I've gotten some surprises since I moved from Northern CA to OK. Plants that were invasive in CA are not here, and vice versa. My all-time hated plant for taking over the world is Hypericum, in any of it's varieties. I would never ever consider planting it unless erosion control was desperately needed on a hillside. The root system is very tough and can turn into a nearly solid mat, killing anything else in its path. Once it's really established, I think it would take a tractor and a lot of weed killer and several years to eradicate it. Lily of the Valley can spread out over a huge area and be all but impossible to control. Coreopsis in CA is like a weed. Start a plant or two and it spreads everywhere. Here in OK it doesn't seem to be nearly as much of a problem. In fact, I tried scattering seed in hopes that I'd get a crop of new ones, but nothing happened. However, I found that the spiderwort likes this climate and had a dozen babies the first year. The remaining ones are vinca major or minor, which can be really hard to control; sweet woodruff that was mentioned above, which has such tiny roots that it's easy to keep where it belongs; monarda, which began as 8 plants and is now over 8' wide; and evening primrose (oenothera) which spreads like crazy. I'm using it to fill in an ugly patch and it's doing a very good job of it, very fast. Six little starts last year turned into an area that's about 8'long and 5' wide. Also, honeysuckle in OK is an invasive weed, climbing over, under, around and through anything in its path. I'm growing Goldflame, which is well mannered, with an extremely long bloom period.

Yep, we built twice, still working on finishing the 2nd one. Both times we were the GC, and that worked really well for us. We hired the same contractor to provide the labor for both houses, same electrician, carpenters, plumbers, tile guy - great crew! First one we hired an architect and pretty much sat on his shoulders to make sure we got exactly what we wanted. Which we did, and loved it. It was a contemporary South American style house with a large central courtyard and two long wings. It had solar hot water, solar heat for the pool, lots of energy-saving bells and whistles, and many cool features (like a secret door to a secret room, the entry to the master bedroom was by walking through a greenhouse, 2-storey sunken circular library, etc.). But after about 6 years we decided the house (about 7000 sq ft) and garden (2 acres) were both larger than we wanted. Soooooo... we decided to get rid of the parts of the house that we didn't use (like a huge family room that was almost always empty and a too-large living room). In San Diego County you can be your own architect if you also get an engineer to sign off on your plans and if your plans meet certain other requirements. The good news is that we were really pleased with almost all the features of the previous house, so we didn't have much trouble picking out wood (same cherry as we'd used before for all the woodwork), granite countertops, slate flooring (for about 80% of the floors), appliances, etc. That saved a lot of major decisions. My hubby, a wanna be architect from way back), designed a very simple house which is basically a square 80' on a side with a 40' x 40' courtyard in the middle. It is 1 room deep all around the courtyard, and every room has terrific cross ventilation. It was the first house in this county to be built of Aerated Autoclaved Concrete (AAC), a kind of concrete block that is both fireproof and terrific insulation. We have solar electric, solar hot water, 14 solar tubes and skylights, grey water system, lots of other "green" features. Conditioned space is 2400 sq ft, plus there is another 1600 sq ft of unconditioned space (garage/workshop and also storage/potting room). The new house should be done in another year or so (we're finishing it ourselves), but we've been living in it for 2-1/2 years and love it. We don't miss the larger house at all, and this will definitely be our last house. One major change is that the previous house was very modern, with lots and lots of floor-to-ceiling windows and doors and almost all white paint inside. The new house is more Mexican traditional, with 8" thick walls that resemble adobe somewhat, and very brightly painted walls inside and outside (deep violet, hot pink, turquoise, mustard, rust... you get the idea). It would be right at home in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico and elsewhere in So. America, and it also fits well in our neighborhood, too, where there are many custom homes. Best things about our house: 1) Kitchen counter on my side of the kitchen and the 4' x 8' central island are both about 3" lower than standard 'cause I'm only 5'1'' (on a good hair day). 2) All the house, including all bathrooms and showers, are fully handicap accessible. My sweet MIL is living with us at the moment and this is enormously helpful for her limited mobility, as it'll likely be for ours some day. 3) Our AAC masonry is so well-insulated that we don't use much heat - we have 2 natural gas fireplaces as our only heat source, only run them a short time a day here in winter (okay, so it rarely gets below 45 degrees here, but we DO have winter). 4) With all the skylights and solar tubes we use almost no lights inside during daylight hours. 5) Solar electric meant an electric bill last year of about $200. It should pay for itself in about 10 more years. 6) Altho the house shrunk by a lot, the kitchen is still about 18' x 18', bigger than in our last house, which is good 'cause we have a lot of cooks in the family. 7) All the bright colors are very cheerful. The barrel-vaulted ceiling in our bedroom also has a mural of the night sky, with stars that glow under black light, which we love. 8) Hubby has 2 jumbo clean-up sinks on his side of the kitchen, plus one of those tall gadgets with a sprayer attachment you could have water fights with someone across the street. Hey, he does the dishes and if it makes him happy it's fine with me. 9) We never enjoyed the jetted tub we had in the last house, so this time hubby got a whole bunch of sprayers and attachments for his side of our 2-person shower. Again, he's happy as a pig in mud (and a whole lot cleaner).

I am thinking more in the line of a tiny shop vac. Something small that I can carry in my hand, not run on floor like a stick vac. Which is why the Kone thing was great but just not big enough dirt cup. What I really need is a contraption that is built into the baseboards that when the door opens it sucks really hard, pulling all the hairs floating on my wood floors and into the door. That would be cool. When I lived in Atlanta my house had a whole house fan. When on, all the hair would come to middle of house, wood floors, and ball up. Simply take vac and suck up. My house now is two story and so the whole house fan does not work like the one in my old single story. I guess I could always move back- lol! Thanks for the hints. I do use a broom and then vac when I have to do a total clean but for the inbetween days I just need to suck up a few here and there. Maybe I could shave my dog? Wonder how a shephard would look shaved? He might not let me take him for walks anymore. hmmm

"so follow the FDIC rules as outlined on their website carefully!" Thats right, especially the fine print! Here's an article with a little food for thought regarding how many banks the FDIC might be able to rescue if push comes to shove. Financial Sense How Safe is My FDIC-Insured Bank Account? by Dr. Chris Martenson : April 14, 2008 Your bank account may not be as safe as you think (or hope). Taking a deeper look at the legal details and the financial depth of the FDIC reveals several troubling details that call into question how the FDIC would fare during a true banking crisis. The US is coming out of a period of unusually low banking stress and failures. Since it is typical human behavior to let one’s guard down during tranquil periods, we might legitimately ask if this has happened with respect to the FDIC. Before we address that though, we probably should understand bit more about the FDIC. There’s a fair bit of both good and bad information about the FDIC floating around out on the internet, so I thought we could stick to the facts. In this article I even go straight into the language of the 1933 FDIC act itself so that you can decide for yourself whether it’s worth spending any of your precious concern on this matter. What is the FDIC? Let's begin with a snippet from Wikipedia on the FDIC: The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is a United States government corporation created by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. The vast number of bank failures in the Great Depression spurred the United States Congress into creating an institution which would guarantee deposits held by commercial banks, inspired by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and its Depositors Insurance Fund (DIF). The FDIC provides deposit insurance which currently guarantees checking and savings deposits in member banks up to $100,000 per depositor. Accounts at different banks are insured separately. One person could keep $100,000 in accounts at two separate banks and be insured for a total of $200,000. Also, accounts in different ownerships (such as beneficial ownership, trusts, and joint accounts) can be considered separately for the $100,000 insurance limit. The Federal Deposit Insurance Reform Act raised the amount of insurance for an Individual Retirement Account to $250,000. The two most common methods employed by FDIC in cases of insolvency or illiquidity are the: • Payoff Method, in which insured deposits are paid by the FDIC, which attempts to recover its payments by liquidating the receivership estate of the failed bank. • Purchase and Assumption Method, in which all deposits (liabilities) are assumed by an open bank, which also purchases some or all of the failed bank's loans (assets). In short, if your bank gets in trouble, the FDIC will ride in and either pay off your account (up to $100k), or sell your bank off to another bank which will then assume the usual duties of your bank. Under normal circumstances, a bank failure should not impact you in the least. But these are not normal times. We might reasonably ask how the FDIC would respond during a major banking crisis. After all, this is our money we’re talking about. Faith and hope are great at weddings and sporting events, but they should not form the basis of our strategy for handling our finances. How many bank failures could the FDIC handle at once? When we take a look at the financials of the FDIC (Figure 1) we see that the level of insurance (in circles below) is not terribly high either, when viewed as an aggregate amount (in blue) or on a percentage basis (in red). Figure 1. http://www.chrismartenson.com/system/files/u4/FDIC_financials_2007.jpg The 1.22% Reserve Ratio means that for every dollar in your bank account, the FDIC has 1.22 cents “in reserve” ready to cover your potential losses. This has proved to be an ample amount during the period of stability we’ve recently had, but it doesn’t seem particularly significant, considering the recent headlines about banking losses (Spring of 2008). Consider, for a moment, the collapse of Bear Stearns. In order to assume that bank, JP Morgan asked for, and received, a special waiver from the Federal Reserve to keep $400 billion of suspect of Bear Stearn's assets off the books of JPM (page 4 of the linked document). While JPM may have been padding the books a little bit here, due to the uncertainty of how bad the wreckage might turn out to be, $400 billion dwarfs the $52 billion reserves of the FDIC. If one medium-large bank collapse could wipe out the FDIC by a factor of nearly 8, what do you suppose would happen if there were multiple, simultaneous bank failures? At this point, my guess would be that Congress would be sorely tempted to borrow additional funds to remedy the situation, but I worry that hardship and losses might result while the laws were amended and sufficient funding avenues identified. So how many bank failures could the FDIC endure? The data suggests slightly fewer than one big one. I thought the FDIC has full faith and credit backing by the US treasury? Actually, no, it does not. The language in Section 14 of the FDIC Act is clear and unambiguous (emphasis mine): (a) BORROWING FROM TREASURY.-- The Corporation is authorized to borrow from the Treasury, and the Secretary of the Treasury is authorized and directed to loan to the Corporation on such terms as may be fixed by the Corporation and the Secretary, such funds as in the judgment of the Board of Directors of the Corporation are from time to time required for insurance purposes, not exceeding in the aggregate $30,000,000,000 outstanding at any one time, subject to the approval of the Secretary of the Treasury: Provided, That the rate of interest to be charged in connection with any loan made pursuant to this subsection shall not be less than an amount determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, taking into consideration current market yields on outstanding marketable obligations of the United States of comparable maturities. Now that’s pretty interesting. First, that any additional money from the federal government is not a guarantee, but rather a loan, which will only be made subject to the approval of the Secretary of the Treasury. Further, that the loan is to be made at “current market yields." What do you suppose would happen to US Treasury yields during a true emergency? I can imagine a few scenarios where they might skyrocket, and this would serve to compound the difficulty of keeping the FDIC fund solvent. How long does the FDIC have to repay me if things go bad? Here things get murky. We turn to Section 11 of the act and find this (emphasis mine): (f) PAYMENT OF INSURED DEPOSITS.-- (1) IN GENERAL.--In case of the liquidation of, or other closing or winding up of the affairs of, any insured depository institution, payment of the insured deposits in such institution shall be made by the Corporation as soon as possible, subject to the provisions of subsection (g), either by cash or by making available to each depositor a transferred deposit in a new insured depository institution in the same community or in another insured depository institution in an amount equal to the insured deposit of such depositor. That only says “as soon as possible” and sets absolutely no time limit or maximum. Taken to the extreme, it might be impossible for the FDIC to ever make depositors whole again, and this is one of dozens of such “outs” that exist in the document. Remember, this act was written in 1933 when money was gold, times were uncertain, and government lawyers were exceedingly careful to avoid locking the government into any possible financial black holes. And the FDIC Act is very clear to spell out that the only insurance funds available to depositors are those that exist within the fund itself: (f)(1)(A) all payments made pursuant to this section on account of a closed Bank Insurance Fund member shall be made only from the Bank Insurance Fund So, if the fund runs dry, there isn’t another possible source of funds that can be legally tapped without changing this wording. And that would take " wait for it âÂ" an act of Congress. Surely Congress would appropriate the necessary funds to keep the FDIC solvent? A link that might be useful: www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/7203/