Cool idea, Mike. My tools of the trade shot would look similar. It would have binoculars, a digital camera, snake gaiters (if at snake road or Mingo), a gazeteer atlas and one or more local field guides instead of Peterson's. I've never worked with a snake hook so I guess I'd have to have a roadside stick instead for that part.

It's called Windows Mail in Vista. Look in "all programs" after you hit start and click on it. You'll have to set it up with your new internet provider according to their instructions. I use Yahoo mail and Hotmail and Windows Mail, each serves a different audience when I communicate, one for friends, one for junk and Windows Mail as the default mail program in Vista (cause it won't let me use the others.) I have Vista Home Premium, so Pro may be a little different, but probably not too much. MSFT just came out with SP1 for Vista, so if you have all the right drivers, it will download as an update when you get online. All Vista is, is Win XP with a pretty dress on. As you learn it, you'll see. It's not really different at all, just better looking and things have new names to confuse us. The tutorial that comes with it is good as is the info at the link below. Also, when you get your internet connection, just put any questions you have into a google search and you'll get all the help you need. Here is a link that might be useful: Microsoft Vista Site

Thank you all:) It was very very VERY scary for me saturday morning. Jonathan acted so calm but after we were sure everything wwas OK he broke down crying. Even though he wasn't saying so he thought I was miscarrying he was just trying to stay calm for me. He later said he was glad Latla was fine but was more terrified for me than anything. It was without a doubt hands down the most terrified I have ever been and him seeing me so upset and scared really did a number on him. They determined that the blood vessel had already popped earlier in the week and the clots had formed and stopped the bleeding. The sex dislodged the clots and the bleeding started again. There will be no more sex. It scared us enough that we don't even want to risk it. This happened once earlier in the pregnancy but the bleeding was very light. It was NOTHING like this. I was literally dripping on the floor on the way to the bathroom. All I can say is thank god it turned out OK. As far as the girls mom is concerned I guess all we can do is watch her like a hawk and hope she eventually gets help. We will continue to do as much damage conrol as possible in the meantime. The woman looked like death warmed over. She was painful to look at. She's going to wind up either over dosing or finding enough courage to drag that knife across her wrist a little deeper. I am sick for the girls right now.

Nancy, As long as the new week isn't the first week of summer, I'll be okay with Spring starting over or whatever. I just don't want for us to skip Spring, so we can reset and start Spring over every week if we wish. Friday's high temperature of 84 (which was not at all forecast) reminded me that some years we also go from winter to summer overnight, and I don't like years like that. I don't think this will be one of them, but I'd sure hate to be wrong about that. Rebecca, If y'all only go to 31, I wouldn't be worried about much. I just feel like I cannot trust my forecast to be on the money because it so seldom is. They've already dropped our forecast low from 33 to 32 to 31, so I need to stop looking at it because every time I check it, it has changed again. And, just because I said that, I felt compelled to go look at the forecast again, and now it is showing 30 degrees for us. This is nuts. If I check it in another hour, will it show 29? Jennifer, I'm glad the power wasn't off for too long. We had sunshine on and off really late in the day, but not that much of it. About the time I got used to the sunshine, the clouds came back and blotted it out again. Nancy, I think we're all coasting.....too many plants inside waiting to go outside again and then into the ground. I couldn't start more now if I wanted to. However, once the plants start going into the ground and I have empty flats and empty shelf and table space, then starting more seeds (this time for the back garden) is a definite possibility. Jennifer, It feels like time to get the poor things in the ground, doesn't it? They've been waiting for so long and the weather has been so uncooperative. Jacob, I cannot speak for anyone else, but the coldest nights (after tonight) left for me are Sun @ 40 degrees and Mon @ 41 degrees. Being rural, we get frost more easily than folks in town where the heat island effect from all the concrete often helps hold temperatures up a couple of degrees, so I've seen frost often at 36 degrees, occasionally at 37 and a couple of times at 38. (This has a lot to do with official temperatures being recorded at 5' above ground level, and frost on plants basically occurring at ground level or just a foot or so above it, where air temperatures likely are colder than they are at the 5' level.) Having moved here from the city, it took me a while to get use to these unexpected frosts that occur when the air is several degrees above freezing. However, we've never had them with lows in the 40s, so I'm hoping our forecast lows are correct. Regardless, I have frost blankets enough to cover the whole front garden if a big disaster were looming, though I hope I never have to do that. I hadn't used row cover at all this year until last Sunday night and now I'm sick to death of looking at it. However, having it on the plants does make killing mosquitoes easier, so at least there's that. They land on the white fabric, I see them, I swat them and another skeeter bites the dust. Is is odd that we have mosquitoes out at the same time frost blankets are in use? Sadly, it is not. I've noticed mosquitoes seem to be becoming cold hardier all the time and we see them here in every month of the year, even when temperatures are in the single digits. This goes against everything I once believed about mosquitoes. By the time you're hitting the 70s, I should be hitting the 90s. Is that nuts? We've already hit 88 once or twice this year, so hitting the 90s in April isn't unheard of. We hit the 90s Easter week in 2011, which maybe should have been some foreshadowing of the summer heat that was to come, but I was hoping those hot days were an anomaly. For that year, they weren't. It was the worst tomato year ever because we were hot enough to inhibit fruit set before all the tomato plants even went into the ground. So, when you see the risks we take with putting tomato plants in the ground so soon after a big cold spell, it is because of past years like that. Long before you were born, Jacob, there was indeed an over-the-counter pesticide made from nicotine. I want to say that the one I recall was called Black Death, and it wasn't even that unique or new. Compounds containing nicotine sulfate were used as a pesticide as far back as the 17th century. What Ruth Stout was doing was basically her version of that sort of product, though the commercial products were sprays, not burning cigarettes. (grin) As I recall, the nicotine products fell from favor in recent decades because of hazardous side effects, but nowadays modern science is giving us neonicotinoids, which I haven't used, and never will. Do you mean to use just a fire with no tobacco? I don't think it will work. I think that for Ruth Stout the fact that it involved tobacco was the key. I go to many wild fires and grass fires every year, and they are not that good at driving away the insects (or the snakes) during the summertime. One of the things that drives the gardener in me totally insane is that I'll be standing near or even walking through a blackened, burned area that is still smoking and smoldering, and there will be grasshoppers everywhere. Live, unharmed grasshoppers, clinging to a fence post, or a tree, or hopping around in the blackened area. Sometimes they are clinging to the top of unburned prairie grasses, usually in an area where a strongly wind-driven fire raced through the area so quickly that it hopscotched its way through a field, leaving unburned patches here and there. Were I not used to seeing grasshoppers in these burned areas, I'd think the fire surely drove them all away. It simply doesn't. I do remember hearing tales of back in the olden times, before I was born, where farmers, in desperation, would set fire to a field, hoping to kill or drive away the grasshoppers. They were sacrificing one particular area in the hope they could save everything else. Now I'm wondering if that even worked for them. Some people make a similar homemade concoction (similar to the nicotine compounds) from tobacco leaves or from the leaves of any nightshade, but most often tomato plants, and use that to try to kill pests. You're hardly the first person here in this group to drop a flat of plants. It happens to everyone sooner or later, and it has happened to me many times. Luckily, sometimes we can salvage the dropped plants, although sometimes we cannot. Kohlrabi has an unusual flavor that is hard to pin down and hard to describe. Mostly, I think that it tastes quite a bit like the stalks or stems of broccoli plants, but not exactly like them and the flavor is a bit milder, and just not so strong and assertive. There's some hints of something else. Perhaps a little bit of a turnip flavor, or even a bit of radish. I always think it tastes weird, but I think that's because it looks weird....like an alien version of an turnip or something. Or the vegetable version of Sputnik. The first time I grew it, I had no idea how to use it or even if I wanted to. I just had to try growing it because it was so different. Cabbage plants can last surprisingly long in to the summer here, but eventually our extreme heat tends to make it bolt and send up a seed stalk. Still, you can usually tell when that's about to happen and can harvest it and use it before it bolts. In your summer weather it might not bolt in the summer at all. Eileen, Of course you should try them if they sound appealing to you. That way, you'll know if it is worth growing them. The current issue of GRIT magazine has an article about growing them and even tells you how to make a slurry of actual morel mushrooms in order to start your own patch of them, instead of ordering the morel spawn or culture from a mushroom company like Fungi Perfecti. Around here, mostly all you have to do is cut down a very old, half-dead elm tree (or wait for it to fall in the woods on its own), wait for it to rot, and eventually you'll have morels there. I need to go back to bed before the dog wakes me up wanting to go outside again. Dawn