Fescue is a type of grass called bunch grass. The other kind is a carpet type of grass that spreads with either stolons (over the ground) or rhizomes (under ground). Bunch grasses spread but they spread so slowly you don't really notice. When a bunch grass dies, you really have to start over. Your back yard is dead. Why? I suspect you have a fungal disease that is continuing to kill your grass. It could be insects, but a fungus is easier to treat (my way) and hurts nothing while you're figuring out if you have insects. If you apply ordinary corn meal (from your local feed store) at a rate of 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet now, in three weeks your fungal disease should be gone. I'm saying this assuming you have not used any commercial fungicides and don't plan to. Then you can start over like you never had a lawn. Seed heavily, roll the seed down with a water fillable roller, and water daily several times for 15 minutes at a time. Turning off the water and using RoundUp will not stop the fungus and there is no need to kill anything before you reseed. Just mow them to the ground. I started watering at night last year and it seems to work fine for me. We are required by law (heh heh) to water only at night. Just for grins (it's only grass) I thought I'd give it a try. I have not had any more fungal disease than I normally do. So I water from sundown to midnight or whenever I go to sleep in the summer. Your mileage may vary. I normally get a fungus disease every May after my kids build a fort out of yard trimmings. Corn meal always works for me. If you decide to use corn meal, be sure you don't get corn GLUTEN meal. It costs 6x more than ordinary corn meal and does not work the same. You should pay about $6-$7 for 50 pounds of ordinary corn meal.

Good morning everyonbe. Still no package, and no mail today as we all know it's a holiday. We have been sleeping in so much later these last few days, that not sure we'll hear the alarm tomorrow when it's time to get up for school! My granddaughter had off as of Friday. I better get in the habit since I may be going back to work real soon...sooner rather than never! LOL Mary Ellen, I don't blame you for being partial to the photos. I would be proud as well. Dianne, I can't tell you the number of times I would "remmeber" something, anything...especially that stuff I package up and put in containers in the freezer! LMAO....sometimes it's a defrost everything to determoine what it is. Or defrost what you think were mashed p potatoes and find out it was buttercream icing! My promise to myself this year was to label everything, but I don't always. oh well. One time I had a box take the longest time. When it came down to it, it was never mailed as a priority box, so it took a longer time to get here, perhaps Vina that is what is happeneing? I'm still experiencing great problems with GW. I type to a blank page and then minutes later, the words appear. As of now, I see the paragraph where I mention MaryEllen. It will be minutes before anything else appears and then I have to go back and fix typos. So strange, not sure why this is happening. Spring, plesae come soon, I can no longer take this cold. Have a great Monday! Maryanne

I'm mostly vegetarian. I don't much care for meat, don't like to digest it, and don't like the taste. When I do eat meat it is poultry or fish. I use bacon occasionally as a flavoring, more often pancetta or proscuitto. My "problem food" is evil cheese. I just love the stuff and can't get enough of it. Cheese has some kind of addictive chemical in it I read. I have to work really hard to limit my consumption of cheese. The kinds I like are full of saturated fat. I do mix the fatty kind with lower fat kinds to try and mitigate some of the damage. I have no heart or cholesterol problems, and have been in generally good health my whole life. I have fairly decent genes. But I think the main issue with eating for health is to eat a balanced diet. It does no good to eschew red meat and then eat tons of sugar and fatty junk foods, which is what I see some young "vegetarians" doing. And these sugary drinks also are terrible for your health. I would be much more concerned about someone eating lots of sugar and junk foods than occasional red meat or eggs. I think that is what does people in, a diet of very little fruit or vegetables, and high in the saturated fat, including bacon, sausage, etc. I don't see a problem with maybe two strips of bacon if you're eating it with whole grain waffles topped with fresh fruit and yogurt. But that's now how most people eat. They eat processed foods. Also, a huge culprit in our national heart disease epidemic is lack of exercise. We lead such sedentary lives that it's almost impossible to control one's weight just with diet. I would say it's not beef per se that is killing us, it's how we raise the beef, how we cook it, and how much of it we eat, and what else we eat (or don't eat) along with it. For most of time, red meat was an occasional treat, and sausage was used as a flavoring for potatoes or beans, and it was a struggle to get ENOUGH calories for folks, not what we're facing today. Most people ate some kind of grainy gruel every day, not the rich dishes that have survived in the cookbooks and literature. My dad's four main food groups are meat, fat, sugar and white carbs. He always goes shopping and lays in a supply of junk food when he comes to visit me. Also suggests that we go out to eat all the time. Once Christmas I cooked and ate like he likes just to keep the peace. I felt really bad after a week of it. Poor sleep, and generally sluggish with mild digestive upset all the time. Of course I guess one's body does kind of "adjust" over time. Anyway, dad had been plagued by digestive problems all his life, and has clogged arteries, yet for whatever reason, cannot change his eating pattern, even though it makes him suffer. He's kind of like an alcoholic. He thought he could get away with it when he was younger because he was an athlete and not overweight. He's still only a little bit overweight, but has terrible acid reflux along with colon and artery problems. Shy of genetic conditions, I would say my dad is fairly typical of what's out there. BF's co-workers are dropping like flies now that they are in their late 50's and sixties. They all smoke, drink and eat like my dad, and are overweight. I would say eating a lot of red meat is in most cases part of a general pattern of poor health habits. Folks here are probably not typical American eaters.

I had a horrible nightmare again this morning at about 4 AM, and I had to stay up long enough for the memory of it to fade. I think I need to look into the effects of cheese and dreams because I did have some Brie last night late in the day. It's a snack I like to have late at night, and I'm not sure how often it causes nightmares, or whether it is the cause at all. I also ordered some Magnesium taurate supplements to see whether they can help. I'm going to see my doctor tomorrow regarding new BP medication that he had prescribed for me (Nifedipine ER) that I believe is causing my feet and ankles to swell. This is a know side effect of this medication, and so I plan to stop taking it after I get my doctor to prescribe something else. The dream I had this morning was another university nightmare, but this time I was going back to the first university that I had attended but was being put into on campus residential housing. I was assigned a roommate that I liked, but when we went to our housing, it was in a large building that we had to share with a lot of other students, and there were very few defining walls to separate the individual spaces, and so I could not tell where our space ended and someone else's began. I wanted to have more walls to provide privacy, and this was causing me anxiety that made me wake up. The interactions I had with other students and staff were particularly disturbing. The closet that I thought was going to be ours was already full of someone else's stuff, including a huge collection of heads or busts that were storing wigs. Some of the busts were somewhat grotesque, and I wanted them out of our closet. There were also a lot of very small dresses on hangers in this closet that looked like they were meant for dolls. There was an office in the building with managers, and I tried to get them to define the limits of the space that we were supposed to occupy, and so they started painting lines on the floor to show exactly where our space was. The lack of real walls was what caused me the most anxiety, and so I woke up and was afraid to go back to sleep. I do appreciate all of the good advice that I have received here and will try to implement more of it - especially the suggestions right before going to sleep. Yesterday or the day before I was watching old episodes of Candid Camera with my brother, and there was one that had a small girl in the early 1960s being interviews by Alan Funt. At one point, she talked about having nightmares, and she said that when that happened, she would tell herself to redirect the dream to something positive, and this worked for her. Unfortunately, this has not worked for me, but I will keep trying.