Note that there is a special place for non-garden questions - up on the top before the beginning of posts there is a blue "Conversations" tab to click and to post under for this type of non-garden question. I'm not the police, just want to help you find out that there is a lot of information on this forum and a wealth of information on the rest of GW, which are organized quite well, although sometimes not really very obvious where, to new members. As you can see though, it's not cast in stone because you did get many answers here and you will elsewhere on the GW, so you will never be ignored. I am retired and the pay I get for sitting is in hugs and wet kisses and good times to remember when the house is quiet again. It would be nice though to get paid a little for milk and cookies (child or pet types), or that they would bring some treat with them once in a while, or a treat for me even. As for the price for paying non-family to sit for your children and pets, take the info from those above and start asking around. It is a big responsibility to sit for triplet toddlers who go in six directions at once and the price you pay should be commensurate with that level of responsibility. As it has been said - you get what you pay for. Pay 'em $5 per hour and you get $5 worth of inattention. Pay 'em $20 per hour and you can go do what you have to away from them with an easy mind. Childcare can't be a cut-rate proposition since they are the most precious things you have. Pets on the other hand are not quite as precious, but they can't get their own dinner or water either and you do need someone dependable to show up when they are supposed to. Since you live far away from the 20-mile tripper, you should compensate them for their trip time and their gas in addition to their on-the-job time. As for baby-sitters I only asked those with their own car to come sit so that if there was an emergency they would not have to wait for their mom to come get them (we lived far out in the country when mine were small) and since this was before cell phones, they wouldn't have to wait for us to come back and get them, if they could reach us by phone at all. As to where to find these sitter types, I'd recommend contacting some of the local churches. Many have youth groups and keep lists of young people who need some spending money, and as I've found, were always dependable. In my church we have some people (in all age ranges) who have lost their jobs and would love to do something, anything, for any fair amount of pay. Hope you have good luck finding just the right match for your needs! Nancy the nancedar

Bon, In your case with the open top container, I would put fish in the tank. Even if gold fish is all you can afford, they will take care of the mosquito larvae. Bird poop, that's a good thing. Soap may be hard to rinse out, but I think it can be done. If your water could run through a tank of sand on it's way to the garden, I would think it would remove most things. I think most things coming off the roof are going to end up in the ground anyway, so short of lead, it probably isn't going to matter. While I wouldn't like roof particles in my garden beds, in the long run it probably isn't going to hurt the soil. After all, it came from the earth originally. This is a quote from an article written by Geoff Lawton who teaches and designs restoration projects all over the world. The Bill Mollison that he speaks of is "the King" of permaculture, and wrote the book that has become the permaculture 'Bible'. Here is the quote: "We also looked at the spraying of oil residues and oil waste products over sand dunes which is a system proposed by Bill Mollison in the first Gulf War in Kuwait, where oil wells that were destroyed and were causing a lot of pollution across the landscape. These oil residues and surplus oil waste products can be used to spray sand dunes after they have been seeded to rehabilitation species and pioneer sand dune stabilisation species." I am not suggesting that it would be safe for food, but in the long term it was removed from the earth and returned to the earth so I wouldn't be concerned about what falls off the roof onto the ground, but I wouldn't want it directly on my food plants unless it was run through a filtering area first.

I believe that's a squirrel bite in the one you are holding. They like to take one bite and then leave. Some say its for the water.

Thank you Judy, this is much better. Although I really couldn't figure out the part of making four waves and changing the setting on each. Probably working through the original tut made it a little easier to understand. Somehow I got it to work, not as the instructions went as I just wasn't quite sure, but I am so much happier with these results.