Well not to beat a dead horse but I am a little slap happy from being up so late so oh well. Macs are not that expensive, get a Mac Mini for $400 bucks, and as far as what macs are used for you got to get passed the ipod and Imac. The current G5 runs on two 2.5GHz dual core processors running on a architecture designed to run bus loads of data and store it on 16 Gigabytes of DDRAM. Why have two processors so while your encoding video you can multitask and download and process 20MB RAW image files while typing a reply on a forum. Macs aint just for kids. I'd hate to disagree with you on Microsofts Legacy software, their whole problem is their software. Ever wonder why all your applications you run on Windows look different, why Explorer looks different then your dial up connection app, or why Windows Media Player looks nothing like Windows Movie Maker; or why Outlook does not resemble Word, Similar apps, but way different code running each. Reason why is that Microsoft has hundreds of departments writing code for apps that don't work together. As a result you get a bloated operating system named Window XP that has to manage all of these apps that have conflicting code and stich it together so you have a working computer. It really is a big mess when you look at XP in the old DOS. !!!DOS!!! I can't believe anything still drags DOS around. Why do you think Windows based computers need to have liquid cooling systems in them today; they need to cool the CPU that has to run Windows. !!!Liquid Cooling!!! Last time I checked liquid and electronics are a bad mix. Here is an interesting quote: Microsoft chairman told "It's not going to work" By Andy McCue Published: Monday 26 September 2005 Microsoft was forced to scrap the first incarnation of Longhorn  now called Windows Vista  after a senior executive warned chairman Bill Gates that it was too complex to work properly. Jim Allchin, group VP in charge of Windows, told the Wall Street Journal he dropped the bombshell last summer, simply telling Gates "It's not going to work". Longhorn was so complex that Microsoft's developers would never be able to make it run properly, Allchin told Gates. The root of the problem was Microsoft's historical approach to developing software  the so-called 'spaghetti code culture'  where the company's thousands of programmers would each develop their own piece of code and it would then all be stitched together at the end. According to the WSJ interview, Allchin faced opposition to his call for a completely new approach to how Microsoft develops Windows  firstly from Gates himself and then the company's engineers. The new approach was to develop a clean solid core code base for Windows which new features could more easily be added to over time and Allchin introduced new tools that would automatically reject buggy code." end quote Well maybe next summer you might get something to replace Windows XP and yes it is sloppy code and yes hackers find flaws in that code to take advantage of weaknesses in Windows based computer systems. As for Vista, or Longhorn, or whatever it's called it's a long way off, they had to start from scratch, thats how bad the operating system your using now is. Microsoft should have started from scratch a long time ago. To everyone I know this is a gardening site, not a tech site, so I apologize for the rant and I will not speak of this matter again. I think I'll follow up on some bamboo threads.

Scrap quilts are my Karma, I think. Before I started quilting, my mother used to urge me continually to take some of the fabric she had stashed over the years to use. I did and it was wonderful stuff, like raw silks she bought by the yards when we lived in Japan. She was always going to make a quilt, inspired by the wonderful cottage industry quilts we saw hanging on clotheslines when we lived in the Ozark Mountains. If you saw a line full of quilts, it was an unwritten invitation to stop and haggle. They were not somebody's laundry. Wells, she inherited and bought stashes after that at auctions and they all got sorted and folded into boxes and she bought a huge load of natural muslin to make a catherdral windows quilt and started one and got to the point she was so elderly she gave up sewing and it never got finished. When I started quilting, I heard daily that I should take fabric home to quilting with. When Mama died........I did. I think I am on the seventeenth quilt in less than five years. Not a one of them has been done entirely with purchased material, though many were made with unused cottons she had collected. But, it goes without saying I have enough scraps that the number of potential quilts I could make is driving me crackers. LOL. And when people hear I quilt, more elderly lady's stashes find their way to my house when children clean out their parent's houses. So, even though I was always a monochrome-themed person, I have learnt to appreciate scrap quilts. My wildest to date was the spider web and it even set my teeth on edge. LOL. But like said previously, by setting scraps against a themed background or using a common plain sashing, you can tame the scrap quilt enough it doesn't come across as something from a nightmare. I am just finishing up on a Blueridge Mountain beauty block quilt, using crisp blue paisley, solid blue and white and incorporating four patch random scraps into the diamonds. It reads serene. I'm loving the way it turned out. Long live scraps.

My problems have been relatively minor so far. Demo started last Monday. On the first day, the power went off in my neighborhood for two hours. Not my GC's fault. This was, however, an omen. I had told the GC that I wanted the wall oven lower because I'm short, and he said he'd keep it at the same height as the current one. But, in fact, he raised it 6 inches. That one I caught in the framing stage, so he's fixing it. I think he forgot. Then he asked me as he was heading out to buy lights, did I want black or white UC lights. He recommended white, I'm not good with quick decisions (why I read GW for months) and said OK. Before I could tell him I really thought I'd rather have black, the white was installed (it was the same day - at least he's quick). That wasn't really his fault - I should have asked for time to decide. But we did discuss where to place the recessed lights, since the joist ran right where they should go, so they could be too close or too far from the cabinets, and I'm quite sure we had decided on too far, but he installed them, instead, too close. If this was due to a decision on his part, shouldn't he have mentioned it to me? I think he forgot again, and it was the same day. But I didn't notice until the ceiling drywall was done, so too late! The most recent thing is not really his fault, except indirectly. I'm donating the cabs and metal stuff to Habitat for Humanity Restore. They said they would be selling the oven for scrap, which was a shame, but at least it wasn't going to the landfill. When the GC demo'd, he put the oven in the driveway instead of the garage with the rest, and I reminded him that it was being donated (I'm seeing a pattern of forgetting here). I knew it was very heavy, so I told him that it was OK to leave it there - it was up by the garage, behind the dumpster, not easily visible from the street, and it didn't matter if it was rained on, but I told him to be sure not to put it in the dumpster. That was last week. Habitat comes tomorrow. Today, while my teenage daughter was home alone, a man and woman in a pickup truck came up the driveway with a dolley and took the oven, wheeling it between the dumpster and our Buick Rendezvous. My DD called my DH, who doesn't ever listen to me when I tell him what is going on, and he told her it was OK if someone could use it. She was afraid to go out and say anything to these people anyway - she's only 13. So my beloved oven was stolen by scrappers. I understand if something is at the curb, it's fair game, but no one should walk up your driveway and spend 15 minutes trying to figure out how to get an double oven into their pickup truck. I'm really PO'd. So it's been only 7 days of remodel, and I can't wait to see what's going to happen next. From now on, every piddling thing is going to be in writing. Still, my stories are nowhere near as bad as all of yours. Clearly, no amount of planning - or wine - is ever enough.

Sources cite the economy and mounting debts for the closure. Cardell Cabinetry had debts of $45 million and had been put in receivership late last month. According to Spector, the appointed receiver, "the company owed its unsecured creditors more than $15 million and its lenders in excess of $30 million, and it did not have sufficient liquidity to manufacture products to meet outstanding orders. You're not going to get anything from Cardell, so i'd respectfully suggest that you find another solution. Even if you had a panel of expert witnesses who agree with you, Cardell can neither produce new drawer boxes for you, nor do they have any money to pay your 'claim' (in addition to the fact, stated above, that you would be way down the totem pole in terms of creditor priority). Years ago, friends ordered a custom sofa. Between the time they paid the substantial deposit and the delivery, the company went bankrupt, with their deposit. They never saw a dime. Time to order a new sofa from someone else and chalk it up to "stuff happens" (annoying as hell when it does, but that doesn't stop it from happening).