Josh, this was an above average income woman, in that she was the widow of a well-known author who wrote many books after the collapse of communism. Make no mistake: Bulgaria has a lot of history, but it's an entirely modern country. Nearly everybody has appliances... well some appliances, anyway. Every washing machine I saw was front-loading and in the kitchen. Nobody has dryers. Everybody has at least one balcony, and they line dry their clothes. This is true of both city and country folk. I didn't see a single dishwasher while I was there. Also, I experienced very little AC, which was uncomfortable only in that we were experiencing record highs (100+ F)... this accounts for us spending so much time in the (cooler!) mountains! Here's a picture of a backyard in the next city we went to. Notice the satellite dish? When we left Irena, she asked if we would copy our pics to CD and send it with Vesko on his next trip by. Concerned about compatible file formats, I asked (through my interpreter) if she wouldn't prefer prints. She laughed and said "No, I have a TV, a DVD player, a computer, and more. Your file formats won't be a problem." One last thing about Kovachevitsa, its designation makes its property very desirable... especially to people from other EU nations looking to snap up bargains. Irena told us property has been selling in this village at the heretofore unheard of rate of 1,000 Euros per square metre ($147 US per square foot?) Sometimes we change things the most when we try to keep things exactly as they were! After Kovachevitsa, we went to Leshten. Lots to see here. There are beautiful gardens attached to restaurants, and some very charming old buildings have been converted to hotels. There are only two official residents of Leshten. It was dark, but Vesko knocked on their gate and asked them to let us in to meet them. They were in the middle of milking their goats (!) but they obliged. She's 76 and he's 81. Five times they begged us to drink rakia with them, but we were reticent to continue our interruption so late at night. They could not have been friendlier or more charming. By this point I was understanding a surprising amount of what was being said. Certain phrases amused me though... One was "Dah Bah Dah" which was interjected quickly in a conversation when the listener agreed with the speaker ("Dah" means yes). To me, it always sounded like "Yabadaba-doo!" and would always make me giggle. Well Vesko had a surprise for us at the very top of this hill. He called it the "Yabadaba-doo house" for obvious reasons. Vesko found the power and we turned on the porch lights and enjoyed a fantastic view. He said he knew the owner and had always wanted to stay here (no one was when we were there). He said the house had satellite and wifi. I wondered why anyone would go to what seemed to me to be the end of the earth to plug in. We walked back to the car (much easier to negotiate those cobblestone hills when one is sober and wearing proper footwear) and drove back to our hotel in Ognoyanovo. We wanted to eat dinner on the patio by the pool, but there were no free tables, so Vesko got the waiters to carry an indoor table outside to accommodate us. Vesko had told us he had a surprise for us and asked us to wear our swimsuits and cover-ups to dinner. After dinner, he strapped a spelunking light to his head, took us off the hotel grounds, walked us across a narrow and precarious suspension bridge (daylight pics don't do it justice), and up the road for about five minutes to a geyser-fed hot spring mineral bath that's been operational since Roman times. The moon was bright and barely waning, the air was clean, cool and fresh, and the water was bath-tub warm. My friend is a very driven woman. She's a serious scientist with lots of business responsibilities... and we learned about then that she's also a hopeless "city girl." The whole way up she was terrified of encountering snakes or bears... and even frogs! After we had soaked for a good long time, we went back to the hotel grounds, sat in a circle, and drank Vesko's pear rakia until the call of sleep finally became louder than the chorus of crickets. Steve took these pics the next morning... they don't do the experience justice. And thus ended our fifth day, and second with Vesko...

Clara - Looks like you are certainly pumping out the lumens, and plants look happy. Two questions to ponder though: at $45 a pop, these 85W CFLs + fixture are well-beyond chump change, at least for me. At some point, it must make sense to switch over to a HID lighting system. A ceiling mounted 1000W HPS, for example, would probably irradiate a good portion of your grow space, and they can't be more than a couple of hundred bucks. Second, the size of those 85W CFLs in the HD brooder lamp seems to ensure a lot of wasted lumens, and they stick out so far, a strip of Al-foil won't do much. As someone previously said, those gigantic CFLs seem much better suited to horizontal mounting in a "wing" or "half-tube" style fixture. I think the same poster described making a simple one with a double-ended screw-in socket, 8' heating duct cut in two lengthwise, and a couple of sheet metal screws. That said, the brooder lamps _are_ very flexible in their placement. Personally, I don't exceed a 55W bulb (linked below) in this fixture because, as you pointed out, I don't like my retinas fried just walking around the room. Nice thing about this particular 55W is the squat design that just about fits inside the 10.5" hemisphere. And not too shabby at 3600 lumens and $16. Here is a link that might be useful: fat 55W CFL

Hope all the boys with their injuries are getting better. Yes they will always call and sometimes if the child acts funny they will really make your life miserable. You would think that boys never have accidents they way some of them can act. I was always at the school for some bruise or another with my two and they usually did it to each other, lol. They fought all the time and still don't get along. John says his oldest boy was always good. He said when they went to someones house they could have a box of toys right in front of them and they wouldn't move from where he told them to sit unless he told them it was ok even if the other person told them it was ok to play. I told him thats because he trains us all like the dogs, lol. He makes you want to mind him, lol. I often wonder if my boys would have been different if I had met him sooner. It has surely helped with my daughter. She acts very different around him than she does with her father and he will do anything in the world to please him. I thought he was going to faint when he heard her back talk her father on the phone once, lol. He just expects you to behave and thats it they do it, lol. Even my boys don't act up in front of him. His younger son got arrested once and sat in jail 3 days and wouldn't call and tell him until his brother found out and called us, lol. He would have stayed there forever rather than tell his father he got in trouble. He gets this look on his face and it makes you stand up straighter, lol.

I wear makeup for myself. It is all about putting your best foot forward. I feel the same way about not wearing frumpy clothes, LOL. It makes me feel better about me, and I think when you feel good about yourself, it shows in your overall attitude. I wear light makeup - as someone said, to enhance. I do don't eye shadow colors - taupe or charcoal to shade and a pale shade as the base. Soft eye pencil. I use a bb creme or mineral foundation very lightly and a bit of concealer under my eyes and anywhere else needed. Not a powder person. A little natural looking blush and mascara and I am good to go. I do however use a bright color on my lips - it looks best on me. A bright, deep pink is my best color. However, I use a sheer version - a lipstain or a gloss, semi lipstick, etc. never a full coverage lipstick. For going out or something dressy, I just deepen my eye makeup a bit and also the lips. tina