Morning all, Well my computer is finally fixed! Woohoo! Doug is a genius. I had some type of nasty virus/malware/spyware/Trojan.. something that completely gummed up the works. I couldnt keep a browser window open for longer than a minute and they it would randomly close, couldnt open aol and in general, nothing on line was working. Anyway, Doug spend the better part of 24 hours or so eliminating the damned things. They seemed to propagate themselves because hed get rid of one thing and then another two would show up. What a pain in the neck. I have no idea how I picked anything up because I almost never download anything off the internet and only when Ive checked out the source. Anyhow, it appears that my computer is fixed and thats a wonderful thing. The gardens are really going into their late summer foliage die off which makes me a bit crazy. I cant keep up with it. I just love daylilies but I wish they didnt look so bedraggled this time of the year. LOL I also had some powdery mildew explode on the lilac, heliopsis and a couple dahlias practically overnight. Id run out of my Garden Safe fungicide so Ive got to get to the store today and get something to treat this or its going to get really out of control. Oh dear V. I just hate those hornworms! They are so huge theyre nasty and give me the willies. I hope your peppers will be OK. I had a similar but different evidence of pests in the house yesterday. I had some sawdust appear under the light fixture over the kitchen sink. I didnt think much of it but wiped it down. When it showed up again I knew there was something chewing behind there. Well, midway though the day I walked through the kitchen and had a little mouse run over my toes. Euuuuuwwwww!!!!! It ran like h e l down the cellar stairs then hid behind the bookcase at the foot of the stairs. I told Doug about the situation and he ran outside and got the cat. I said to him, it doesnt work that way, you dont just put the cat in the house and hell find and get the mouse. Well, Mr. Rahjii, made a liar out of me. Within ten minutes he started sniffing at the base of the bookcase (I thought the mouse would have been long gone) so I moved it out and the cat pounced and ran up the stairs with a mouse in its mouth. He seriously caught that rodent in less than a second after I moved the bookcase. Incredible! Well, he proceeded to bring the mouse into the dining room and drop it to play with it there and it immediately ran under the sofa. Doug moved the sofa and Rahjii caught it again, brought it into the middle of the room and dropped it again. We finally caught the thing in a colander relocated it to the great outdoors. What a drama. Kathy, your daylilies are nestled comfortably in my holding bed here and theyd even put out some lovely new roots into that newspaper youd packed them in. They are amazing plants. ~~ Love those agaves! ~~ Ill have to grab some photos of my brugs for you. They are finally starting to bloom and it looks like they will be smothered with flowers in a couple days. Mary, how lovely to hear from you. It sounds like you had a terrific visit with Fuquan. Thats just marvelous. It seems that your summer vacation was just a whirlwind of activities. How are the gardens doing? Cindy, so sorry for the continued heat and drought you are dealing with. I use oscillating sprinklers here too. Ive used soaker hoses in the past but they dont uniformly wet down the borders and then I have to hand water the dry spaces and other problems. Then Ive dealt with the clogging problems too so I just do overhead watering. Its a lot more even and if done in the early morning or evening there isnt so much of an evaporation problem. ~~ Thanks much, so happy you liked the pictures. Martie, great score on that Bonfire. Ive got three of them and I read on the begonia forum that they overwinter well! How cool is that? ~~ Marvelous that youve got buds on your camellia. Bug, it sounds and looks like you had a terrific vacation. That wedding looks like it was fun and interesting. Brenda, you are absolutely a scream! I love it that you went out and bought a television with DVD player. So glad your Princess Weekend was a great time. Woody that photograph with the Disco Belle hibiscus with the Bacopa is lovely! It makes a beautiful combination. Michelle, I agree with you 100% about the joy the gardens bring. I love it that I go to a different place in my mind when gardening. ~~ Thanks so much, so happy you liked the photos. Yes, that is a four year old Sunray fuchsia in that photo. Its an extraordinary specimen and I just love it. Eden, lovely news for your family! OKie dokie, Ive got to get my day started. Have a good one everybody! Deanne

Hi Jeff, What's happening when the link changes to a different color is your computer is "caching". Essentially, that means that your computer remembers that you have visited that link before, and therefore, the "visited link" color is different from the "unvisited link" color. As long as you don't go in and manually "clear your cache" (the reason I'm putting some terms in quotes is because you could do a Google search on those terms to learn more if you want), then your browser will show those links a different color for as long as Garden Web has the site set up to remember. This is related to "cookies" in the sense that Garden Web sets a "persistent cookie" on your computer (that's how they can remember you when you come back without forcing you to log in each and every time). Basically, this means that the link will show as a different color forever (assuming you don't go in and manually clear your cache on a regular basis - if you did that, you would then also have to log in again as all cookies would be cleared and the history in your browser would get cleared out). The link changing colors doesn't have anything to do with whether anyone new has posted or not. It would be a different color regardless of whether new posts were added or not. Another way to quickly locate all "Word of the Day" posts would be to use the Garden Web search functionality and choose to search for "word of the day" and click the button for "this forum only". That would immediately bring up all "word of the day" posts and you could easily see them all. You could tell if they had new posts or not because each post tells the last time a post was added to the thread. Doing it this way would allow us to see everything we all had to say about one specific term because it's all in one post alone without a bunch of other terms and conversation that's unrelated to what we might be interested in, versus having to comb through a huge thread with way over 100 posts to track a conversation about the specific term. Also, another thought. Think about how long it must take for someone who wants to read those threads when he/she is not on a high-speed Internet connection. It probably takes so long to load that those posts never get read by people who would probably really enjoy them. Thanks for listening :-) ~Angie

Thanks treebarb for giving me Karen's email address and phone number! I spoke with her this evening and she said she would love to have the additional help in the gardens (Kim - she is sooo appreciative for all the work people have been doing there, so thanks so much for organizing that!!!), as well as have her garden be the location for the 2012 fall swap! So now we just need to decide which Sunday will work for most folks to attend, as well as best time. I'm thinking Sunday Oct. 7th would be the earliest to plan on, since that's only 2 weeks away. Karen said that she usually doesn't get home from her second shift until 7am, but she normally doesn't go to bed until evening since she has the rest of Sunday off - and she would really like to join us at the swap. So what about starting off with working in the gardens from 10 - 11:30, then a pot luck (Karen said we were welcomed to do so if we want to. She has some tables we can use if need be.) from 12 - 1 (11:30 - 12 set up time), and then swap after that. If that is too long of a day for folks, maybe we just skip the pot luck this time and do the swap starting at 11:30. So please post to this thread if you can attend and if Oct 7th from 10 - ? will work for you - if not, please suggest a different date and/or time. Also please vote for whether or not to do the pot luck. Thanks! Marj

I've wondered about this, too, because you can turn up old threads through Google that won't show up in a Gardenweb search. The search feature has always had glitches, like not turning up a thread that has been added to that same day. This means that most active current threads don't show up in the search. It seems like the search software hasn't been worked on since the founding days of Gardenweb, when the dictatorial webmaster would send you to Disney if he was peeved, usually by complaints like these about the site. It's too bad because there is so much accumulated wisdom in these forums but the poor search engine makes it hard to access that wisdom. At least IVillage won't send us to the Disney website for complaining, though.