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

I just quickly looked at office depot.. Really lots of monitors, almost all are under 200 dollars. LED only is a slight diff for newest stuff. LED supposed to be quicker, brighter, more colorful & use something like 40% less energy than lcd... way longer life too than fluorescent back lighting on lcd's. All I looked at seem to have hdi & vga outputs. My TV was bought right before hd.. hybrid digital / analog huge thing. Analog 4x3 screen, sort of square looking.. that shows wide screen with black border above & below the video for wide screen broadcasts. Regular full screen now is mostly commercials. Odd at first.. but now its normal to me.

Native resolution is usually best on any monitor - you can use windows to adjust the front type size. You may want to install the driver files for too. Assuming xp, here's a link that should be them... Here is a link that might be useful: Viewsonic xp drivers

* Product Description: Acer B193 Bbdmh, LCD display, TFT, 19" * Device Type: LCD display / TFT active matrix * Color: Black * Built-in Devices: Stereo speakers * Diagonal Size: 19" * Max Resolution: 1280 x 1024 / 75 Hz * Display Positions Adjustments: Height, swivel, tilt * Color Support: 24-bit (16.7 million colors) * Response Time: 5 ms * Image Brightness: 250 cd/m2 * Image Contrast Ratio: 10000:1 (dynamic) * Digital Video Standard: Digital Visual Interface (DVI) * Audio Output: Speaker(s), stereo, integrated * Signal Input: DVI, VGA * Compliant Standards: TCO '03, MPR II, TCO '99 * Environmental Standards: EPA Energy Star * Manufacturer Warranty: 3 years warranty those are the specs for that monitor, I agree Acer makes a very good LCD. that one does have both inputs and has nice specs. That one does have the built in speakers, mine does not but I use stand alone speakers anyway. In the 19" monitors yes you can still find the non widescreen models but I have not seen any in the larger size monitors which are non widescreen. If you have not set up and used a buy.com account before there are some codes available that will save you some money on that purchase for first time buyer. I use buy.com quite often. first time Buy.com customers only don't worry about expiration dates they are always available just google buy.com promo codes and you can find them.