Oh, well. At least you know how to kill them. :) Callas do well. I have them on a western exposure about a foot from the house in almost full sun and tucked in behind some liriope and in front of Indian Hawthorne. (Before I had them in a more exposed area and they froze back to the ground and only got six inches tall). They are twelve to eighteen inches high and stay evergreen except for as few months in the summer. (They are evergreen from September through June and bloom in April.) Cannas do well also, but there are the dreaded canna leaf roller caterpillars than I keep fighting. Hostas do much better in pots than in the ground because they get colder in the winter and the drainage is better. I have Patriot hostas and some of their offspring.) You might want to check out the daylily festival in Abbeville. It should be coming up soon. You can grow evergreen daylily varieties. As far as the amaryllis, I have several. You can pick them up at Wal-Mart and Lowes around Christmas for a few dollars a piece. They are evergreen and bloom right now. Also, there are a lot of cool gingers you can grow. Check out gingerwood nursery online. It is located right outside Baton Rouge. Tim Chapman is the owner and he is on the ginger forum and is real good about answering questions. The white butterfly ginger (Hedychium) is really nice and spreads rapidly and is junglesque. I also like crinum and eucomis. They do well. A rapidly spreading plant is mexican petuia (ruellia). I have purple and pink ones that get three feet high and are covered with flowers all summer. I could send you some seeds later in the summer if you remind me. The evergreen dwarf agapanthus are really nice too. Home Depot has them right now. As far as reading, you might want to check out Louisiana Gardener (it is the only magazine I get) and Southern Livings Garden Guide (an encyclopedia of 5,000 plants) and Louisiana Gardener's Guide by Dall Gill and Garden Perennial for the Coastal South by Barbara Sullivan (Beautiful pictures and some different plants)

I have never had a subscription to a cooking magazine - the only subscription I did have was to Illuminatrice, an Italian lighting magazine, and that was at work. The only magazines that I buy at the newsstand are Italian design magazines, some of which are quite expensive (I used to buy men's Italian fashion magazines, when I was more fashionable), and I have saved every one of them. I also buy Architectural Digest, Interiors, Veranda, etc. when they publish photos of my furniture designs, and I keep these also. My old magazine collection takes up one shelf in my garage, and I do refer to the Italian magazines from time to time for inspiration. I do collect clutter, but books and magazines are not part of that. I have one shelf of cookbooks in the hall next to the kitchen. I once bought a magazine on Feng Shui, but I decided that the magazine was clutter and got rid of it. I spent last week-end trying to declutter my bedroom because I also bought a new mattress that will be delivered tomorrow, and I want my room to look nice. Yesterday I made a runner with the fabric left over from making new drapes for my bedroom (to be able to block out light) and put it on the wide dresser beside my bed. The dresser on the other side of my bed has a runner I made from fabric left over from when I made my bedspread. I find that decorating or trying to coordinate rooms helps me get rid of clutter. However, I did put a bunch of books on the wide dresser using bookends. I don't have room for another bookcase. If I need to get more books, I will get rid of old ones that I have. Lately I have been buying and reading books on Anthropology and early human evolution. I read them at night to help me get to sleep, and so it takes a while to get through them. I cannot stand to watch Hoarders, but I will watch Clean House if I need inspiration to declutter. Making my house and yards look as beautiful as possible is one of my top priorities, and this helps me let go of clutter. I haven't gotten rid of it altogether, however, and so I think it is an on-going process. I have a hard time getting rid of old clothes that no longer fit, and I am convinced that sometime in the near future, they will fit again. Anyway, that is my goal. They may be terribly out of style or inappropriate by that time, however. Getting rid of old clothes is my biggest problem. One of the things I came across yesterday while decluttering was a printout from a Cooking Forum thread from 2005 that I started asking what was in everyone's freezer. It included a post by Ann_T on pitahaya (I happened to have some in my freezer at the time) that she had copied and pasted, bad Google translation and all. The translation was hysterically funny. Lars

I am like Jan - can't stand clutter, even if it's behind the closed doors of a closet. Just too distracting for me. Unfortunately, my seemingly "raised in a barn" children don't seem to have inherited this gene :-) DH just took all three kids to visit his family during spring break two weeks ago. I had four days with the house all to myself and cleared out a ton of stuff, then reorganized quite a few spaces. You just seem to accumulate so much with kids in the house! When I was all done, I felt like I could breathe again! I had about 5 big garbage bags of stuff to dump, then filled up the back of my SUV with dontations for Goodwill. We have a drive-thru donation center nearby so it was pretty easy to have them take it all off my hands. I agree with the others who said this has been a great way to evaluate potential new purchases - every time I've been shopping in the last couple of weeks, I've really stopped to think about whether I absolutely need and/or love it. I've passed up or returned quite a few things lately! Still need to tackle the unfinished storage area in our basement. The main source of clutter there? Paint cans! I was truly embarassed to see how many partially-used gallons of paint I've piled up due to my eternal search for the "perfect" colors. I can't even tell you how many golds or warm yellows I have. Next step is to whittle them down to the colors we currently have on the walls and dry up/ dump the rest.

I agree with Jim Mat. Most electricians probably have better prices than you're going to get at the Borgs. I usually get about 50% the list prices at the electrical supply houses I deal with. My PRO discount at Lowe's doesn't end up being cheaper. If you're concerned about price, it's almost always better to get bids from several firms rather than trying to game the system. If you bring your own materials, you may suddenly find the labor costing more to make up. If you have a particular brand breaker brand you want, you can certainly make that a requirement. When I told the guy doing one house I wanted QO, he said "I figured you did" (I'd already added a QO subpanel at one point but hadn't touched the horrendous Zinsco main panel. I was planning on doing the work myself, but it got bundled in with a kitchen remodel and that was fine by me. Frankly, my view of panels changes as time goes on. Having been a QO/QOB man because I came out of industrial stuff where it's pretty much the standard, I've found that various others CH, GE, etc... all have their pluses and minuses. One thing however (less of a problem becausse you can order just about anything online and get it in a couple of days), is to pick stuff you can easily get additional breakers for. I've found if you sniff around the Borg electrical system you get a sense what the regional preference in your area is. In NJ, I found tons of CH stuff in stock. In DC, it was all QO and HOM. Down here in NC, we see a lot of GE and BR stuff. Go figure.