Well, my mantelpiece is bursting with Christmas cards which is lovely as they are my only Christmas decoration this year. I couldn't get excited about putting up the tree and didn't really have the time anyway. I'm glad people liked my bookmark :-) Veer, it's "Uluru", pron. "OO-loo-roo" ("oo" as in "book"), which is the name the traditional owners give it. As a sacred site they prefer that tourists not climb on it, but sadly many visitors ignore this and don't feel they've been to Uluru unless they climb to the top. I wouldn't feel the need to climb over the altar at St Paul's or Notre Dame to show I've been there and so climbing Uluru seems very disrespectful to me. Astrokath, I have to say I prefer real cards too- you can't put an e-card on the mantelpiece! (Well I guess you could if you had a colour printer, which we don't :-) .)

Hi, I am the one who originally started this thread and I wanted to give a quick update: Our cotated coil has been working fine. No white flakes at all. The original issue may have been due to the fact that we are in a suprisingly humid micro climate, our coil is located in an unconditioned crawl space, and our AC system may have been oversized. Therefore, salt deposits/corrosion started to accumulate on the bare aluminum of the originally installed coil and started to flake off when we switched from colling to heating, as the warm air was passing the coil. To my knowledge, the white flakes were insoluble salt/corrosion deposits on the coil and therefore are not toxic! Anyway, if you have the same issue of white flakes comig off your aluminum coil, coating it may do the trick. I did not want that coating to be done on site and requested it to be done at the factory to a brand new coil in a more controlled environment in order to achieve the best results. One important note: if you decide to get a coated coil cleaned, do NOT use standard coil cleaners as they will destroy the coating. You need to use a specially forumlated ph-neutral cleaner. Most coil cleaners are not ph-neutral. I hope this helps.

Yes, this forum has been hugely helpful! Happy to blab on about my experience. Once everything is green and growing strong, the two bermudas aren't easily distinguishable. However one greens up faster than the other, so in early spring there's a pretty clear line. This was March 31, 2016:With the pattern of green shoots I'm seeing now, it's probably going to look similar in a couple of weeks. Oddly enough though, they seem to go dormant at closer to the same rate. I've thought a lot about the question of what single thing made the biggest impact. I've got neighbors asking what I do, and when I try to explain the details of soil analyses and pre-em and boron, their eyes glaze. So ultimately the answer I've settled on, and that I think is most correct, is cutting frequency. If I could cut everyday, that'd be best, but over the summer I manage about every 4 days. My neighbor on the right takes great care of her lawn too, but mine I think is slightly stronger and denser because she cuts at most 1x per week. I also have a patch out back that is the same Bermuda sod but its in an odd area so I often go weeks without cutting it. The grass there looks like a completely different plant. It's thin and lanky with super thick blades and lots of brown stem, whereas the maintained area it butts up against is dense, short, with narrow blades and not nearly as much brown stem below. Really cool to see the difference cutting makes. The next most important thing (a distant second I think) was the milorganite, mainly because the iron content gave my grass a unique deeper blueish green compared with my biggest competition in the neighborhood, which happens to be my neighbor on the right. If I were rich, I'd be right there with you reeljake, and do the leveling again this year. Just enough to get those ruts out. But it's just a cost thing. Now that my grass is no longer a disgrace, I've got some other landscaping that I should probably prioritize. Another nice lawn I track has clearly been leveled many many times. It looks great, except for it sitting about 5 inches above the sidewalk. Fortunately for the homeowner, it a pretty steep hill, so no matter what, I don't suppose drainage would be an issue. Not the case for me. Absolutely right that the leveling company left too soon. They started while I was on lunch break, and they were diligently working while I watched, but I had to get back to work and left them to their own for the last part. When I returned they were gone and I kinda felt like since they knew I wasn't watching, they could cut out before really finishing and maybe get started on another job. Ah well. Next time I'll make sure I can stay until the end. Beach sand, ha! You just might be right. Come to think of it, they advertised a special blend of sand+topsoil, but that's clearly not what I got. Whatever it was, it was coarser than what everyone else in the area is using. My neighbors on the left had a company come in with a ridiculous amount of what looked like mortar sand. They covered about 5k sqft of lawn with 2"-3" of sand. Amazingly, the Bermuda eventually came back from that smothering. Theirs seems to still be fairly level and with less rutting than mine. They cut far less often, and they have lots more foot traffic with their kids playing on it, so it's not easy to directly compare I guess. But I am really interested to figure out the rutting. From what you're saying, dchall, it's not necessarily my mowing that's causing it. it's just a pattern that the sand is settling in that encouraged by the shape of my grains. Finally, the aeration was supposedly for what reeljake explained: reduce stratification. And nope, they didn't sweep up the plugs. If you look carefully in the first pic I posted, you an see the plugs being dragged along. Most of them broke up pretty fully, as I don't remember seeing any once they were done.

Carolyn, I read a couple some years ago. I must check and see if my library has reprints. I am reading my books slowly at present, there seems to be so many other things to do, like dropping off to sleep! My D gave me a small CD player for Xmas with handy top buttons. Just right for listening to recorded favourite books. I have been accumulating some in case of being confined to bed or having the eye operation for cataracts. I am doing a Scarlett O'Hara on that!