I work at at a very large nursery and by far the greenhouses we grow the white petunias in smell the best. As soon as you walk in you are instantly transported to heaven! All petunias smell good when grown on a mass scale, but NOTHING compares to the white houses.

camp, I didn't realize it either until researching online and on gardenweb. "What are these cabbage lopers of which you speak?" (what the heck is a loper?) ... OHHHHHH, those gross lil green caterpillars I keep seeing. Gotcha! This has been fun to read everyone's input. There are too many gems to point them out individually, but I've learned that not only are garden bloggers really nice and helpful (per thyme2garden) but they are pretty funny, too! It's too bad I try to share the humor with my non-gardening friends and family ... (um, ok, everyone not on here!) and they give me the blank "I don't get it," stare. Such is life. I highly recommend the archived "so you want to grow a gardenia" thread... I read that a few months ago and was CRYING it was so funny. (I didn't even know what a gardenia WAS until that thread.) And it has given me the courage to venture into growing flowers this coming year ... once I make the lasagna beds this fall for spring ... and build a few more trellises ... and flip my compost ... and ask the restaurant down the street for coffee grounds ... and.. and.. and.. :P Oh, btw. The tomatoes are starting (in case anyone was troubled by my plethora of non-ripening tomatoes.) ... The gardening gods like me (at the moment ;) ). Thanks again everyone for sharing - Veronica

Hi Iggie. If I may. If the use of Back Yard Bob, reaches a point where the professional shop is forced to cut back on tooling, training, and maybe even personnel to the point that say they are no longer equipped to deal with your transmission question (which is actually already happening, one MUST have the $9000.00 factory scan tool for ONLY Chrysler to operate at the level required) then what is anyone going to do, with or without the financial resources? Back Yard Bob would never go anywhere near this level of an investment, we can only do it when we price correctly, and are fully utilized by our customers. There is a difference between price and cost. You can get a cheap price by going around us, but how do you really measure the cost of doing that? I had a customer who took her Honda Odyssey to a back yard bob to have a timing belt job done. She came back here a month later thinking she had a transmission problem, that he discovered right after doing the belt. The transmission was fine, he missed the timing marks when he did the belt. What if she totally lost the chance to ever bring her car back here because we weren't doing enough business to keep our doors open? Don't be too sure there will always be someone else, the cars got way too complicated in too short of a time. The tools are not being widely purchased and very few technicians are attending sufficient training to keep up with today's technology. The best part, is its all because most shops are actually priced to low already to afford those expenses. Now with many other people losing their jobs, and thinking they are capable of, and attempting to work at home and grab some/most of the easier work, we are getting hit with all kinds of problems when we are the second person in, (sometimes the third) with cars that have lots of parts thrown at them, that they easily may not have needed. In many cases, if someone else does a job like that timing belt in the back yard, we are faced with either turning the customer away, or completely re-doing the repair. You see, once we touch it, we are expected to stand behind the repair, fully. Meanwhile Back Yard Bob can sit back and still say he did everything right, and act like we don't know what we are doing. The Honda owner I referred to, once the car was diagnosed, was handed her keys and sent back to the person that did the work. As far as we are concerned, she does not ever have to come back. If her Back Yard Bob can't handle everything her car needs, she can take it to the nearest dealer, a sixty mile round trip. That's a real cost associated to the cheap price she got. BTW, like that Chrysler tool, I'm the only independent that has the Honda Factory tool, I won't bother going into detail right here what that means that I and the dealer can do, that no other shop, or especially anyone working at home in their garage cannot. Seriously it would take way too much time to try and look it all up and type it out. BTW, I know it sounds arrogant to turn her away, but its more about preserving the shop in one of the toughest business climates ever. We are all in, customers that don't understand that can't help us, and for the sake of the customers that do understand we have to make choices. "Nothing personal, its just business"

lydia -- the 100+ food Elisa test sounds very interesting. I may give that a try, eventually. I'm convinced that I have quite a few food allergies. I used to throw up when I was given white milk as a child. Never drank any once my mother figured out the cause. Except in elementary school when I was forced by a teacher and I threw up. Funny how I was able to drink chocolate milk, though. I read later (as an adult) that in fact the chocolate in chocolate milk reduces the allergic reaction. Anyway, regarding food allergies, I know I'm sensitive to wheat though I'm not a celiac. I am also sensitive to dairy. (Ask me why I can't give up my goatsmilk yoghurt, this is the last frontier for me, hope to give it up eventually.) I subscribed to the test at http://www.enterolab.com/ which is where I got the results about wheat and dairly. The test was expensive. I think over $300.00. Glad I did it though. Sounds like the Elisa test may give you the same results plus some. This food allergy thing is tricky, I think. One of our dogs now it seems has food allergies. I asked the vet to test and she said that testing for food allergies is not very reliable (for dogs). I wonder if this is true for humans? A food elimination diet was the only thing she could recommend plus eating only a particular type of dog food that was "engineered to have a small enough molecule size so it doesn't trigger the allergic reactions" (her words). I was amazed and am wondering if raw food has "smaller molecules" than cooked food, HA, HA. Perhaps moite's methods that she got from her doctor about measuring her pulse rate may be the best way. I'm going the simple route with this raw food diet (for now) because it meets many other needs also. I had a great day yesterday. I went the whole day without the "wave of tiredness" that comes over me every day after lunch. I hope it wasn't an anomaly. Bad news is that with the raw food diet, there is a "detox phase" initially where some claim that you are ridding your system of toxins. The detox phase can produce acne which is what I just got yesterday. I haven't had a pimple on my face for many years but I have two now. Oh well. If my energy level stays good, I'll have to add that as one more reason why I'm glad I found this diet. I was craving cooked food day before yesterday but managed to get by without it. Hopefully those days will get less in number. This was kind of like craving a cigarette after quitting, as I remember it many years ago. Keep us posted about your food allergies. I'm becoming more and more convinced that for some of us, they are literally killing us or are reducing our quality of life (for some of us) to a very very large extent producing chronic problems and diseases that mainstream medicine doesn't have a clue. In my case, I definitely feel like I've become a guinea pig for trying out different "cures". I'm hoping that raw food will by my answer. I realize that because there is no definite proof, I could be wrong on this but as my DH says, it's gotta be better than being so overweight and hungry all the time. We were killing ourselves eating cooked food so how could this be any worse.