Eloise, he was a very positive man. No matter what the child's skill, social level, or how much trouble they had been in at school he welcomed them and always found something for them to do and made each one of them feel special from the kid that painted the stage floor to the lead actors. He was very well respected in the theatre community as well as the schools (he had taught at several schools in his 22 years of teaching). Right now the kids are working on "Harvey" remember the old movie with Jimmy Stewart and the 6 foot invisible bunny? My daughter is playing Veta Louise Simmons, the crazy guys sister. She is so excited this is her biggest role to date. She will be going to college next year and wants to major in theatre or communications/ journalism. She has won several competitions in the category of TV news casting and thinks that may be a possible career choice for her. This is an exciting time for her, the world is at her feet!!! Although I am glad that I think she has scratched being an ariel acrobat off of her list of possible careers. She had even researched possible jobs (other than the circus) and that was really scary that she had done that much research into it. I think the next 4 years are going to be exciting. Mary

that depends upon the time of year and where at in TN - we have such a diverse state from mountains down to the tapered toes of the foothills, dry, rocky, moist and downright boggy.... and if you narrow it down to pre-Spring and exclude evergreens, do you include those that come on with blooms before leaves or just those with leaves? In my neck of the woods - the first ones blatantly perking up are the Bradford Pears and ornamental cherry trees(strictly ornamental, none of them native I don't believe), the Redbuds are smattering the woods here and there, singularly or in small groves, with their purple... the Dogwoods won't be long... but these are all noted for their blooms, the range of native trees are all keeping pace in developing new leaves for the year... should we disqualify shrubs?

I tried monarda and also horehound. They are similar, but I couldn't get a picture of flowers that looked quite the same. Same with Galeopsis tetrahit. The flowers look too "snapdragon-ish" for a good match. Black horehound has similar flowers, but the foliage isn't quite right. Will keep looking. Thanks for the suggestions.

Hi Guys - so being the owner of a Home Automation/Low Voltage company just like the companies with attached quotes, a few comments that you can decide what you want to do with. (1) These quotes seem reasonable for what you are asking for (2) AV quotes will vary a lot depending on what is included and what is not. Pre-wire/trimout prices should be pretty similar unless someone is using a thicker gauge wire or not estimating the wire run lengths correctly (3) Equipment will vary the bid significantly. Distributed audio speakers (those not in a theater) don't have to be that nice as mentioned above however you can also go too crappy on your speakers as well and have some pretty significant buyers remorse afterwords. In-wall/in-ceiling speakers vary slightly in size across manufacturers so drywall repair costs need to be factored in as well if you go too cheap. Generally speaking we tell our clients to go with a speaker brand that has the same size speaker at a bunch of different price points with different performance and build characteristics. In so doing, you can chose the speaker that fits your budget with minimal to no cost to swap out. The most significant cost which you haven't covered yet is the amps and other head-end equipment that drives all these systems. (4) Security systems can be done cheaply or they can be done correctly. Personally we prefer to allocate a zone on the alarm panel per opening. In so doing, this makes trouble-shooting any zone issues easier for the client to do on their own and faster for the security tech to resolve. This means every opening is home run back to the security panel which does mean more wire. We could also daisy chain one wire to 4-6 openings in a room or area which would be much cheaper and less wire. However, when its time to trouble-shoot, it becomes much more of a headache as you have go through 4-6 openings to resolved instead of one (5) Wired Pro surveillance systems will have local storage rather than cloud based storage. As such, they will be in need of a hard drive, similar to a computer. As you might guess. the bigger the hard drive the more the cost. However, what is also true is that the bigger the hard driver the more history of camera footage you can save. Additionally, you can also save higher resolution footage on a larger hard drive. Cameras have an Mp rating on them most typically and the higher the Mp rating the more resolution you are capturing in camera image. As you might guess the higher the Mp rating the more they cost-- sometimes $400-500 per camera or more. More resolution means more detail and allows police/detectors and other to zoom in on any potential bad guys and get license plate numbers, facial details etc. With lower Mp cameras, they are cheaper but then a lot of this detail is lost. (6) Whole house Wifi is good to have and plan for but not to rely on for the reasons mentioned above (aka not secure and throttling your bandwidth compared to a wired connection). Up until the latest round of Wireless Access points, the more wireless devices you add to your home, the more they have to share a single 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz radio connection and the slower they will all go. It is only with the latest release of WAPs that feature 4x4 MU MIMO tech that you can truly experience lots of wirelessly connected devices connected to your network without throttling bandwidth. However this assumes that your devices are setup to connect in a MU MIMO configuration (any device older than a year likely is not). If these devices are not MU MIMO capable, then you will still run into the same throttling issue. Generally speaker we tell our clients that any device that permanently sits in the home should have wired connection to it with only portable devices and enter and leave the home being wireless. (7) If you are truly lost on how to compare bids and make an "apples to apples" comparison, hire one of the AV companies that seems the most trustworthy to you and have them design the system for you. Then have all 3 companies bid against that design. For large residential and commercial projects, this is typical, at least for us it is. (8) AV companies are selling expertise and design in addition to gear and wire. As such they are typically not going to break everything down in infinite detail so you can buy all your stuff online and then have them come back and install it. Most of the time, the expertise and design labor is built into each system of the project so they are not going to want to give that away for free any more than a lawyer or accountant would want to give away their expertise for free. I would be upfront about it and just ask them to line item how much their design/expertise labor is and what that includes. For example, does it include taking that pool contractor the last 6ft in terms of connecting his Jandy iqualink system to the internet when he can't do it on his own? Does it include wiring up your Nest Thermostat because the HVAC guy won't use anything Thermostat but he one he knows? What about a reconfiguring your Home Theater wiring as you decided to get rid of that cabinetry where the equipment was going? Or the electrician who doesn't know how to wire up the smart-switch you purchased-- who will install it now? In a nutshell, there will be quite a few things where a Home Automation/Low Voltage contracting companies expertise will be useful and worth the money paid for it. Hopefully you find this helpful.