Marian - the paper size is 11"x17" for the course but I gather in 'real life' it would be at least 24"x36" or bigger... Mary - I have noticed the ads for the English Gardening School in the RHS magazine. And there are the RHS courses too... I guess one advantage of the U of G courses is you can just take the courses that interest you and they can count towards a certificate/diploma or not, as you like. So there no feeling that you didn't complete a program if you want to stop after just one course. The Internet format was ideal for me; it's just that the course content wasn't quite what I was looking for. I'll have to look around at options and then see whether I'm still in the mood to do something more once the gardening season is over for this year. Saucy - The reference to the clematises is in the verbal description of the plan. You need the plant list key to find them on the drawing (and the drawing posted here is too small to read the numbers anyway! :-) GB - I was going to consult with you about what ones to use but ran out of time and just named ones I was familiar with! The transparent house was interesting. I had to 'build' it from scratch with only the floor plan outline, the height of the walls as provided by the teacher, and the fact that there was a 2' roof overhang! It's not quite right I think on the back part of the house but good enough for the purpose of the assignment. The whole isometric drawing thing is actually quite simple to do - if a bit fiddly and tedious! You follow a straightforward process using fairly crude shapes for the plants (drawn to scale based on mature height and spread) and, when you put it all together, it produces that rather astonishing drawing - with zippo artistic talent required on my part! Since it was all done at a scale of 1/8" = 1' small details were killers to work with. It took me two days to draw that table and tuteur! Rotating things 30 degrees when they're that small and have so many lines (all those chair legs etc.!) is hard on the eyes... And since the technique produces a 3-D effect, I kept losing track of what was bottom and what was top as the little image seemed to have a life of its own and 'morphed' a lot :-) And tilting everything at 30 degrees started to 'get' to me - when I was reading something after working on the drawings for a while, the text of what I was reading seemed to be on a slant! But it was mostly fun - and good mental exercise :-) But now it's time to mess around in the real garden! I do hope to get out and measure things next week and do a proper scale drawing of the front garden and the changes I want to make there. (I suspect I may end up just 'winging it' as usual if spring gets underway quickly sometime soon and I run out of planning time....:-)

Looking at the manual, I believe that when you use this feature, it applies to all stations, no matter the program. This seems to be the case with most timers. This post was edited by irrigirl on Mon, Nov 3, 14 at 10:33

They are so cute !

Because the situation has some extreme aspects to it, I can see your frustration over what sounds like an extreme discrepancy between the way the kids are treated. I'm sure that it must be hard to watch, and there are no easy answers for how to make things fair... because the kids in general have had very different lives and experiences and continue to do so. It's kind of like comparing apples and oranges, and that's what makes the 'fairness' hard to determine. I agree that your husband should cut back a bit on the buying of luxuries, and he certainly shouldn't buy them every time she asks for one, and certainly not on command in general... But I also see where you and your bio-kids have to adjust your thinking a bit too. First of all, the following thinking needs to be adjusted: "he loves and cares about he more than he does us and that is painful to have him put first when i am demented in thinking we were here first.." Because actually, your Sd was there first. Not saying that this automatically means each and every time that she has to be "first' on everything, but her existence is a fundamental point of fact that you seem to be mis-perceiving. Also "i wouldnt have chosen a man with children because i didnt ever want my children or me to be second to someone elses children...but here i am..and here she is..." Well, you very much DID choose a man with a child: another fundamental fact which you seem to be ignoring. Finally, you mentioned that it upsets you to see your husband providing for his daughter her b/c he doesn't provide for you in that exact manner. But the thing is, not only is she his minor child, but she is also a minor child that he DIDN'T provide ANYTHING for for the vast majority of her life. So yes, a certain amount of this is making up for that past irresponsibility and neglect. Clearly not in an ideal way, but he at least is trying to own up to his paretal responsibilities to her in SOME way now. But as everyone has noted, of course this can create other problems. Namely how your children perceive the situation. The only thing I can suggest as to how to address it with them is by an honest explanation incorporating some real-life lessons about: the fact that life doesn't always treat everyone exactly equal in exactly the same ways at the exact same times because we all have different lives; the fact that people make mistakes but that the right thing to do is to address those mistakes and make amends like your husband is doing; and that no matter what it may appear someone else has, on the surface, you never know what they have endured, or what they have lacked deep down, in the past, etc. Not to be overly dramatic about it, and it's not the best comparison, butit's soemthing along the lines of how it may be explained to kids that some kids get out of certain chores b/c they have a physical disability, or soem kids get out of certain homework assignments b/c they have a learning disability, or some kids get first consideration at colleges b/c they are in a certain minority group, or some kids are just born to rich parents and simply get more than other kids, period. If you think about it, at some point, we all learn these type of lessons, b/c if we didn't we'd all be pretty bitter and think that life is terribly unfair and that people who have certain advantages that we don't have are automatically happier. And this whole thing underscores the point that money shouldn't be a defining thing in happiness or relationships... the very point that is trying to be made about why it's upsetting to see Dad spend so much money on SD.