Thanks all. I'm resurfacing after several days of barely making it off the couch. This has been an awful illness. Started out with a 103.5 fever and headache to beat the band, along with a cough. When I couldn't hold down any meds to bring the fever down or any fluids my neighbor brought me to the ER. They actually thought I might have Legionaire's, since there is a mini "outbreak" going on in CT. They also tested me for meningitis with a spinal tap. Both tests were negative, but they dx'd pneumonia. I then spent several days with a blinding, completely debilitating headache (although the fever went away). Turns out spinal fluid was leaking due to the spinal tap and they had to do a "patch." Not fun. I'm now on my third antibiotic because the first one made me sick to my stomach and the second one has caused a severe allergic reaction resulting in swollen hands, feet, and legs, and splotchy itchy skin everywhere. Four days later I'm still taking benedryl every 6 hours because as soon as it wears off the reaction comes back. So all I want to do is sleep, but I can't really totally sleep because all I do is lay around. I swear the treatments have been worse than the illness! OK, enough whining. Between my cat Lily and my Pug, I have never wanted for company on the couch. When they are in the house the two of them join anyone who sits on the couch instantly, negotiating for the best position. Matter of fact it was feeling pretty crowded there when I had the high fever and was achy and uncomfortable in my own skin! The plants have totally taken a back seat. As I type this I can see a couple of them out the window and they look fine. That will have to do for now! Thanks for the kind words and support. My goals for now are to do a load of laundry so that DS has uniforms clean for school on Monday, to do the dishes, and to go through the mail. Oh, and to try to be something of a parent, rather than a person who barks out orders from the couch ("Please feed the dog! Do your homework! Please empty the dishwasher! Please don't complain or nag, my head hurts too much!"). With Halloween around the corner (supremely important holiday for 11 y.o. DS) I hope I am able to pull it together soon!

Terry Wait until you are committed! If, you are dedicated to enjoying this wonderful planet and putting back more than you take out so that you help insure that something is left for the future, do NOT wait. Fill out the form honestly and completely, and see if you qualify.??? Do you provide food for some form of wildlife? Do you have a birdbath, pond, fountain, or some other way to provide water? Do you have some cover to provide escape from preditors? Do you provide a place to raise young? I have some large "driftwood" logs for the large carpenter bees to nest. Some undisturbed vegetation is good for beneficial insects. Flowers provide pollen and nectar, and later seeds. Tiny birds love the hollyhock seeds. Every habitat has a beginning. Keep up the good work! Verena You speak of geese. Late this afternoon I looked up and HIGH in the sky was very large V! It came from the southeast and crossed over me to the northwest. Maybe coming from over Mexico and heading for BC? They were too high for me to hear the noise. Here and there one would drop back and veer over to take a "higher" spot in the social order. Msrpaul I have no experience with the killer bees yet either, but they are here too. Navymom2226 Happy summer to you too!

Thanks for asking Socks .... Had the surgery one week ago today. Got out of the hospital the next afternoon. I'm now home wearing a hard collar, bone stimulator machine and trying to stay off the computer. I'm only allowed on for 20 mins at a time. I was totally bed-ridden until yesterday... sleeping most of the day and night, so that helped keep me off the computer. So far the only real pain is my throat and left shoulder. Loss of voice is typical with this surgery. Mine finally came back yesterday afternoon. I was warned my shoulders might hurt after the surgery but was never told why. I might call the doctor and ask what causes the shoulder pain. Surgery ended up not quite what I expected. Instead of removing the bottom two fused vertebrae, the doctor cleaned the bone spurs off the fused verts and removed C5 instead. He cleaned up and realigned C3 and C4 and fused C4-C5-C6 with what's called a PEEK cage. From what I can tell, my range of motion is better than before and very little pain when I move. But I'm not going to be able to fully test it for a couple months. Because my throat is still sore from them moving the esophagus and other stuff aside to access the spine from the front, it's difficult to tell if my cough and breathing issues are gone. But I think they are. Just won't know until I'm fully healed. Jodi-

Being stuck inside with a big puppy who cannot run around outside is driving me almost as crazy as it is driving him. He is smart, he is learning all the standard commands like No, Come, Sit, Stay, etc. but he seems determined to engage the cat, Lucky, in a battle of the wills every single day. The lesson he has not yet learned is that her claws are going to win every single time. I am on the verge of losing my sanity here. I need a vacation from the big puppy. He is a bundle of love, but a very energetic bundle. Jennifer, It always is challenging the first time a person processes something new from the garden---new to them---and sometimes the sheer quantity of whatever needs to be processed is quite daunting. I'm glad you're making progress on the Seminoles. You do need a root cellar! I've always wanted one but never have been able to convince Tim that building one would be worthwhile. If our clay wasn't so impossible to dig, maybe we would have one by now. We started digging out a spot for one once and simply gave up---digging that dense red clay is like trying to dig concrete. After decades of trying to raise as much of our food as possible and spending far too much time canning, freezing and dehydrating it, I'm sort of over it and really, really wanting to cut back more and more. I no longer can 600-800 jars a year and I don't miss all those long hours in the kitchen. I don't think my body can physically tolerate being on my feet all day every day in the summer any more either. I'll always can some stuff, but more and more I focus on food that can be root-cellared (or maybe I should just say kept in dry storage since I don't have a root cellar) or frozen. Nothing makes a person appreciate things like onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes and winter squash like the fact that you can harvest them, cure them, and put them in dry storage as needed until you use them. This summer I processed and froze all the excess tomatoes in 8-cup batches for salsa back when we were harvesting tomatoes, telling myself that when the weather cooled down, I'd spend October-November turning them into salsa. So far, I haven't done that. If everyone is going to get salsa for Christmas as planned, I need to get busy canning salsa. After all, October is almost over. I think I'll do a few batches of salsa next week, and I haven't yet decided whether to make apple pie jam, candied jalapenos or Habanero Gold to go in the gift bags as well. I need to decide on that and get it done because it seems like once Halloween arrives, Christmas is here in the blink of an eye. I dread doing all this canning for the holiday gifts. I know I'll enjoy it once I start doing it, but I'm so burned out from doing so much for so many years that I don't absolutely love doing it the way that I once did. I wish I did absolutely adore doing it as I did 10, 15 or 20 (or longer) years ago, but I just don't. There's probably a lesson in here somewhere about pacing one's self better over the years so you don't burn out, but I didn't learn that lesson in time. I wish I had a nickel for every night I stayed up canning and cleaning up until midnight, and then got up at 6 am to go out to the garden, harvest tomatoes, and do it all over again....until midnight again.....and again, and again. I used to feel shocked when my older friends here gave up canning in their 60s or 70s after a lifetime of doing it, but now what I'm thinking is that I'm surprised they didn't retire from canning sooner than they did. I may can a lot more after Tim retires---he'd be here to help lift that heavy canner filled with water and filled jars, for example. On the other hand, I may decide that I completely retire from food processing when he retires from his job, though I really don't think I will. I am not sure he wants to help with the canning, because every time he walks into the kitchen now and I'm canning away like a mad woman, he sort of gets that deer-in-headlights look in his eyes and cannot get out of the kitchen, and the house, quickly enough, like he's afraid I might put him to work in the kitchen. lol I'd like to point out that I never once have asked him to help me can, dehydrate or freeze anything, so I don't know why he gets so twitchy when he thinks it might happen. Nancy, I hope the new faucet works out. I hate plumbing work. Tim can do it, and he does do it, but it always requires at least 3 trips to the store to get all the right parts, as if it is impossible to buy all the right parts the first time. I realize that when you start taking apart old plumbing, sometimes you find a part in there that you didn't expect and have to go get one, but it drives me nuts...partly because it is such a long drive to get to a store that has what we need. I hate having to go out in the rain anywhere for any thing at all. Nobody here can drive in the rain and we have a lot of motor vehicle accidents everywhere when it rains, particularly on I-35. We joke that people here cannot drive in the rain because rain is so rare they lack experience in driving in it. Yesterday, within 5 minutes of the rain starting to fall, we were paged out to an auto accident in town. It boggles my mind how common this is. Jen, I love dogs but couldn't have that many of them underfoot all the time. It would drive me crazy. There is a really nice pet boarding facility north of Marietta and some friends of mine who love animals worked there for quite for a while (several years, I think), and it was a tremendous amount of work. We needed the rain and I'm grateful we received it, and now I'm ready for it to end and be over already. We've got about 2.5" in the rain gauge, with light rain expected to continue falling today and tonight. I'd be happy if no more rain fell, but it still would be very wet, chilly and miserable out there even without any more rain. At least we aren't getting snow like those folks in western OK and northwestern OK. I am not getting one single thing done with this dog in the house. He just has too much energy, and I am too kind-hearted to send him out to play in the rain. I'm going plant shopping tomorrow, come hell or high water, because being stuck indoors is driving me almost as crazy as it is driving the dog. Next week's cold looks discouraging. It looks like summer held on forever, and winter is coming early. I miss the long, pleasant autumns we used to have. Dawn