Well Sahira, you've now waited over 24 hours for our internet savvy gardeners and no one has posted a reply. Let me tell you what I came up with: The University of Nebraska at one time had a www.plantguide.com. The WayBackMachine indicates that it was pulled off the net in 2005. That site had something the called a "Planting Date Calculator" and, apparently from what I can read, it was fairly sophisticated and not just some rudimentary list of dates. During the few years it was out there, I guess I missed it completely . . . I checked some ag sites which list farm resources for ALL KINDS of calculators. There was nothing really on planting dates. Something that happens with these university resources is that they are funded by grants. When the grant money runs out . . . if they aren't actually pulled, they become dated and fall into obsolescence. It would be nice if 2008 planting information was specific to the 2008 growing season. Since weather is forto me, at least) to have a hard-and-fast date for much of anything. Oh yes, I know that some folks just CANNOT get a garden in until Memorial Day weekend when they've finally got time to do it. It makes sense for them to have a date specific. Personally, I'm becoming more and more inclined to use soil temperature as a guide for when a seed should go in. But, thatÂs me. A Weather Service website that I came across not too long ago gives ongoing growing degree days information thru every growing season. If the gardener wanted to use air temperature as a guide, one could set some benchmarks based on personal experience or, I'm sure, internet research. But just for the sake of some examples, let's say that I found that 100 growing degree days should accumulate before I put cool-weather vegetable seed in the ground. And, 400 degree days should occur before planting warm-weather vegetables. That website is updated weekly by the Weather Service for some US locations. It would be a fairly easy process to keep track of the Spring weather. Being ready to grab the seed packets and race out the backdoor at the right moment may be another thing. Steve

Because a female Japanese Beetle can lay 40 eggs in her lifetime, if you let her and her twenty female egg mates from last year live, next year they can produce 800 JBs. Maybe some skunks will get some of them. Moles might wipe out ten or twenty, but every female that lives ...do the math. I may be the only person who has a good history with beetle traps. But when you say spraying is your only option, you are overlooking letting the trap catch them so that all you have to do is drown them. The beetles will find your roses regardless. And the pheromones they give off while one or two are on a rose will attract more beetles. That's why the beetle traps have two different lures. one pheromone and one flower. My part of the world has had horrific beetle infestations. We started putting up traps ten years ago. We had stopped the horrible multiplier effect that having a JB Target Plant flower garden can cause. We had gone from putting up ten traps to only putting up four. Then came three years of drought that finished the beetles off by encapsulating their larvae in hard clay. This year? I've decapitated three beetles. That's all I've seen and our first beetle date was June 6 or 7 for eight years. I will put a couple of bags out after tomorrow's rain, just in case any vagrants are around.

I did online dating for a few months. I hid my profile recently only because I'm starting a new job and want to focus my energy for a little while. I plan to resume online dating as soon as I feel settled into the new job. I think that online dating is not geared toward making friends, but depending on the site, it may be geared toward finding a life partner or a sex partner. Eilleen, while I understand your hesitation to send someone a photo if that's all they are interested in, I myself will not carry on communication with a man who won't send me his photo. People who refuse to post/send a photo often have a reason: they've lied about their looks or they're married. I believe I can tell a lot about a person by how he/she looks (but not everything, and I know that looks can be decieving) and if I'm thinking about eventually maybe kissing this person or even having s e x with him, I want to know that I don't find him physically repulsive to me. Looks are a part of who a person is, and I want to be intellectually, emotionally, and physically attracted to someone I'm considering entering into a physical relationship with. There are ways to minimize the number of sexual responses you get when you post a profile. Of course, you can't always control who responds to you, but the occasional sexual-content emails are easily deleted. I've had no sexual emails, though one man, who seemed nice via email, wanted to talk sex when we finally spoke on the phone. I told him that I didn't feel that we were a good match, wished him luck, and got off the phone. I lost nothing except for the fifteen minutes we spoke on the phone. During the ten weeks I was online, I got dozens of emails, talked to about six men on the phone, met four men, went on one to four dates with each. While none of these men was my soul mate, they were all nice guys and I'm glad I met them.

The basic concept of the book is sound: gradually establish daily and monthly cleaning routines while chipping away a larger issues. There are a number of "systems" to do that. You just have to find one that resonates with you. I read through the book and found that it wouldn't fit with how I do things. The monthy schedule feels like a jumble to me. That doesn't mean it won't work for you. With aging and limitations on mobility and energy, I've had to reconsider how I do household chores to balance what I can do with how I want to live. It's especially hard when one has been meticulous and can no longer function at the same level. It still irritates me to no end that I can't just zip through housework. It's especially galling that I that I need to ask for help with some things. Grrrr. Obviously, the less stuff one has, the easier it is to clean. You're definely on the right track with wanting to declutter. Before jumping into any system, it helps to know what's important to you, what isn't working now and why. People have wildly different ideas about housekeeping standards. The minimum for health and safety is a clean bed, bathroom, kitchen, litterboxes and no tripping hazzards. A routine to make that happen is where I'd start if you don't already have one. Think of this as the "good enough" baseline routine for times of crisis. You and you husband have been in crisis for quite some time now with health issues and grief. Please try to be gentle with yourselves. After that, what isn't working and why? Is the house just too big to clean at your current energy level? Are there too many knick-knacks to dust? Is there an old floor that never looks clean no matter how much one scrubs it? Too much stuff in closets? Once the "why" is understood, it's easier to work on solutions. I'm a list maker and crossing things off lists makes me feel good, so I have a schedule of tasks in Excel with due dates, desired frequency and last date I did the task. Tracking dates allows me to see progress. I've also found that some things don't need to be done as often as I thought. Those add up and give me more time and energy for other things. Since I'm retired, spending some time every day works better than marathon cleaning sessions. Consider tools, too. I bought a Dyson stick vacuum recently - and oh my! It cleans well and is so light that I no longer hate vacuuming. Since one of our cats sheds a lot, this is a big deal.