Loving this thread. If you aren't already on Pinterest, that's a great source for clever little home modifications. Here are a few that I've pinned recently: Laundry appliances raised on pedestals with room to slide baskets underneath: http://pinterest.com/pin/165999936235136591/ Shoe drawers in mudroom: http://pinterest.com/pin/165999936235089604/ Bookcase door: http://pinterest.com/pin/165999936235126760/ Appliance "garage" or coffee station: http://pinterest.com/pin/165999936235093051/ Vertical storage above wall oven for cookie sheets / cutting boards: http://pinterest.com/pin/165999936235089285/

Once again, thanks so much to all of you who have taken the time to write . . . I so appreciate it !!! Seeking, thanks for your sympathy and idea of searching the make with +problems . . . I did plug that in, and amazingly enough, came up with OTHER problems we've already had with this dang truck !!! On some other sights, I also did find some similar things . . . And, on another entirely different note . . . . I hope your little puppy continues to recover nicely . . .poor little thing .. I was so sorry to hear that . . just an awful thing to have to go through . . . my good thoughts to puppy and you !!! dktrahan, thanks for the Dodge websites . . . I got quite a lot of useful stuff from them . . . I was on the computer last evening . . . late . . so much so, that my poor eyes are tired tired tired today . . . but I am so determined to get to the root of all of this . . . Sue, not to worry . . . but the husband factor in all of this is really trying . . . too much to go into, but basically it's not helping this situation . . .at all !! He's blaming me and DS for even buying a Dodge product to begin with . . . So, wanted to make it clear that my son is being a total champ through all of this . . . Nina, I think that will be the next step . . . to take it back to the original dealer and tell them to just keep it until they get it figured out . . . and IF they can't figure it out, then somehow, I'm going to try to make them responsible for selling us this truck to begin with !! Someone has to take responsibility for this, and to "eat" the loss . . . Don't think it should be us . . . Supposedly the truck was certified, and I'm thinking that's worthless !!! I feel that we're kind of between a rock and a hard place . . . I'm too honest to not disclose problems with the truck if it comes to trading it in . . I certainly don't want anyone else to have to go through this . . . but we just can't afford to have 18K go down the drain, either . . . We don't want another Dodge product, but I'm wondering if we would have more leverage with the selling dealership if we did go with a new Dodge, then get rid of it at another time . . . Oh heck . .. I have such neck strain, headaches and eyes aches through all of this . . . . . Oh, and re: the computer reprogramming . . . I talked with our friend yesterday who originally diagnosed the problem as needing to reprogram the computer . . . He COULD NOT believe that Dodge wouldn't do that . . . could not believe that Dodge said they wouldn't take responsibliy for anything that might go wrong because of the re-programming . . . I asked if he would mind if I had the Dodge guy call him and they could hash it over . . (they are acquaintances, having worked together years ago) He he didn't mind at all . . . called the Dodge guy, he told me WHY he didn't want to re-program it, saying he had to answer to Dodge as to why it was re-programmed when they couldn't get the problem to duplicate . . . said that even if they did re-program it, that that might not be the problem, which I can understand. I told him plain and simple though, that the truck, to us, is not safe to drive. Oh, and another thing . . .in an e-mail from our service adviser yesterday, he said that assuming there is a problem, that it WILL get worse, to the point of engine failure, and THEN we can bring it back and they'll know what to do !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Okay, so digressing a bit . . . back to the main service guy . . . he suggested that they could just keep it and he'd have his techs drive it home at night to try to duplicate the situation . . also saying that his techs were more experienced drivers than my son, and if anything should go wrong on the freeway, that they'd know more how to handle it . . . Now, all of this just does not leave me with warm fuzzy feelings !!!!!!!!!!!! Bill, thanks for the clogged catalytic converter tip. I e-mailed that suggestion, along with a list of other things that I gleaned from some of the Dodge forums. The catalytic problem sounds so much like what's going on with the truck . . . I'm so wondering just exactly what they've done to check into all of this . . . whether it's just driving the truck to try to duplicate the situation, or really getting into it. My friend that has his own shop told me that dealers really don't like working on warranty work . . . at all !! and sometimes do just what they have to to get it out the door. He did highly recommend this dealership, but for the life of me, and maybe I'm just naive . .. but I can't figure out why THEY can't figure out what's going on !!!!! Well, that's the update for today . . . so far anyway . . . Again, I so appreciate all of your posts, suggestions, and sympathy !!!!! Chris

Frankie, as a former antique dealer who has done her share of sales, your timing on this coincides well with the basement we are cleaning out to have our ''Sale'' with! Your observations are right on. You know those things that were saved in boxes were probably family gifts the owner felt they couldn't give away. Broken or dirty stuff that's been neglected is just sad. Knowing how much work there is to selling off old stuff always makes me want to make it easier on myself. I helped my parents with their estate sale. Mom thought it was too overwhelming and she never dealt with the contents of her house until that point in time. She was a depression kid, and her stuff represented her life to her. Most of it wasn't particularly valuable, yet she had far more difficulty letting it go than she should have. She didn't have any practice at culling, and though she knew most of that old stuff wasn't worth much, it was physically painful for her to let it go. When we cleaned out our garage, to have a staging area for the basement stuff to sell, my DH wanted to save two windows that ''we might need if'' something happened to the others. I put my foot down. I'm allowing him to keep the bicycle he refuses to get rid of that has been hanging (out of the way) in the garage that he hasn't ridden since we've lived here. (It's a symbol of his youth, long before we met. Since we'll have been married 27 years soon, it's old and not particularly valuable...Only in his mind!) I figure it resides there as my bargaining chip, which I've used many, many times as a point of reference. Since it isn't taking space away from anything else, it's useful to me for that! I have an assortment of tablecloths too; you can bet I'm culling them for my sale. I have parts to pieces I've been looking for since we moved here 11 years ago. I hope to find them in the basement when we clean it out. If I don't, they're GOING. I'm trying to have a good attitude about this, knowing I'll find some treasures that were lost and found. It's going to be great to reclaim the basement real estate for a re-purpose, other than storage. The only problem I can see with this is that it may involve another remodel, but I'm not going there for a good, long while! In the meantime, there will be room to figure it out. I've had so much stuff come and go in my life I don't attach a lot of importance to it anymore. If it's useful or you love it, sure. Most doesn't fit in that category. Otherwise, you just have to deal with it at some point. When it's all said and done, it's only stuff. It's so refreshing to lighten the load!

Jennifer, I would not really describe the smell of a copperhead as being similar to a cucumber. It smells like a.....copperhead. It is sort of a musky smell, not as bad as the odor of a skunk, but not pleasant. Maybe it smells a little like a cucumber to some folks, but not necessarily to me. I have some friends who say it smells like copper to them. It doesn't to me. You won't always smell it. I usually smell it when I have walked by one and startled it. Copperheads don't want to tangle with us and usually will slip away if they can, but if they are startled or surprised and can't slip away because maybe a person is between them and their best escape route so that they feel trapped, they'll release that scent. I try to freeze in place when I smell it, first checking the ground near my feet to make sure I'm not about to step on one. Sometimes I can find them after I smell them, but sometimes I cannot. Brandywines do seem a bit more prone to have fused blossoms (aka megablooms) than many other varieties, especially from blooms formed when the nights still were cool. Usually as the season goes on, the megablooms become more and more rare. The fused blossoms do tend to produce very large fruit, but because of the way the skin of the different fruits fold together as the fruit enlarges, you often end up cutting away and tossing a significant portion of the ripe fruit, so lots of people just toss those flowers before they form fruit. I never do, merely because blossom drop happens so much here once we get hot that I hate to waste a single tomato blossom. Nancy, If you plant milkweed, you're just going to have milkweed pests. Insects cannot afford to be picky---if they have to eat milkweed to survive, they're going to eat any and all milkweed. I've never noticed that any particular type of milkweed is less susceptible to the specific pests than others are. Like everything else, the milkweed plants and their pests are natural parts of our ecosystem. If the pests are doing too much damage, just destroy them. I leave them alone if I can and wait for the birds or beneficial insects to take care of them. I've never had the tussock moth caterpillars here and do believe I'd kill those things in a heartbeat. Whether you appreciate it or not, the ecosystem is functioning properly. While we plant milkweeds for the monarchs, we also have to expect that anything else and everything else that feeds on them might show up too. I usually don't see milkweed pests until the fields turn brown and the milkweeds go to seed and, in dry weather, began to fade and dry and die back to the ground. Guess what? We're already that dry here. The milkweed plants in the fields look sad and pathetic and the pests are moving to the milkweeds in irrigated green gardens. It happens every year---if you are hungry, you go to where the food is found. Pest-free gardening is a myth perpetrated by chemical companies. A healthy garden is full of insects, both good and bad. Milkweeds existed on this land before we bought it. They are still here. They'll be here long after we are gone unless someone scrapes the ground bare and pours concrete on it. (What a horrible thought!) Nothing kills them, though excessively dry weather can make the ones in the fields die back to the ground. They often green up and grow again when rainfall returns in autumn. The milkweed in our flower border never dies back to the ground (I hope I didn't jinx them by saying that) but can look ratty if drought gets too extreme and I stop watering because I cannot water enough to help the plants stay in good shape. Sometimes I just give up in the heat and close the garden gate and tell the plants I'll be back in the fall, or after we get decent rainfall, and the milkweeds survive, so if they can take a couple of drought months with no water, they can handle feeding by most pests. Probably not the tussock moth caterpillars, but pretty much everything else. As for being a Monarch Waystation....don't think of it that way. That's a sort of gimmicky way to make people feel good about growing plants for the monarchs. I want to grow plants for the monarchs to help them, not so I can display a Monarch Waystation sign. (sigh) You aren't trying to have a monarch waystation for its own sake, right? Instead, you are trying to fix a broken (by others) ecosystem by providing habitat. Approach it with the attitude that you are restoring the ecosystem to what it once was and needs to be again and remember that doing so provides a habitat for everything and that will have everything inhabiting it....those insects and creatures we would choose to see and those that we'd rather not see around. It is the way of the world, and they all have their place somewhere in the food chain. Everything in any ecosystem eats something and everything gets eaten by something. Accepting that and not going overboard trying to micromanage the garden 'pests' is so much less stressful, and it is natural. God made the world and everything in it and I trust that he created those darn milkweed pests for some reason that he understands, even if we do not. My goal never has been to have an insect-free garden or landscape, nor is it to have pest-free plants, because such a thing isn't possible unless you use synthetic chemicals strong enough to kill everything. My goal is to have an ecosystem that is healthy, strong and balanced, where I interfere in the food web as little as humanly possible. Make peace with the pests and only destroy those that truly destroy plants, not those that just damage them. Look at it this way: plant asparagus and eventually asparagus beetles show up (and harlequin bugs). Plant brassicas and cabbage loopers, imported cabbage worms and diamondback moth worms will show up. Plant potatoes and Colorado potato beetles will show up. Plant okra and sharpshooters and aphids are likely to show up. Plant squash and you-know =-whos will show up. Plant sweet potatoes and morning glories and tortoise beetles show up. Plant milkweed and milkweed assassin bugs, milkweed leaf beetles, oleander aphids and tussock moth cats show up. It is the way things are. The older I get, the more I have learned to chill, relax and let the garden ecosystem just be an ecosystem. I have learned I can ignore most pests and the plants will outlast them, so I don't worry about anything except the ones experience has taught me do extreme damage to the plants we grow for a food harvest.. Blister beetles are an example of one you can ignore most of the time. After all, blister beetles are beneficial because they devour grasshopper eggs. However, on some plants (cucumbers and sweet autumn clematis, for example) they can eat the foliage down to nothing, so if they're doing that, a gardener really cannot ignore them. What matters the most, though, is how many blister beetles show up. If I see an occasional handful of them in the garden, I just ignore them. However if they show up by the hundreds or thousands, a gardener cannot ignore them. Rebecca, It is just one of those years with the Septoria Leaf Spot. It was really hit and miss in my garden, but definitely more widespread than usual (some years I don't see it at all) and, in a most interesting way, I saw very little Early Blight, which is more common in my garden. It is almost like the Septoria Leaf Spot outcompeted the Early Blight for the right to hit tomato plants randomly. Sorry about the squirrels. I was hoping those squirrel treats would work. I've always found it interesting that most tomato varieties that produce bite-sized fruit just do not seem to suffer from common fungal and bacterial foliar diseases like the varieties that produce larger fruit do. I've never seen this addressed in technical literature, but have observed it in my garden. These diseases may hit the plants, but the plants outgrow them and never stop producing either. I watered twice this week and probably will have to do the same next week. It just depends on how much the soil dries out. Tim is already fretting over the coming July water bill (which will arrive here in the first week of August) because, he says, the water bills haven't been at all bad this year and he dreads getting a high one. I laughingly told him to adjust his attitude and just be grateful that the water bills for January through June were not bad and to remind himself that a high water bill in July and August is normal and expected. lol. I also still don't think the July water bill will be that bad--I certainly am watering the remaining veggies and herbs, and all the flowers, much less than I water when I'm trying to keep a ton of tomato, cucumber and melon plants happy in the heat. I think he just needs something to fret about. It hasn't really felt hot here since that day our heat index hit 116. Of course, the obvious explanation is that after that miserable day, any other day will feel cool by comparison. (grin) Tim wasn't here that day though and was in his air-conditioned office at work, so he missed the worst of it. I think our heat index had dropped into the 70s or 80s by the time he got home because of all the rain storms around us that basically missed us but gave us rain-cooled air. (And, I believe, a measly 4/100s of an inch of rain.) I do think the heat returns at the middle of next week. Since that hot, miserable day, I've felt like our weather has been only warm, not hot, but by mid-week, we'll be hot again. We need to mow and edge everything tomorrow, and especially all the fence lines and such where the fields really are drying out now. Keeping as much vegetation as possible cut short reduces the fire danger, and we are starting to have fires. By the way, while typing this I have heard some fireworks going off in our neighborhood. Really, people? I think that by now people should have all that out of their system. Apparently they don't. Dawn