Well guys, We still live in the house we bought to in 2014 in order to move Donna's aging mom who was (at that time) showing symptoms of dementia. The dementia progressively took its toll on her mind, and then in October of 2016, she was diagnosed with stage 4 bladder cancer. She lived until early February 2017 and died here at home with us, as she wished and she had made us promise not to let her die in a hospital or nursing home. She died surrounded by family and a hospice nurse was present. I only relate this story because Donna's mom's health situation was the reason we bought a house big enough for all of us to live in, under one roof.........and the subsequential multiple projects and renovations.........were the reasons I dropped off of the forum. As soon as we moved into the house, I had a long list of things that HAD to be done, and a long list of lesser things we WANTED to do......so my time on the forum just could not be justified.....I simply had too much to do. The first things to be done were to come up with safety measures to help prevent an elderly woman with dementia from injury by being proactive about preventing her from "escaping" the house. I had to equip all exit doors with a deadbolt lock keyed inside and out (all keyed alike) and we had to come up with a nearby "hiding place" close to each lock location for spare keys in case of emergency. This house has a full basement with stairs, and we did not want her mom to have access to the stairs, so I included the same deadbolt on that door too. The sliding door to the second floor deck was a challenge in that it had a key lock on the outside ONLY with just a paddle lock lever on the inside. I had to come up with a way to make that door lockable with a key from the inside. My solution was to remove the lock assembly from the door and "reverse" location of the paddle lever plate and the key tumbler plate, so that the key tumbler would be on the inside. I stripped out the guts relating to the paddle lever and covered the hole where the paddle shaft came through with a small brass plate.....heavily epoxied in place from the backside (inside the door). All you can see from outside is a small hole blanked off with brass. The deck is on the second story on the backside of the house with stairs leading down the the pool, which is enclosed inside a fence, so we never use the sliding door as a "key entry" point anyhow. Then there is the attic storage space epic adventure. The attic space when we bought the house, was almost non-existent. There was a total of 4 sheets of 4' X 8' plywood (128 sq. ft.) on the joists at the top of an extremely rickety pull down wooden stairs. Stairs were the first to go. Replaced with a sturdy aluminum pull down folding stairs. Then I hauled 22 4' X 8' sheets of 3/4 OSB into the attic space.(each sheet was cut in half lengthwise to fit through attic stairs opening). We now have about 800 sq. ft. of usable attic storage space. I built 2 inverted trusses (strong backs) to attach to the joists on the sections spanning the 12' kitchen and the 18' den. These trusses ensure that the load imposed by the extra OSB and stored material are ultimately borne by the load bearing walls at the hallway, den, and both walls of the kitchen. The addition of the trusses assures that the ceiling joists do not assume a sway back shape over time resulting in cracked ceiling gypsum board. I assembled the trusses in the attic and fabricated them to have about 1/2" "preload bow" on the 18' truss and 3/8" preload bow on the 12' truss. This was to ensure that the trusses were actually carrying some load right from the start. After I got the trusses built and fastened onto each joist they served with metal strapping, I built a 30' long, 2 tier shelf system into the truss structures. Shelves are 24" wide and the bottom shelf is 20" off the floor, while the second shelf is 46" off the floor, so you have the attic floor under the shelves, and the 2 shelves themselves for storage, That yields 180 sq. ft. of space, plus the remaining 720 or so sq. ft. of attic at various head space. The tallest overhead clearance is about 6'2" at the rafter collar ties (and I added collar ties so that every rafter has a tie, instead of every third rafter as the house was built). There were 4 rafters that had "split" open due to improper orientation by the rough carpenters. They had placed rafters with knots situated on the lower chord of the rafter (tension side), which is a no-no. These rafters had to be jacked back into place and reinforcement panels of 3/4" plywood "scabbed" onto each side, glued and screwed. The original scheme had the ventilation exhaust fans from both bathrooms simply dumping into the attic space, another no-no. I extended the exhaust hoses over to the gable area of the house and busted through the brick and installed 2 bona fide exhaust hoods with insect screens. On the longest hose, which was a 4" hose....I built a booster fan box in the middle of that run and wired it so that it turns on when the original fan turns on. I felt that a 16' run of 4" hose would probably need all the fan power it could get to keep from simply "stalling out". The other hose was 6" and only 8' long, so I felt it was adequate with no additional help needed. I could go on and on about other projects, but these were some of my most major undertakings, Now, about my employment. I no longer work as a forklift mechanic in the shop. In midsummer 2015, I took over running the parts department when our longstanding partsman retired. This was challenging in that it put me to the task of acquiring and dispensing the parts instead of installing them on vehicles. It has also been challenging in that I was the first partsman in our history to actually have the capability of searching the Volvo and Daimler websites to look up parts. It was in the summer of 2015 that the company finally got onboard with software to enable this. Prior to that advent, our method of ordering parts involve looking the parts up in hard copy paper parts manuals, or talking to a vendor/dealer on the phone and trying to describe what you wanted, it was sometimes a crap shoot whether you would get the right parts or not. The outgoing partsman never had to use the computer to look up and order parts, and when it was introduced, he refused to do it saying that his time was too short to need it, so he told me to get all the training and he would just watch. LOL He and I worked side by side for 3 months while he showed me most of the ropes before he retired in October 2015. That is a summary of what I have been up to. I know this was completely off topic, but since the request was posed here, I felt OK in responding here.

Actually, if you learn one color system - the language of just one color system - it's not hard to figure out all the other ones. The one to learn is Munsell. Albert Munsell is my favorite old dead guy. We share the same birthday but that's not the only reason he's my favorite. Al was a teacher and his motivation for creating his system was color education for elementary school children. What that means is you don't even have to be smarter than a 5th grader to figure out how the Munsell Color System works. I recently wrote an article about the absurd state of retail paint stores and how manufacturers market color. In the article I ask readers to imagine walking into a department store to buy an outfit: shirt, jeans and shoes. Everybody can relate to that, right? Now imagine that there are no tags on anything. No labels sewn into the collar of the shirts or seams of the jeans. No sizes imprinted on the bottom of the shoes. No clues whatsoever about sizes or prices. The only way you're going to be able to find a complete outfit it to start trying stuff on. You have to start by searching out a shirt that "looks like" it might fit. Try it on and when it doesn't fit, your only option is to keep trying on shirts; comparing each one to the one before that didn't fit. Then you have to do the same to find a pair of jeans. Then you have to do the same to find a pair of shoes. How long do you think it would take you to find an outfit that fits? How long do you think it would be before you got totally frustrated, confused, and exhausted by the process. How long before you said "this is crazy, I'm outta here!"? No one in their right mind would shop at that store. They'd find a department store where all the items had labels and price tags. Substitute color notations for labels and this is exactly the situation in paint store world right now. Some stores have paint brands that have notations. And some do not. Sounds half hopeful, right? Not so fast. Sadly, the people who own/work in the paint stores that do have brands with notations have not one fat clue their brand has a color system loaded behind it - let alone what to do with the actual notation. So, unfortunately, @williamsem nailed it. Most people are left with aimlessly combing through chips and sticking with the company with the chip you like. Bonne chance my colorful friends. P.S. Thanks @linelle for the kind words.

Tim Park's Medici Money has a very interesting take on Lorenzo. Cosimo, his grandfather, built up the bank that made the family's wealth, but apparently Lorenzo had no interest in banking or being a working man; he wanted a more aristocratic lifestyle and so neglected the business that supported his expensive habits. He also consolidated political power into his own hands, so that under his rule, Florence was a republic in name only. It's a very interesting, short read.

I think the OP probably understands that plants don't care where their nutrients come from. But the OP, who wants to eat those plants, does care, and that's smart. No question that eating only organic plants can be a healthy way to live. But if you don't eat plants that have been fed or treated with with the wrong stuff, eating non-organic plants can be a healthy way to live too. How do you know what the wrong stuff is? MSDSs and LD50s tell the tale. Read them carefully. But if you don't want to read, organic is probably the best bet. I don't do organic gardening, but I'm fixated on doing healthy gardening. Now, eating store-bought non-organic veggies can be unhealthy, because the store isn't giving you the MSDSs and LD50s to read. That's an issue of trust that someone in the food chain read them and is being responsible. That's a different issue. But if you grow them yourself, you have all that info accessible to you. Of course, another issue might be whether you trust the people who did the MSDSs and LD50s. Those are required to be done by scientists at independent labs. If you want to reject independent scientific research, then there is a whole lot of other stuff that you need to reject as well. One should remember that the world is full of entirely organic (i.e. no factory, naturally occurring) stuff that is deadly poison. Sorry, I did bother with the organic argument. Time to duck and cover.