There are lots of differences besides vegetation: As a person born and bred in Baltimore ( 40 years in NH and MA) I never ever miss the humidity of a DC/Balto summer. It is insufferable. However, east coast MA & NH have equally hot spells and humidity, just not week after week after week.. As you know, Md and DC are 4 season climates....there is certainly spring (long) summer (hellish) fall (just fine) and winter ( just not so snowy so often so long) You would not miss the drivers who have never learned to drive in snow. On the other hand, you'll have to learn. You will lose two months of real warm weather gardening and the long lovely springs which encourage azaleas. New England springs are rather short and violent.....here today, gone tomorrow. But beautiful, for sure. Oh yes, it can snow on May 1. You will miss reliably delicious tomatoes you can grow yourself, the operative word is reliably and soft shell crabs ....real crabcakes. (though you have to search as far and wide down there as you do here for the authentic lump crab) You can get Bud here. Maples we have, but the oaks down your way are fine. I miss the southern graciousness and friendliness that linger in more southern areas. Many parts of New England are more racially segregated than the greater metro area. I continued to be startled by that whenever I went home or visited DC. Maybe I wax nostalgic and inaccurate, maybe times have changed.....but around here one rarely "stops" by for a beer or a drink after work, people don't "drop in" or "drop by" . At least where I live, nobody hangs out on their front steps or front yard, though you'll certainly get a wave from the neighbors. Sure, we chat when we get to know each other, but I honestly think people are more reserved here. Maybe in part because we're holed up so long in winter. I feel very homesick right now.

Study Clouds Link Between Pollution and Rain By Robin Lloyd Special to LiveScience posted: 23 December, 2004 7:00 a.m. ET A team of scientists has looked at clouds from both sides now and found more bad news about air pollution and global warming. For the past decade, some scientists have thought that small air-polluting particles produced by the burning of fossil fuels and then sucked into clouds acted as seeds for new cloud particles, plumping up polluted clouds with numerous and smaller cloud particles. Smaller cloud droplets are less efficient at producing rain, and the thinking was that less precipitation would yield thick balls of clouds that reflect more sunlight away from Earth. The cooling effect was thought to be strong enough to cancel the contribution of atmospheric warming from increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is the major greenhouse gas produced by human consumption of fossil fuels, along with methane, nitrous oxide, and other carbon gases. Ship tracks, the long lines of clouds downwind of ships, provided a nice opportunity to study the effect of exhaust particles, called aerosols, on clouds. However, pesky data turned up. Sometimes scientists measured more water and thicker clouds in the ship tracks. More often, less water was measured in the tracks, just the opposite of what was expected. The new study involved creating a detailed three-dimensional model for the interaction of air pollution with clouds and found that the mitigating effect of pollution only works when the air above clouds is humid. The model was tested against real data from the field and found to be very realistic. "Our findings indeed indicate that aerosol pollution will not save us from greenhouse warming to the extent that has been widely thought by the general climate community," said Andrew Ackerman of NASA's Ames Research Center. A research paper on the results by Ackerman and colleagues at the University of Tasmania, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the University of Colorado, Boulder, was published in the Dec. 23 issue of the journal Nature. The teams approach involved a model with 45 ingredients or variables at each of a half million grid points to represent a cloud space spanning four square miles and one mile thick, solved to predict the interactions of water droplets in clouds. The approach was so complex that mathematical solutions required three days of running simulations divided into smaller pieces simultaneously on 32 computers at once, a process known as cluster computing or parallel processing. A big surprise came when the model, in one case, cranked out a relatively dry cloud despite an increase in aerosols, or air pollution. No precipitation was falling from the cloud, as well. Thats when the team noticed that the air above the clouds in this strange case was much drier than in the other meteorological cases. "We hypothesized that the dry air above the boundary layer was reducing the precipitation, and thus leading to the unexpected behavior," Ackerman told LiveScience. Sure enough, by drying out air above the simulated cloud layer, the team was able to reverse the response of cloud water to pollution in their models. The dry air resulted in less drizzle from the cloud and more rapid drying as it sucked in more air from above. Ackerman and his team also learned something about "non-precipitating clouds." It can be misleading when studying the effects of pollution on clouds to ignore small amounts of precipitation locked in clouds that do not rain. Actually, the movement of cloud droplets slowly falling within clouds can be the subtle driver of the process that results in relatively dried out, polluted clouds that are less effective at offsetting global warming.

The crawl space under the slab is surrounded on all 4 sides with 4" block, except for 2 vent holes and 1 2x3 opening. Also there is only dirt on the floor. This I don't understand. "You might get 1/2 way back to the crawlspace temperature with insulation." The top of the slab is already at least 25 degrees above the crawl space temp. "I'd glue 2 or 3 inches of XPS but it will not get you as warm as the crawl space area." When the outside temp is 40 for instance the crawl space under the slab is about the same temp. So if I add the XPS or insulation to the bottom side I should be able to keep the slab itself a few degrees warmer than the crawl space under it, do you think the underside of the slab is colder than the crawl space? The slab is pretty smooth on the bottom, I have no idea how they built it, but the bottem side looks as smooth as the top of any slab. I can buy DIY spray for about $700 that would give me 2 inches of R7.4 per inch. I haven't called a local company yet. The piers would still be ground temp I guess. As far as the air idea I was conceding making a couple inches air tight under the slab and hooking the heat pump into one end with a 3" duct and exiting the other end back to the return air. Its all under the house.

Lololol, K!! Isn't that the truth??? I still have a few weeks left to get my trees inside and settled for the season. We did have a low of 47 degrees the other night, but they were all fine. They will start drying and I'll give them the second spraying of the Bayer in another week. Sounds like you are busy with the greenhouses.. ;-) Thought of you the other day.. We have a new Coach store and as I drove past this new store, I thought of you and your wife!! Lolololol!! Looking Great Kawagoe!! Great job!! You do have plenty of room in that setup?? Mmmhmmmm, won't be long... ;-) Have a great evening!! Laura