Aaaahhh... finally... last visitors left Saturday... did piles of laundry... feet up today! Everybody loved the pond and the sound of the waterfall. I think there was some family member or other on the pond deck all waking hours.

Hi, I have a water garden center in Oregon. congrats on the babies! Seperate the goldfish from the Koi if they are spawning because the goldfish will eat them. Also, goldfish will spawn with Koi and make a ugly black brown "Mule" fish that you probably do not want to keep. If you have any black ones when they are about 2-3 inches long, that is probably what happened. Good luck and you may email me with anyother koi questions you may have. Lori

I will continue by building one small compost pile this year. Mostly, the material will come from one of my neighbors who makes this strange commitment to compost each year. He has tons of what he calls compost! It is almost entirely lawn clippings and pine needles. Appropriate choices but he does no more than pile them up. In fact, he invites a landscaper guy to dump lawn clippings in his yard where nothing is likely to be done with them for a number of years. They aren't even mixed into the pine needles which might even be left in plastic bags and tossed into the pile - I kid you not! Anyway he is always pushing this "miracle material" (which is obviously in his way) and I'm willing to haul off several wheelbarrow loads. Remarkably, he has now tilled his garden and it does not appear that he will make use of a single fork-full of his own "compost" this spring! At the rate he is utilizing this material, I figure that he will have some of what is already piled up over there into the next decade! What I carry off will be used to mulch the potato beds after allowing it another 12 months of composting. I don't add anything but soil but it gets good and fluffed up. Just doing this seems to take care of the bindweed seed that must be in it - yes, bindweed is robustly growing over some of the neighbor's bins! My own compostables will continue to be buried under 8" or 10" of soil directly in the garden beds as they become available. I realized the other day that the nature of the soil here may be a primary reason why this seems to work so well for me. Decomposition must be at least partly an anaerobic process when I do this. However, my garden soil has a great deal of gravel in it. In my imagination at least, around each rock is trapped some air. Layering clay over compostables may not be entirely successful but in my garden, all of the material will decay away uneventfully while doing a good deal to improve soil tilth and fertility. Steve

Kats, that is some real chutzpah. I feel for you. We've been in our home for a little more than a month after a 13-month build (that was only supposed to take 9 months) - the delays were excruciating because they would have been avoidable by someone with even a modicum or organizational ability, which our GC does not have. He's a lovely guy on a personal level but not nearly as good a contractor as he thinks, and we sorely need a break from the unrelenting pressure. He still has not finished one major item - two sets of steel stairs that go from our rear porches to our rear terrace, as well as several small punchlist items. There's always an excuse. He's disorganized, but resents it when we step in to organize, or take any kind of action to impose a deadline - this from a guy who is routinely hours late to scheduled meetings and never met any deadline in the construction process, even ones he imposed himself. Our new theory this week is to give him whatever time he needs (within reason) but to limit his intrusions into our home life to one day a week, arranged in advance, with a "one hour" rule - if he's not here within an hour of when he is supposed to be he has to wait until the next week. Apparently that is being just as "mean" and "difficult" as complaining about unmet deadlines - he thinks we should be there 24/7 for him to do what he wants, or we should just give him a key and trust him, in any event on his schedule. No way - he has needed watching every step of the way. We've done way more than our share of work that he should have done - I feel for you there too. He's been inches away from being fired more than once on this job, and we've talked to a construction lawyer several times about really contentious issues. In the end, even though we have the cash leverage (we still owe him more than our 10% retention, primarily because he's too lazy to do a requisition), it just hasn't been worth it to fire him. Assuming that you don't need clean title for a takeout of your construction loan, it sounds like you have little to worry about. I don't have huge faith in the court system, but even then I find it hard to believe that a judge would buy his argument that his subs are not under his control. Also, if he's not done, how in the world could he be owed a completion bonus? The courts are always a risk, but in this case it seems to me a pretty small one. If you do have to close any new financing that requires title work, you may need to think about it a bit more strategically. Do everything you can to get your loan closed without a lien being recorded. Otherwise, my advice to you is the advice I have a hard time taking myself. It's only as big a deal as you make it. So hire a lawyer and instruct him or her to deal with it in as cost-effective a manner as possible. Then let it go and enjoy your new house.