I was feeling sorry for the plants more than for myself, but it is so nice today to not have to worry about when to irrigate next, etc. It has been so dry for so long that irrigating just wasn't helping as much as it should, and I'm not exactly a rookie when it comes to getting a garden through a drought year. Even with lots of watering, some plants (notably cucumber, watermelons and squash in the back garden, though the ones out front are fine) just weren't growing and producing well. I guess they were just sort of clinging to life and producing a little here and there but nothing to get excited about. This rainfall will change that. I am glad I had planted them in both gardens so I could compare their performance in the two different areas. Otherwise, it would have been a poor cuke, melon and squash year here so far. The garden plants look ridiculously green and happy this morning. Of course the entire property is a mud pit, and we have an inch or two of water in the pond, though I expect it will soak into the ground by tomorrow. I'm loving the temperatures too. It feels more like October today than late July. I wish the weather wouldn't have to go back to normal summer weather in a couple of days. I'm liking this so much better. Bon, Isn't it sad? Kids know what they see, though, and prolonged drought is what you kids have been seeing for so long. I get it, though, with our cats. We took in a feral (likely dumped in the country while pregnant) mama cat and kittens in the horrific summer of 2011. When we got some heavy rain in 2012, they all totally freaked out. Why wouldn't they, though? The rainfall was so low and so infrequent in 2011 that they probably never experienced a big, raging thunderstorm with heavy rainfall until the kittens were at least a year old in the spring of 2012. They were so scared they stayed indoors for 3 or 4 days as if the rain was some monster to hide from. I'm the opposite---when we get rain after prolonged dry spells, my inner child wants to go out and splash in the puddles. It rained on and off all night. I was so excited that I couldn't even fall asleep. I just listened to the rain falling. For those of you who routinely get a big rainfall day here or there throughout the year, our rainfall amount wouldn't necessary be impressive, but we can go years without having a single-day rainfall over 3", so this was a huge event for us. Most years our rainiest day of the year will be in the upper 2" range, like 2.8 or 2.9. At our house this morning, we had 3.91" in the rain gauge. Much of that fell before midnight but about an inch fell afterwards. At the Burneyville Mesonet station they have had 5.19", with 4.40" falling yesterday and 0.79" since midnight. The 4.40" would be Burneyville's biggest one-day rainfall total since April 29, 2009. It has been cloudy, sort of gloomy, misty, foggy, etc. all day and the air is remarkably cool and moist. For today, at least, we can pretend we live in the Pacific Northwest. I hope that everyone who needed rain got some, and I'd be tickled pink if I could look at next week's U S Drought Monitor and see us moved back from Extreme Drought to Severe Drought. I don't know if the 5.19" recorded at Burneyville is enough to roll back the drought one category, but I think that it might be. Dawn

Thanks, lazy_gardens and kirkhall. The lights are all snugly installed. We did call Lutron and Cree after I posted this morning. (Thanks for the suggestion, laz_gardens.) According to Lutron, they test for compatibility, and unless they hear a significant hum or see flickering, they think that things are ok, and stated that LED's humming is a natural byproduct of the electricity cycling 120 times per second. DH didn't ask Cree about the humming (I'm not sure why...), but he did ask them about their chart, and they said that if we noticed flickering or humming, then decrease the number of lights on the circuit until we no longer notice those characteristics occurring. DH was more concerned about whether running 12 lights on the circuit could cause premature failure of the lights or the switches, which he was told is not a concern since the switches are labeled capable of handling 150w of LED lighting. Our 12 lights fall in that range. That's very interesting that some of your lights hummed and some didn't, Kirkhall. Are they the same brand we bought? DH can't hear the hum (he has some hearing loss and doesn't pick up on noises outside of his hearing range). I haven't climbed the ladder to check them up close. I could try that and see if I can figure out which ones are creating the sound. The noise is subtle, and when the household is active I don't pick up on it as much. The sound reminds me of the hum of fluorescent lights in a classroom.

Here's why I personally feel buzz words don't work. It's a little like custom features. Everyone's idea of what "luxurious", to use one example, can vary wildly. Even words like "large" can often be disputed as what may be a large backyard in your own neighborhood, may be a postage stamp in someone else's. We've sold FSBO three times and each time when we let the buyer do most of the talking, we discovered interesting information about their home search. And with every home we've had buyers who were downsizing. Had we wasted time in our ads or trying to convince them that our "fabulous deck area" will sell our home, we would have found out that maybe they don't want the maintenance of a deck. Or that the deck they currently home is massive compared to ours. For the majority of people, a home will be the single most expensive thing they ever purchase. So it stands to reason that most of us don't want to over pay. Superfluous adjectives create high expectations. And whenever those expectations aren't met, the buyer sees that as an opportunity to create objections in their own mind in order to offer less. The idea of the ad is just to get buyers in your home. Period. When the buyers show up, you want them to leave thinking that the property has SO much more going on than even the ad promised. That creates value in the mind of the buyer and it pushes them to make a decision because they know their competition (other buyers) will probably be feeling the same way.

> not ALL the diodes could have died Many LED retrofit bulbs, especially the cheap ones (which is pretty much all of them now), have all the LED chips in series across a fairly simple power supply. If one LED opens, all of them stop working, just like Christmas tree lights from 70+ years ago. There are ways to keep a single LED failure from killing the light, but they add cost, so they don't often get implemented. But that probably doesn't matter. The power supplies in those $2 bulbs are built with the absolute cheapest, most marginal electronic components the low-bid fly-by-night Chinese sweatshops can make. Therefore most often it's a failed power supply component that takes out your bulb, not an actual LED chip. FWIW, I know guys who cut open failed LED retrofit bulbs and rebuild the power supplies with better components. Or sometimes salvage parts from 2 or 3 units to make one working one. Great if you have the time on your hands, I guess. Remember when LED retrofits cost $30 or more and claimed an average life of 50,000 hours or better? Now they cost a couple of bucks, but average life is more like 20,000 hours. I saw one a while back that claimed (in small print) a 15,000 hour lifetime. Hey, wait a minute. Now that I look at your photo, I don't see replaceable bulbs in that luminaire at all. Isn't that a premade LED-only fixture? Something doesn't add up here.