Hi to my Smaller Homes friends! I appreciate your support and care more than you can know. I have been working toward a weight loss diet since the first of the year. I need to lose almost 200 lbs. In the past I have done liquid protein diets, both without and with other foods. This time, I am going to use the liquid protein to replace some meals and to use between my smaller meals. I figure that doing weight loss this way is a more sustainable way, and that I will likely need to use the liquid protein for some meals the rest of my life. Falling into the fast-food/drive-through habit is too easy for me, since I am on the road for my job. If I can leave the house with a liquid protein packet making a nice cappucino-like drink in home-brewed coffee, I won't be stopping for breakfast with bacon and white-flour breading. That saves a few hundred calories right there! I am trying to leave some snacking (a few individual Dove chocolates at night, a handful of pretzels, some air-popped popcorn) in my diet so that I learn to eat the way I always revert to - but with moderation, instead. DH is the sodium-sleuth, and since he does most of the shopping, I can eat low sodium if I do not sabotage his efforts! We still get take-out, but mostly Middle Eastern, and I get salads with some meat most of the time. So that is my plan - to establish better habits overall, use liquid protein drinks to keep my nutrition up, and eat fewer calories while avoiding sodium and white carbs. I started PT this week. We started with my ankles because that is where the worst pain is. Stan, my PT Man (a genius!) first studied my walk and added to my orthotics (he made them) to correct my left foot's roll. I am doing strengthening exercises, too. Next is my elbows, then my hand. Once I am done with the PT, I plan to get into that nice warm pool at the community center of a nearby suburb a few days a week to work out in the water. I am walking almost as fast as I used to walk as I cruise through my nursing homes, but get out of breath. No major heart pains since the one I had in my first week back at work. I am working to recognize my patterns of tension, worry, and stress. I drive around doing deep, slow breathing exercises and relaxing my shoulders! My biggest, best, and most time consuming change has been working my sauna into my schedule. I have done 30 to 60 minute sessions before bed, a 40 minute session as soon as I got home for work, and even a short 15 minute session before showering to go to work. It feels SO GOOD! I wake up without stiffness if I use it at night. As a matter of fact, it is warmed up for me now, and I am going to go indulge in a full hour in the baking, far-infrared 130 degree little cabin in our smallest bedroom right now!

Hey Tech, Got a bee in your bonnet? Sorry if we offend you... Out in the country, we've always recycled. Didn't get into 'organized' recycling until I lived in a city. Call me ignorant, but for most of my life I have either been in school or in such a high stress job (meaning working 60 to 70 hours a week) that while I thought of our environment, I did so rather casually - that's all the time I had to spare for it. What does frustrate me is that super conglomerates dictate our lives by being convenient. Easier to go buy gas than to think of what car/truck manufacturers did 75 to 80 years ago to insure that we'd buy those babies...and the oil/gas companies around that shored them up. My father made his living growing an evil weed...tobacco... And it was the only thing he could grow that would bring enough money to keep his family clothed, housed, fed and educated. It breaks my heart to think of him, and my neighbors. They could be growing food...but, we expect grocery prices to be soooo cheap. No way to earn a living producing food. I would very much like some geniuses to devise equipment that could use corn or soybeans to fuel not only cars/trucks, but also to run heating systems and the like. It would help our enviroment in more than one way. Maybe talking about it here will encourage a few more people to think of it. And, as far as I'm concerned, a penny earned can be a penny saved, so to speak, with regard to our environment...and our pocketbooks...and with saving farmland. If you have particular problems with me, for any reason, please feel free to take it away from the forum...email me privately. I'm personally happy that there's a stained glass/mosaic forum. Please do not run the newbies away... I, and others too, appreciate the help and info from others, especially those who have more experience in whatever our 'projects' are. I've said before, and I'll say it again, now, I know I'm a newbie with much to learn. I don't feel welcome at GJ anymore...I'm not posting there anymore. Please, play nice. Kimmy

When we were building, I didn't do a lot of shopping ahead of time....unless you call what I did in my head "shopping". I guess I did a lot of actual shopping too, but didn't buy anything. Through the use of my little blue notebook which was divided up into each room and exterior, I filled it with the plastic pocket pages and inside went pics out of magazines, fabric swatches, paint chips, brochures and web sites, etc. I also had a scale drawing of each room with potential furniture sketched in. Typically I find that, unless it is really unusual or unique like a garage sale find, most of the bargains I can get today, I can get tomorrow too. And if I buy stuff too far ahead of time, I forget that I have it and then buy it again. And I like having options open, like last minute color changes. Also, the longer you wait to buy something, the more likely something new and better will be out there for you. So my suggestion would be to shop all you like, but keep the old credit card in the wallet until you're closer to the finish line.

So, Ron, why did the electrician who inspected the wiring of my old home, which was wired with EMT, said that I had to run a green ground wire through all the conduit? Good question. With few exceptions EMT functions as the grounding conductor. Adding an actual wire would be "belt and suspenders" but in any case I would imagine it would have to be sized for the largest conductor and it would have to be connected to each box and/or device. Years ago I did see a home where the foundation had started to collapse and when the problem was fixed, the pulled apart a run of EMT. There was enough slack in the run that the wires stayed connected but the ground was lost. But after looking at it a while longer, I think maybe we're seeing a plaster ring, and there's a much larger box behind it, inside the wall. In my experience it's pretty common to use a 4" square box and a mud ring. That typically provides plenty of space and about 2" of depth. I think there are 'self grounding' receptacles but they aren't the norm. There are self-grounding devices that will either have a little brass tab or a pair of wires on the yolk that "captures" one of the mounting screws. Those devices are typically more expensive. Otherwise ground the device with a short piece of wire. That wire should be attached to the box with a threaded screw (not sheet metal). One of the holes in the back of the box will be threaded to accept those cute little green screws sold in the home center. So if you are wiring in a Lutron Maestro dimmer, that has a black, red, red/white, and green wire in the back, how would you wire it? The two blue wires coming in from the top left and top right get attached to the black wire, red to red, ground to the box as discussed in the previous paragraph. Red striped gets capped off.