Dawn thanks. There are times when you wonder if it is worth it. I had 9 seeds of a scarce variety of bean. I planted them in a bed that I had left mulch on for the last few years. Pulled it back and planted. But left a little old mulch close by. Of the first 3 that sprouted something ate 2/3 of the way through 2 stems and ate the leaves of the 3rd one. So cleaned the mulch away. Had five plants last night. Thought they should be wet enough to make it through the day. By the time I got home all but one looked bad. Two of them revived after I watered them well. Hopefully I can save the 3 to build seed from. Then after dark I decided to fix spaghetti. I went out to the garden and pulled two volunteer garlic plants. Not the biggest of the volunteer plants but 2 which I would have to remove before long. One had a scape. I also pulled 5 onions that are just starting to bulb. I cut them up and put them in the spaghetti sauce. And then I remembered why I garden. The best sauce I've had for almost a year. Nothing like the flavor of fresh garlic and onions. I noticed this evening they are saying 86 tomorrow but have raised the 88 for Friday to 96. Hopefully it won't get that hot. Everything made it through the day except the 2 beans I mentioned above. But know the plants are stressing some although they don't show it yet. I probably wouldn't have fed the tomatoes any N if I hadn't steamed the leaves off some in the WOW's and felt I needed to grow some foliage back. The wind is blowing hard now. Jay

There are plenty of shopping streets/neighborhoods here that going to a mall is not a necessity. Not all malls are all covered here either, particularly Century City Mall, which has a parking structure, but you walk outside to go from store to store. Third Street Promenade is all outdoors, as is Rodeo Drive. Melrose Avenue is one of my favorite shopping streets, but I also like Sunset in the Silver Lake district. Hollywood and Highland also has a large central area that is open to the sky. There's really no need to cover these areas, since we don't have cold weather, and it's usually not too hot. Lowspark, you are not a weather wimp if you can handle living in Houston in the summer! I lived there when I was going to Rice, but I never managed to stay there in the summer. Rice closed for the summer when I was there - they didn't want to subject the students (and professors and staff) to the heat and humidity. DB had been telling me that Circuit City had been late with all their payments to Sony, and so we were not surprised when we found out that they were going into chapter 11. We bought a new TV recently and ended up getting it at Best Buy because they have a brand (Insignia) that got good reviews and was well under the employee discount price that DB could get from Sony for a similar LCD widescreen TV. I gave our old widescreen TV to the neighbors, for helping us move it out of the house. It was a rear projection TV and was huge!! I'm much happier with the flat screen TV, and our old TV, even though it was HD, was not compatible with Blu-ray. DB had bought a Blu-ray player a couple of weeks ago at a company sale (at Sony) along with an AV amplifier, but we could not get a picture on our old TV with it. Finally, I broke down and bought a new 47" Insignia flat screen LCD TV, and we're much happier with that. We only have a few Blu-ray discs, but we're starting to collect them. The old DVDs are supposed to look better on Blu-ray player, but it's difficult to tell. Lars

they are amazingly tough trees where hardy this looks very similar to the damage a stupid local kid did cutting my grass the tree is absolutely fine now, 6 years or so later you really have to look to see the spot where the trunk healed over so, yes, no need to graft a fix to it they are probably one of the top moved trees by northeastern landscapers, I've heard of a couple cases of people moving them when they move house...so they are probably fairly transplant tolerant if done correctly. Expensive though, I think the couple I know on Long Island said it was over $3000 to move one from their old house to their new house. It was bigger and fuller than this.

Unfortunately, a shorter ~30 ft tree doesn't mean it won't fall or break from catching more wind like a larger tree, it's just less of a problem if it does, and thus hopefully something new gets put in its place, old roots removed and all. can see the stem of this ~30 ft blue spruce? snap and break, unfortunately most evergreens which I want are softwoods https://youtu.be/pBkPichBlt8?t=838 this shows how small and weakly rooted (in certain but likely many soils) the root system of a large seemingly strong healthy tree can actually be, especially when ground is saturated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMwCThoK43k someone mentioned a lot of trees won't just reach a certain height and stop growing even if it's commonly noted as the max height. In perfect conditions in nature where a tree happens to find exactly what it likes it can grow much more than max heights noted, this nootka cypress weeping alaskan cedar says can grow 90 ft in perfect conditions, not 30' like commonly noted for home landscapes but if you conditions are perfect for that tree then it can grow much taller. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3ITdkSZ7BM