Strawberry seeds are easily separated from ripe fruit by placing them in a household blender with a cup of water and blending at high speed for just a few seconds. (Not too long, or the seeds may be damaged). The good seeds will settle to the bottom, and the fruit pulp and unripe seeds will float. Wait a minute or so for the seeds to settle, and pour off the liquid. The seeds can then be rinsed or scraped out and allowed to dry on a paper towel.

If you're referring to the new leaf, it doesn't look bad to me. I frequently have new leaves that are somewhat distorted at the beginning but look normal when they mature. Stress can cause leaves to be distorted. The stress can be from transplanting, water deficiency or excess, and from critters such as spider mites, aphids, thrips, mealybugs and others. Check the underside of the leaves for sign of infestation and spray with an appropriate insecticide if they are there. Mike

Just some random thoughts on things you could try. Simply tell landlords you are looking for a small apartment for you and your husband, due to the location of his job. There's no need to get into the fact that only your husband will be using it the majority of the time. If you live near any colleges or universities, many students rent apartments on a full-year lease and then need to sub-let them over the summer when they return home. It might be possible to sub-let for the summer, which would give you a feel for how noisy a particular apartment building is. Try to find a three or four unit apartment building that is owned by an individual landlord, rather than a large management company (Moonshadow's suggestion of Craigslist would be a good place to start). Bonus if the landlord lives in the building, because then the landlord will have a vested interest in keeping the building quiet (or at least mostly quiet). Smaller buildings tend to have less noise, just because there are fewer people in them. You might also try to find an in-law apartment attached to someone's home. There still might be noise, but it would be the noise of one family, as opposed to lots of people above you, below you, on all side and tramping through the hallways. Top floor apartments tend to be quieter. You don't have anyone walking overhead, or dropping things on the floor. End or corner units tend to be quieter because you have fewer walls shared with other units, and therefore fewer sounds to travel into your unit. So look for a top floor end or corner apartment, away from the stairs or elevators, because people can make a tremendous amount of noise on the stairs and people can congregate by the elevators, chatting and laughing while you are trying to get to sleep, especially on weekend nights. In general, the older buildings tend to have thicker walls and floors and therefore sound travels less. I'm thinking of pre-war apartments in places like NYC and Boston and Chicago. I currently live in a two-family house built in the 1920s. There's a little baby downstairs, but I only hear him cry on occasion, and only when I'm in the room directly over the room he's in. And the noise level is not enough to bother me--I don't even turn up the TV sound when he cries. About the month to month arrangement--Moonshadow has given some very good reasons why landlords don't like to do this. In my area, almost every lease starts on September 1 and ends on August 31, because of the large number of colleges and universities in the area. It's a hassle for a landlord to get an apartment ready for a new tenant, cleaning, painting, cleaning carpets, and then have to do it all over again in a few months. What you might try doing is offering to pay a slightly higher rent for those few months where you would be month to month, to compensate for the problems and added expenses that might arise if you vacate the apartment in two or three months. I've mostly seen this done at the end of a lease, where someone needs to stay in the apartment a few months longer than the lease is for, but knows that they can't stay for a year. Landlords in my area charge $75 to $150 a month more to let you stay on a month to month basis. And finally, if there is noise but it's not too bad, say the occasional indistinct noise of a TV rather than the blare of the music student next door's trumpet or sax, there are white noise machines that can cancel out the sound. Or earplugs.

Thanks, both. I had sent him an email to come out and rework it, but I think he doesn't understand the issue even as much as I do, and that's a very small amount. I'll hire someone who does and eat the cost rather than let him mess with it. (FWIW, I started being suspicious of him when he didn't know to loop the co-ax so that water would drip off outside rather than run into the house. When I started looking, I started finding things that made me nervous.)