Dan, why is a non-native invasive necessarily not sustainable? I know that many knowledgable people are highly (perhaps voraciously) opposed to them, but I don't quite 'get' it. Is autumn olive eventually going to use up its habitat and disappear? Some presumably native shrubs and trees around here seem to compete well enough with it; AO has been in this area quite a few decades and it is present in somewhat limited habitats. In truth if the local population needed to get all of its vitamins from local fruit and etc there would not be far too much autumn olive and it would likely need encouraging rather than the opposite to ensure an abundant supply in the face of huge demand. An invasive that suddenly becomes a useful crop probably won't really be an invasive, will it? It will be getting a lot of attention and kept where it produces best and is easiest to get at. There are native species that colonize cleared forest faster than most if not all non-natives. Around here I don't think any shrub or tree can compete with short-leaf pine in a newly-cleared forest. Autumn olive competes for control of old fields and road-sides, both of which are convenient places for gathering berries.

My first load was a very large one of T-Shirts and pants and some other stuff. It did seem more wrinkled than with my old agitator machine. And they came out of the dryer, 'Cotton-Normal'rather wrinkled too. So I put them back in for the Refresh steam cycle and while they were better after, not as wrinkle free as my old Whirlpool. Today I did sheets used the anti-static modifier button which adds steam intermittently towards the end of the cycle and they were surely better for it. I can see how the steam adds de-wrinklification. But I also wish there wasn't a need. Guess that's what you get with HE: faster spin times save energy.

Georgecarolyn, An Ironrite works fine for tablecloths, but because they are so large (the tablecloths) some people find they have to iron them folded. I prefer not to do that because I think it's hard on the fabric to have a crease pressed in. Besides, in formal households the cloth should properly only have one crease down the center. (Plus it's wicked hard to get the crease perfectly straight on a large cloth, particularly older linen damask.) To avoid the crease problem with a Model 85 Ironrite like I have, you can do some fancy manipulations and turn the tablecloth for every pass and start ironing in the center. The catch here is that very long and wide cloths are still complex to do and you need a helper and a clean drop cloth underneath to avoid soiling it when doing so many passes. If you do a lot of tablecloths, making yourself an ironing table is by far the easiest and fastest way to go. The best thing about the ironing table I described above is that between ironing days you can stow it against the wall of a closet. (Let it cool completely and dry thoroughly, of course, before putting away.) As long as the table is not wider than you can easily reach across you can iron 27-32" at a time. Your 54" wide cloths would require only 4 adjustments; the wider ones would require three, but you'd have to turn it go back the other way because it is so wide. (Though you could certainly make yourself a table that was 90" long.) Still it would be very much faster than using even the widest snout-ended type of ironing board. Where the Ironrite excells is on smaller flats like pillow cases, linen dish towels and cloth napkins. I can whip through those as fast as I can feed them under the mangle, meaning about 10-15 secs each for napkins and about 30 secs for pillow cases. HTH, Molly

My neighbor switched to LED outdoor Christmas lights last year. What I didn't like was how puny the light was....toooooo dim. Big contrast between our C9 reds and his LEDs. We usually run four or five strands of outdoor lights 24 hours a day for the month. We turn off the regular outdoor lights for December. In the house, the tree and a lighted garland and a couple of small lighted things are the extent of it. Our electric bill doesn't rise that much...a couple of dollars from the lights. One of the keys is that we turn off our regular outdoor lamp post and garage light. Indoors one lamp doesn't get used during Christmas. It's a trade-off. We are slowly replacing all our incandesent bulbs in the house. I'll miss the warmth of the old bulbs, but the new energy savers are looking better and better each year. For now, the LEDs are staying in the stores. Someday....maybe..... Here is a link that might be useful: Creative Soul