Jay, Sometimes green plants are deceptively dry. I am seeing more and more of a sort of delayed-onset of drought damage every day. Some plants that initially greened up and looked fine as recently as 2 or 3 weeks ago now are totally brown. That includes all the willows on the banks of the big pond, but since they're trash trees, I don't care if they all turn brown and fall down...which is exactly what they're doing. Carol, We've always watered with a combination of hand-held hoses, drip irrigation lines and soaker hoses. Sometimes I use a sprinkler for the grass. Next week I am going to pull all the soaker hoses out of the garden and replace them with dripline so that everything in the big garden and the Three Sisters Garden will be watered with driplines. Then, I'll use the former garden soaker hoses for the grass. Actually, I am not especially inclined to water the grass, but the trees growing in the yard will need to be watered, so that means the grass gets some water as well. Since I plant in grid patterns and not straight rows, replacing the soaker hoses with dripline will be a nuisance since the plants already are so big, but in future years it won't be too bad since I'll put the lines down before I plant the warm-season stuff. I'd rather stand and water with a hand-held hose because that makes me slow down, stand still and pay attention to what is happening in the garden, but as you noted, this is not going to be one of those years where hand-watering is adequate, or even practical. Congrats on the first tomato. Give yourself credit for producing it. All I did was start the plant. You're the one who planted it and kept it going and brought it into production. Our tomato harvest has exploded in the last couple of weeks, so your tomato explosion shouldn't be too far away. Sometimes I have to remind myself it is only May because, harvest-wise, it feels like mid-June. For dinner tonight, I'm going to make spaghetti sauce using tomatoes and other veggies from our garden. While we often have fresh-eating tomatoes in May, we don't normally have enough fruit ripe all at once for me to make a big pot of pasta sauce this early in the year, so I'm excited that I'll be making sauce tonight. MJ, We are not going to blame you for the weather, but thanks for stepping up and offering to take the blame. lol It was a drought year when we found a bought this land, and a drought year a couple of years later when the house was built and we moved here. So, you know, we knew exactly what we were getting into. Then we had several good rainy years...about every other year....and I started thinking at least every other year would be nice and rainy. Unfortunately, that has not necessarily been true. One drought year is bad enough, but if you run a couple of them consecutively, the second or third consecutive one really hurts. We have soaker hoses all the way around our foundation and we usually water the soil around the foundation a couple of times a week in drought periods so the ground won't crack, shift and crack the foundation. I guess I'll turn on the soaker hoses today and start that process. I don't think I had to do that last year until July, but I am seeing cracks in the soil nearer the house than I like, so will start early this year. I'm sorry to hear about the pecan trees. I've always thought of pecan trees as indestructible, but last year's drought proved me wrong. So far, most of ours seem fine, but most of them are near the mostly-empty creek and are used to a lot more available moisture than what they have now or what they had last year. It is starting to seem like it will be a really long summer. George's pumpkins tolerate a whole lot of heat. I have them growing in the Three Sisters Garden along with Seminole pumpkin, Texas Honey June corn, and various odds and ends of different kinds of veggies that tolerate drought well. It is good yours are off to a great early start. Maybe that will help them have a huge and deep root system before the heat and drought worsen. Sonya, The U. S. Drought Monitor map can be confusing when it is new to you. If looking at the statistics makes you crazy, just look at the colors on the map and the legend that tells you what each color stands for. The first map I linked was for the map released on Thursday of this week, which reflects data received through Tuesday morning of this week. The one for last week that I linked later on was released last Thursday. So, the map is always a little behind real-time, but not much. It can help to read the statistics from right to left. Look at D4 and the number listed under it shows what % of the state was in D-4 (Exceptional Drought). Then, look in the D-3 column (Extreme Drought) and that shows you the percentage of the state in D-3 and D-4, and so on down the line. Mostly all I look at is the colors. White is good, and any other color is bad. Generally, the darker and deeper the color, the worse the drought is in that area. Once you're seeing red areas on the map, conditions are dismal. Once my area is in the red, I am only watering what I must water--like the soil around the foundation of the house, young fruit trees that would perish without water, etc. Usually I keep watering container grown plantings if they're still productive. By the time my area is in the red, we are more concerned about a wildfire coming through and destroying everything than with watering enough to keep the garden alive. Prior to 2005, wildfires were not a constant issue in most of the state, so we're all adjusting and adapting as it becomes more of a regular occurrence, along with more regular sustained drought periods. These maps and charts help us evaluate and understand what is happening across the state and how it relates to what is happening in our counties and in our own yards and gardens. I've looked at the Drought Monitor for enough years that I know which parts of our property suffer and how much they suffer at each stage of drought. We have acreage and 90-95% of it gets by on rainfall alone, so knowing if we are in D-1 drought versus D-3 or D-4 kinda tells me what to expect. The first time that my area went into D-4 drought, which I believe was in 2003 after the relatively wet, good years of 2001-2002, I was horrified. I feared that everything would die. A lot of my perennials did die, but the trees and shrubs didn't. So, as bad as Exceptional Drought can be, most plants (not including veggies or annual flowers and herbs, of course) will survive it as long as the duration of the Exceptional Drought is not too long. What is more worrisome than any specific drought stage is how much recovery occurs in between droughts. I am concerned that the developing/deeping drought of 2012 follows so closely on the heels of the drought of 2011. There was not enough recovery time in between, especially for much of eastern OK. Since eastern OK usually has huge amounts of rainfall, their plants may suffer more than plants in areas that have a lot less rainfall even in a good year. Dawn

We bought our home 7 years ago and a security system was installed as an option, so we "own" it. A few years ago we dropped the monthly monitoring, as we weren't doing much travel and felt it was not a necessary expense. Recently there was a group of burglars "working" our area. They would enter homes in broad daylight (after determining no one was home), open the garage door, bring in their truck, ransack the home, then leave. We decided to start using our security system again. I phoned around for rates on monitoring and was surprised at the spread in monthly cost. We chose a company that was licensed, no BBB complaints, etc. They came out and did a full "tune up" on the system, replaced batteries, etc. for $95. The monthly fee is $20. We're doing more travel now, so the peace of mind is worth a lot. IMPORTANT: Monitored systems are usually "hooked up" to fire station monitoring for a fire. If you're not home and a fire starts, who knows how long it would take for someone to notice and call the FD. With the monitored system, the FD comes immediately. Another reason to have monitored security is for the "panic alarm" which you can activate if you're home and a break-in occurs.

There are 4K computer monitors, but many "run of the mill" PC monitors can run higher than 1080p, for example, my 23" monitor has a max resolution of 2560 x 1440 compared to 1920 x 1080 "full HD". That's 1.77 times the pixels. Not quite 4K 3840 x 2160 but noticeably more detail if your PC's graphics card can handle it. Resolution isn't the only thing either. You have to look at screen refresh rates as a powerful PC can run games at 90+ frames per second. Most reasonably priced 4K TV's have a native refresh rate of 60Hz. (regardless if they claim 120 or 240, that's just a marketing gimmick) That being said, you really need to be a game geek to really care. As a casual gamer, I've played games on mediocre systems at 30FPS 1080p and it looked good and played good to me personally. Cheap TV's will also have cheap LCD panels with uneven LED backlighting - creating a halo around the whole screen. The cheap panels will also blur more on fast action. I guess what it boils down to is what you want to pay for either. But a good TV will look great and can do more if it is web enabled. For a college kid where space is at a premium a TV may be the way to go.

I would think you'd have to come up with some kind of sliding track but the trouble I see based on your picture is that you don't seem to have a lot of horizontal room to move the monitors. To center one monitor you'd need to slide the second one to the right or left about half it's width. As for a "track," the first thing that come to mind was a slide for cabinet drawer. Or you could do something like a U shaped bracket that would hang over a bar mounted to the wall. You'd probably have to pick up the monitor slightly and move it rather than just sliding it.