cigarette butt in my garden, my ears laid back, my claws came out and my howls could be heard for blocks. But I decided to take the kindness route. What do you do with "lost" objects? You return them, of course! I meticulously picked up the 20+ butts this pig left all over the lawn and garden and "returned" them onto the porch. There is now a growing and disgusting collection of cigarette butts all around the ground on their side of the porch---you don't think the father (or illegal landlord?) of this punk could bother to stoop down, gather the butts and toss 'em into the garbage can right there, do you? Naw. He just kicks them off the porch onto the ground all around the porch and on the ground leading up from the hill to the side of the porch. What a comforting and soothing sight upon one's return home, I tell ya. It is indescribably disgusting. Now, about my little spirea shrub--which happens to be planted in The Neighbor's Plot garden. You can see where the heavier canes end and newer, slighter growth began last fall. The newer growth is what it accomplished before our first freeze last fall. I was thinking of trimming it down to a bit below where last year's new growth begins, to stimulate some heavy new growth this year. THIS is the shrub I planted to act as a sunscreen for the delicate Midas Touch heuchie I planted there. It seemed to work, as the Midas Touch began to send up nicer looking leaves which were not sunburned after I planted Ms. Spirea. The heavy snows actually removed some of the soil around one of the hostas' roots. The roots are now partially exposed, along with what should imminently be pips. Can hardly wait to see my little guys spring into action! Patience, after all that snow, is a rare commodity.

It's one of the English Ivy cultivars, Hedera helix '24 Karats'. From the collection of Ivy at the Buffalo(NY) Botanical Garden. I grow a number of different one's, but don't have this one presently. Mine are grown in pots, hanging baskets and on toparies. I'm somewhat paranoid about planting Ivy in the garden, since many of the lazy neighbors have allowed it to become a nuisance in their gardens and it climbs trees, where it transforms into an Adult form, flowers and produces berries. Birds then scatter the seed everywhere and it becomes invasive. My property is mostly woodlands and a bird sanctuary, so you can imagine the problem I have with seedlings. not only from Ivy, but all berried plants! Not all are exotics, many are native plants. Here's another view of the same plant. Rb

Yes, you can use a digital camera to convert slides to digital files. It depends on what accessories your camera manufacturer offers. A few years ago when Nikon was selling their 900 series, they also offered a slide conversion kit. The camera mounted to the kit and the kit had a backlight to illuminate the slides. The slides would be saved to whatever format the camera supported, and at camera supported resolution. I have a cousin who at one time did commerical photography for advertisments. He had shots from around the world at exotic locations - including models. He convertered about 3000 slides using his Nikon. So, it depends on what accessories are offered. A fast way to transfer the photos to disk or other storage media is to insert a large capacity memory card into the camera, say 1 GB or more and shoot away. When the card is full, pull the card and place into a card reader and copy the photos to the storage media of your choice. While you at the task, it is advisable to check you work. Review the slides before copying to permanent media to see if adjustments in exposure, etc. are needed. The copy process will faithfully copy dirt and scratches as well. If you have MicroSoft Office 2000 or other, you may have a viewer hidden away. To find this viewer, got to Programs> Microsoft Office Tools > MicroSoft Photo Editor. It's not a full featured editor, but what it does, it does well, and works great for reviewing. A caveat: While the camera memory card is in the reader, do not perform any operation that writes back to the camera card other than simple deletion. Each camera manufacturer has their own propertiary formatting scheme, and that can be fouled if you perform a "write" to the card with anything else except the camera. Storage Media: You should give some thought to the choice of final storage media. For example, 10 years later, will equipemnt be available to read the media? How permanent is the media? Maybe it would be wise to set up a calendar to remind yo to copy the media every 5 years or so. I do not advise depending on thumb drives, although these have improved greatly over the past 5 years. Thunb drives are great for temporary storage, but these do have a limited life. Each junction can withstand about 10,000 rewrites before these fail. Memroy cards these days employ 'leveling' schemes to level out the wear over the entire card, not just the front end of the card. This scheme has improved life by a goodly factor, but someday, a jucntion will eventually fail and that file will be damaged. If the damage occurs in the directory, the entire card may be lost. I am not privy to the internals of today's cards, but in the beginning, these cards had an internal, keep-alive battery that was good for about 10 years. I have been tussling with this storage problem and do not have a satisfactory solution for long term storage of sensitive documents. The best that I have at the moment is external hard drives and CDs and DVDs. Nothing yet matches the old time technology of well processed photos. For example, I have several dagurreotypes (tin types) from which I have made acceptable copies. These images were over 150 years old. I also have photos that are over 100 years old that have proven useful in my genealogical research. So far, digital storage can not match this record.

I wouldn't worry about the install disks at all. Someone might want them. As far as the ones with personal info on them, do you have a good strong magnet around the house? Even refrigerator magnets can wipe out data on disks. I remember one guy who came into the store with a bag full of software he bought at a fairground sale. He couldn't get the disks to load. I checked them out and they were partially erased. As I emptied the bag, there were three refrigerator magnets in there advertising the place he bought the software from! I'd run a good strong magnet over the ones with data, then if you really want to be a bit more secure, format the disk and then copy something of no value onto it to overwrite anything that may be on there. Make it much more difficult to recover. You can do this a few disks a night while you're watching tv or something or even while you're surfing.