1) Part of the country I live in: Florida 2) One quirky/odd/interesting/funny thing about where I live: People leave five open car lengths between them and going through a green light. Two cars get through. Everyone shops out of the middle of the isle. Very few people are from here. We can’t wait until the vacationers leave so we can get into our locals. 3) Two or three quirky things you do NOT know about me: What’s not quirky about me? I don’t like touching door handles going into business, restaurants ect. If I have to I use the up side of my left hand. I do not like it if someone wants to taste my drink. All I can think of is if they flossed or not or what they may have had in their mouth that is now floating around in my drink. I think men who spit in public should need a public stoning. 4) Any weird or funny phobia? No real phobias but I don’t particularly like spiders. 5) Two interesting/funny/ quirky things about my family: Everything my husband is good at I am not. Everything I am good at husband is not. It’s easy to figure out who gets what job during remodels. My husband smells and sniffs everything he puts on. I have two dogs a Rottweiler and Maltese. The Rottweiler thinks he’s a Maltese and the Maltese thinks she is a Rottweiler. All the women in my family are extremely strong willed. 6) Item and age of the oldest piece of clothing I still wear: Nothing I can think of except I collect vintage pins. My DH/SO/Family HATES this item that I love and refuse to get rid of: In my quest for an all-cotton, knee length sleeveless nightgown I couldn’t find exactly what I wanted so bought a Ralph Lauren loud floral print gown. I look like a clown in it but it’s cozy. I can’t recall exactly what he said but it wasn’t nice. He hates my stored paint and wants me to use the same color in every room to cut down of cans in the garage. He hates the tufted headboard I got at a garage sale. 8)Favorite thing to do when I have an hour or so free at home and no one around to bother me and no work. Well I haven’t had time due to renovations but in a few months I’ll have my very own room to sit and paint in. 9) If I could somehow have another career with, miraculously, the college or training already behind me, I would: I’m not sure I could pick one. There is so much to know and learn about with so many things. I enjoy anything creative. 10) If I could live anywhere in the world for 3 months among the locals (other than the country I currently live in now) I would love to live: I love Italy and south west England but am always glad to get back to America. 11) One last quirky thing about me: I am more of a man’s girl than a girl’s girl. But, I am better at being a girl’s girl now that I am older and have had more time to figure out the complexities of women… even though I am one. I still don’t get vagueness. I’m a visual learner.

We just delt with Brown recluses in our home, until we knew what they were we actually had them crawl on us a few times which was quite enough for us, I searched and searched, spraying was not an option as it creats a very nice menu of dead bugs for them, so I found a product called Diatomaceous Earth or fossil flour at Lowes garden center it's organic and says it safe, it kills the critters and makes it irritating to walk through, we sprinkled it in every cranny , around the walls and even put it on the dog for flea control when frontline wouldnt work.We also sprinkled it in the attic with a feather duster, it's messy and dusty wear a mask.in the house I used an empty parmesan cheese container to lightly sprinkle, we then found they started crawling up the walls I guess to get out of the dry irritating dust so I dusted slightly up the walls , We have noticed a huge reduction in their sightings and it has been about 6 months since we started using the "flour" . When those nasty biting orange lady bugs showed up I dusted the outside doors where they were landing and they showed immediate signs of irritation and would fly away, noticed very few on my doors and siding after that.I hope this stuff is as safe as they say and it works for so many other things.worked perfect for the fleas on our animals as well. It's supposed to be organic and I'm all for that. Karen

WB Marta, First a clarification - 5/16 and 7/16 refer to laminated glass which is two lites bonded either side of a plastic interlayer, those thicknesses are not the actual thickness of individual glass lites. 5/16" laminated glass consists of two 1/8" lites and 7/16" laminated has two 3/16" lites so that the 1/8" difference is really 1/16" x 2. Different glass thickness does not mean different frame thickness, it doesn't even affect the width of the reglet or glazing channel in the sash. Because the vast majority of glass that goes into the sash is going to be a dual pane package that will be the same width (or depth depending who you are talking to), even when different glass thicknesses are used by changing the width of the spacer between the two lites, the overall IG width doesn't change. In other words, if window company xyz has an overall glazing channel of 1" for their dual pane units, then that's what the IG unit has to fill. Depending on the window company the tolerance for the IGU width might be as little as 1/64". Available options might be two 1/8" lites with 3/4" space between, or could be one 1/18" plus one 1/4" with a 5/8" width spacer/airspace. Or if they were manufacturing an impact window with 5/16" laminated and 1/8" mono glass then they would use a 9/16" spacer to once again come out at 1", and so on. In your case Marta, you are being told 5/16 and 7/16 but are they selling a single laminated lite in a frame or are they going to be IG (dual pane) units? Either option is available in Florida, but IG is more common. This part is a bit more complicated..... The advantage of thicker laminated glass in an impact window has to do with wind resistance and potentially the DP rating. Simply thicker glass generally has higher load tolerance (wind and otherwise) than thinner glass, but thinner glass that has been heat strengthened or tempered has a higher wind loading tolerance than does non-heat treated (annealed) glass even when the annealed glass is thicker than the heat treated glass. Need to raise the DP of a given window? Temper the glass and it immediately goes up. What all that means is that if the 1/8" glass in the 5/16" laminated has been heat treated and the 3/16" glass in the 7/16" has not, then the thinner 5/16" heat treated laminated glass has substantially higher resistance to wind pressure and low level impacts than the non-heat treated 7/16" laminated product. However note low level impact resistance. There is no appreciable difference between 5/16 and 71/6 laminated glass when subjected to the 2x4 hurricane impact test requirement. Heat treating glass might protect from an errant baseball but the 2x4 doesn't even notice the difference, heat treated or not. The downside to heat treating is that it can introduce distortion in the glass, distortion that may even be unnoticeable in a single lite of glass can become quite noticeable when two lites are laminated together. I am not saying it WILL be distorted, far from it, just saying that the possibility is potentially greater. And most (but not all) distortion when it does occur is very mild and only visible at acute angles to the glass, often even affected by lighting conditions to see it. Marta as you move forward the first things that you need to find out are, a) monolithic lami or IG unit in the windows b) is the glass heat treated, either heat strengthened or tempered c) if an IG or dual pane, is the non-laminated (also called sacrificial) lite heat treated d) if monolithic lami what LowE coatings, if any, are used in the construction And all else being equal, monolithic can be okay and IG can be okay. Depending on location and application eat treated can be a good option, but non-heat treated might be just as effective. Coatings are a necessity, mono or IG, that one isn't negotiable.

On the weather forecast at the end of the national news they said it was 28 degrees in Sydney today. One day last week it was 35, which is 10 above average for this time of year. Missed the local news but we've been in the high 20's to low 30's lately. I've seen composting toilets a few times. I think there's one at Orroral Valley, just outside Canberra. It was the site of a tracking station. Kind of amazing that in the sixties and seventies there were three tracking stations in the Canberra region. Tidbinbilla is still operating. It has four active dishes and several other ones. One of them was transferred from Honeysuckle Creek, where it had received the first pictures of Armstrong walking on the moon (the movie The Dish wasn't entirely accurate, although the Parkes dish featured in it was used to receive pictures also). Honeysuckle Creek and Orroral Valley were closed years ago and eventually the buildings were pulled down because they were getting vandalised. The foundations were left and signs put up to indicate what had been there. And Orroral Valley got a composting toilet fot the hikers and picnickers who visit. I don't know if they'd allow them in the suburbs. Then again the drought has been changing attitudes. Water tanks will soon be compulsory for new homes. Energy ratings were introduced a few years ago. New homes have to be built to a minimum of four stars. Advertisements for houses for sale must include the energy rating. One new suburb is going to have a requirement that households with cats keep them in cat runs or indoors. One thing Canberra has always had is a ban on front fences! It was intended to encourage Canberra to develop into a garden city. The government nursery which grows plants for parks and public areas also gave each new block that was built on a free allocation of plants. I'm determined to reduce my collection of potted plants by next summer. Most aren't potplants as such, they're just waiting for a permanent home. Some are cuttings, some are bought, sometimes I have some sitting in pots awaiting relocation. Do you think if a plant has been waiting for about twenty years it qualifies as a real potplant? Can plants have dual citizenship? It spent a while unhappily in a garden bed, was put in a pot to recover while we decided on a better location, then we moved house so it came with us, then we moved again, and again. It has moved around this garden and seems reasonably happy where it is now, but where it is now is not a garden bed, and we have enough to do without expanding the garden bed over there. We're halfway through expanding a couple of other garden beds, the purpose being to reduce the lumpy crunchy yellow stuff we used to call lawn. As I write, The Amazing Race is on tv. Everyone is gathering at a sports stadium. Acres of green. Mmmm.