Kind of funny story - a couple of years ago the guy across the street trotted over to show me this mysterious worm he found on his tomato plant. He wondered if it was something very rare because he had never even heard of a worm with horns and perhaps UCONN might be interested in having this specimen and maybe, just maybe, he had discovered something that could be beneficial to some plants here in tobacco valley and he could breed them and make money! He said there were many of them on his three patio tomato plants. "Whatta ya think, Jane? Should I put it in a jar?" I asked to see it in my gloved hand and as this guy was envisioning $50 bills, the silly worm reared it's head with horns and mouth seeking something to bite. I dropped it on the driveway and with a flash of my right foot, the mysterious money-making dream shrank into a bite-less green blob as my neighbor went into one of the most shocked and crestfallen expressions I'd seen in a while. I told him he had lost the horn worm lottery and to go home and squish all the others. I have a feeling that my reputation as a nice neighbor lady turned into tough old broad that day in the driveway. Squish 'em, Pixie, Squish 'em - unless you're going into the horn worm raising business. Jane (aka Hard Hearted Hannah)

I'm almost finished with winterizing the deck, just a few more things to store today; all in its proper time. First I had to drain the hose and put out the heated birdbath, install the squirrel resistant cage around the rhododendron Percy Wiseman (tasty flower buds) and start protecting a few shrubs before the ground freezes so I can't put a stake in. This was the first morning with temperatures below freezing and my heated birdbath failed! It may be just the GFI - I reset it and we'll see tonight. I had to break ice and refill all of the birdbaths, to the great relief of the turkeys that were clustered around the frozen baths when I looked out this morning. The row in the back is turkeys bellied up to the water bar. I saw an article in the Cape Cod Times online today about Birders wonder if snowy owls will return to Cape. Apparently they're beginning to trickle down to New England. Claire This post was edited by claire on Sat, Nov 15, 14 at 10:50

I got a birdfeeder with a cylindrical baffle as shown by terrene. All cost me $200. My birds have no problem with squirrels which are not able to climb over that baffle. On the birdfeeder I have two dispensers with black sunflower seeds and one with suet. There was no demand for any other birdfood which my birds did not touch or simply shoveled to the ground. Since we view the birds from the kitchen's sliding glass door, over the deck, the feeder was placed about 8-10 ft further from the deck, also sufficiently away from pine branches. Squirrels could not jump to or drop onto the feeder. Prior to that I used a very low cost construction with the same good results : a long fence post with cedar post bolted to it for height, all covered with a 4 inch diameter 5 ft long plastic pipe. I used an upside-down plastic pale as a baffle. (make sure that the pale sits on the pipe, and that the pale has the rim cut off, or squirrels will use it for leverage. Fill up the lower part of the pipe with gravel or mice will climb up inside) Then on top of all you can bolt horizontally some wood to the cedar pole and hang all the feeders from it as you wish.

One of the many problems I had with this movie (Vanity Fair) was how they portrayed Becky Sharpe. In the book she was a complete shrew. In the movie they tried to make her look like she did what she did simply to survive. A few weeks ago I rented some movies and was lucky enough to find a few 'book based' ones. I saw The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and it was BEAUTIFUL! It started Toby Stephens and Tara Fitzgerald (both played in the new Jane Eyre too). I have yet to read the book, so I will not comment further. Did you think this movie was true to the book? I also saw Emma, with Gwenyth Paltrow. SIMPLY GASTLY! I did not launch anything at the screen this time, but I did find at the end of the show that I had been chewing on the corner of a magazine in agony. It was all wrong! The costumes, the dialogue, everything! And who did they get to decorate the scenes? Van Gogh? What was with all the bright colors? The characters were all horrible. The worst was Mr. Knightly. He looked 'Americanized'. A straw hat?!? He could have been one of Tom Sawyer's gang just floatin' along the Mississippi... The Emma movie with Cate Beckinsale is amazing! It actually made me appreciate the book more. I just posted a thread about a new book based movie. It is on F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Strange Case of Benjamin Button'. Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchette are starring in it. CMK