Jo, are your fruit trees all grouped into an orchard-type of situation? If so, and you can manage to water several of them at once, you might try doing what the commercial growers in the hot and dry west do every year. They deep soak the trees, but only about 3 times over the summer. Say every 30 days. I know that sounds awful, considering our heat, but it seems to work. Set your irrigation so it can reach as many trees as possible, or hook up in-line sprinklers to do the whole thing at once, and then let them run all night . . . 12 hour minimum. 24 hours is better, but I don't think any of us can stand that kind of water use. The trees will do better than way than they will if you try to water them every few days. It seems like a terrible use of water, but if you're only doing it once a month, it balances out on the positive side. We had a small apple orchard of about 50 trees and it was always deep irrigated. A lot of the evergreens require regular water and can't take extended dry heat. One that will survive and look good is the Italian cypress, but like so many similar things, they tend to harbor ticks. I don't care for the upright columnar growth, but the tick situation would keep me from planting them. I'm afraid I'm not much help on your other stuff, except to say that things like grapes and berries can go a v-e-r-y long time without water, even when it's really hot and dry. They can tolerate extreme conditions, although they probably won't produce as well in a year like this. The vineyards in CA are never watered in the summer. The blackberries will come back next year with no summer water at all. The fruit is bigger and plumper if they get water. I read somewhere that strawberries need at least an inch of water a week, but mine in the raised bed are needing that much and more to keep them alive. Pat

first thing you need to do is find out what is the proper resolution you are supposed to use with that monitor and make sure it is set properly in your windows settings, using the wrong resolution can be damaging to your monitor. Look up your monitor and find the stats for it or look on the manual that came with it and find the stats. Go to your desktop and right click then go to the tab for your monitor and make sure the slider is set to the proper matching resolution and settings for your monitor. If you need your text size larger everywhere including on the desktop icons and text you can go into the settings there in advanced and change the dpi settings. Write down what it was set at so that if you need to go back you know what to do. change the dpi and apply and see if that helps. Read the info on the new monitor for the button on the front of the monitor and see if there is an auto set button, you may have to do some adjusting using those buttons. To increase the size of the fonts in your browser only you go into the settings options for the browser itself and change the default font size, the directions depend on if you are using IE or firefox which is it? I would do the change in the settings for default rather than doing the change of text size option in view. Just be very sure you follow the proper resolution setting for that new monitor.

Kathleen check your camera software for a basic editing tool that will resize your photos down to something like 800 x 600 pixels. I'll get back to you if you can't find it but you can also try using the free program Irfanview to reduce pics. I'll post instructions for using Irfanview if you need it. Here's a download link below. SharonCb Here is a link that might be useful: Irfanview - free photo editing program

Lee... I sent off my e-mail to Maureen before I saw that you'd be interested in the way I do Print Screen. I also used to save and paste into Irfanview until Wolf showed me a little German program he used. It saves you having to paste each time you save a screenshot and it is so easy to then save a series of screenshots one after the other. Here's the letter and explanation I sent to Maureen: I have been using a little German program called "Snapsaver" for an easy print screen function. The icon sits down in my tray at screen bottom and I call it up when I need it. With just two clicks, - one to call up the program and the next one to save the screen - it takes a screen copy and saves it to a predetermined folder where I keep all screenshots, so that eliminates having to cut and paste a screen each time you do a print screen. It will take as many shots as you like, just as long as you press the 'print screen' button, and then after a long pause it turns off until you click the icon to 'wake it up' again. Here is one download site at the link below .....I think all commands are in English but I'll go back and check as I see this page is in German. Usually after taking a screenshot I go to the saved snap in the snaps folder and use my resident default pictureviewer and cropper program (VuePrint) - and crop out any unnecessary edges from the screen capture and resize the page to around 800 x 600, which all together sharpens the image and clarifies any blurry text, then I save the cropped image into one of my photo files. VuePrint is an old program and costs very little I think I paid $40...from Hamrick Software and it is so transparent, yet wonderful as it sits there in the background without being noticed but as soon as I bring up a photo, it will crop and zoom in or out, resize, flip over or mirror image a photo. I think you can still download a test version of that program before paying anything. I just noticed that Hamrick's website is promoting his scanning program (VueScan) but at the top centre there is a link to VuePrint. This is such a neat little program! I'm happy to answer any further questions :-). SharonCb Here is a link that might be useful: Snapsaver Download Site