Thanks everyone for your insights. I took the screening exam which was the same exam one takes at the end of the course, and filled out a questionnaire that was focused mostly on listing and prioritizing my volunteer intersests. All this back in mid-May. Then I waited...and waited. Finally got my appointment for an interview confirmed by post-card last week, and I've got the 10 minute interview this afternoon. So I guess I'm on the definiite short-list. We'd all been given an orientation to the program and an opportunity to hear from some real live MGs when we took the screening exam. The Lehigh Valley MG program looks very, very good - great curriculum (from Penn State), great extension services, and many great volunteer ops. (Rodale's around here, too and they host events, call for volunteers, and even influences - to a certain extent - the pest and disease management approaches of less chemically-averse agricultural entities like Penn State's agricultural programs and extension services.) Thanks again, cranebill

Sharon, Normally everything in clay is high because clay is high in minerals. At least you have a pretty decent soil pH. I think most state labs mainly just test for N-P-K and soil pH on the basic soil test. Were you wrong to expect more for $10? Probably, because (unfortunately) $10 doesn't buy you much any more. To get a soil tilth analysis you have to use someone like the private soil lab in Edinburgh, Texas and you have to be willing to pay for it. To understand the tilth and texture of my soil in various parts of our property, I just used the jar soil test when we finished building the house and moved here. I already knew that only the soil in our woodland had adequate organic matter, so didn't even really need the jar soil test to tell me that, but I used it to help me understand what percentage of our soil was clay, sand, and silt. The soil on our property varied a great deal from one area to another with very little uniformity, so I did a separate soil jar test in each area so I could understand the challenges of planting in the back yard (which had a clayey-sandy blend) versus the front and side yards (extremely dense red clay from which you could make clay flower pots) versus the veggie garden area (sandy-silty along one edge, then sandy-clayey from there down to the middle of the garden, and dense clay for the remaining half of the garden. After that,I then knew what plants would tolerate the soil in each area of the yard based on their adaptability to heavy clay versus sand/silt with little clay, and also knew which parts of the garden had the worst soil and needed the most amendment. If I had followed standard soil testing procedures and dug up soil from the various areas, mixed it together I wouldn't have learned much about the tilth in my various areas because I would have mixed it all up together. I think the best way to understand the tilth/texture in a specific area is to do the jar soil test. If your soil is uniform on your property, one jar test is all you need, but I don't really know how a person would know if their soil was uniformly the same without doing a jar soil test from several different areas just to establish that. In our sandy/silty area I couldn't keep anything alive in the drought of 2003 because I hadn't added enough organic matter to that area and it just wouldn't hold enough moisture even with heavy irrigation. Because I had been amending that soil for 4 years before the drought of 2003, it was disheartening to feel like 4 years of soil improvement hadn't helped much. We've been here 14 years now, and that area did much better in the droughts of 2011 and 2012, but I still feel like it doesn't have enough organic matter, and maybe it never will, though it is not for lack of trying on my part. Understanding the soil you have in a specific part of your yard or garden can be very difficult if that area differs from the other areas you have planted. With highly variable soil like mine, it drives me crazy. Ultimately, though, the lesson I have taken from trying to grow stuff here is that you have to add organic matter all the time. I don't mean that you have to rototill it into the soil---just piling OM on top of the ground inproves it over time. I decided a long time ago to follow Mother Nature's Lead. How does she build soil? By letting organic matter fall to the ground, pile up, and decompose---no rototilling to dig it in, etc. When I walk down into our woodland, which has an estimated age of 60-80 years, depending on who you talk to here and what they remember about how this land was farmed, the first 8 or so inches of soil are black, humusy and rich. Down beneath? Same old red clay in some areas and silty/sandy soil in others. How did that black, rich, humusy soil get there? Just from organic matter decaying there over the decades. Did your soil test address your Cation Exchange Capacity at all? It might have been abbreviated as C.E.C. That usually is included in soil tests, though I haven't had a lab soil test in many years so don't know if they still tell you the C.E.C. on the basic test or not. C.E.C. is one bit of info from soil testing that I find helpful. A lab like the private soil testing lab in Edinburgh, Texas, can do many kinds of tests, including testing one's soil for heavy metals, boron, etc. but it is not an inexpensive process, and the more testing that is done, the higher the fee. As a landowner who is not a farmer, I probably wouldn't spend this kind of money on a soil test unless I had problems I couldn't solve on my own without such a test. The kind of testing they do is aimed more at folks who farm. If I had extremely sandy soil, I might find I needed that more complicated and expensive testing because it is very hard to turn almost pure sand (I am not talking about sandy loam, but about sugar sand and the like) into fertile sandy loam. Because you have to do heroic amounts of soil amending to fix sugar sand, the in-depth testing from private soil labs could be very helpful. The best thing you can do for any soil is to continually add organic matter to it year in and year out, and to not overfeed it with nutrients that can build up in your soil. Too much of one nutrient, for example, can interfere with plants' ability to take up and use other nutrients. Also, I think that everyone tends to focus on N-P-K too much, and often people don't think about the micronutrients. If you're adding lots of organic matter, you'll have the micronutrients in the right proportions. However, in the early years while still improving the soil, I use lots of Espoma organic fertilizers because they do include the micronutrients. I still use them after the soil is highly improved, but at lower rates. Crape myrtles, by the way, generally do well in clay. Just by piling on compost and bark mulch year after year, you will be putting enough organic matter on the ground around the crape myrtles to keep them happy. I grew beautiful crape myrtles in Texas black gumbo clay and never did one thing to the soil. The crape myrtles only got nitrogen fertilizer when we fed the yard anually with a pelleted nitrogen-only soil fertilizer. Over the years, the mulch will decompose and earthworms and other little critters, as well as rainfall, will carry the nutrients from your mulch/compost down into the soil. Hope this helps, Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Soil Jar Test for Texture

We routinely give drug tests where I work. We give the kind where it is an onsite test that gives just a positive or negative but that's it and we give the type where it lists the levels of a particular drug. The higher the level usually means the more of a drug taken (both legally and illegally). When we do the tests, we always tell people to write down any prescriptions and non-prescriptions taken in the last 30 days. Not long ago we had a supplier that sent us bad tests. We were getting false positives on every one tested with a certain batch of kits. This could certainly be the case. The only way we figured it out was we sent it to the lab that will give us the level of drugs. (Don't worry - no one was fired.) With that being said, could it be that they didn't want to hire your friend and just gave that as a excuse? Also, your friend may want to ask if they could know what the levels were or if it was an on-site test.

There are multiple side effects on every medication. Quite apparent they are not considering the risks. Statins can and do damage the liver BUT they also kill the muscle cells. I was on Lipitor as I have the inherited type of cholesterol problems. Sharp pains and muscle spasms. I told my doctor and he just laughed telling me it was just age. It progressively worsened to where It was getting difficult to walk very far. I told him again and he gave me the same answer of age. It got to the point of practically dragging my one foot as it was hard to raise my legs to walk. He told me the same thing and I argued with him and summarized for him how I had deteriorated in my ability to walk. Same answer, age. Sorry 3 strikes and you're out. He could take his sorry ___ and take a flying leap at a rolling donut. Changed doctors and was referred to a neuologist. Had a whole list of tests and MRI. The Lipitor was killing my muscle cells. Takes about a year to rebuild all the damage done. My new doctor put me on Tricor which is not a statin. After a little over a year, the blood tests show the same problem. My cholesterol can go whacko but I will not take a cholesterol reducing drug. To put children in harms way with medication is not a responsible decision. Pills do not cure everything and everything can't be fixed. All these studies to determine what causes what and the proposed solution is not always the answer. I think it is frightening what the medical field wants to do to us sometimes. These children are growing and their bodies ever changing. Test results will vary from one day to the next. Really sad that those who we respect and expect to help us keep our children well, come to such assinine conclusions. Lynn