Ask someone you know that has a cat and buys their kitty litter in those 40lbs buckets if they can save you one, I'm sure they'd be more than willing to do so... They make the best "garden waste" buckets for the kitchen. Over winter I literally had five of them full with various amounts of already decomposing slop from kitchen scraps being thrown into them and the only time you noticed the nasty putrid smell is if you were to open one of them up. Emptied weekly, or even monthly, and you'll not have that problem - I just got wrapped up in work and didn't have an "active pile" going to toss them into. ---- Also, there's a lot more stuff in your house that's compostable besides kitchen scraps. Here's a short list of the things I throw into my "garden waste" buckets. Coffee grounds, coffee filters, dryer lint (not the fabric softener sheets, however), dust and dirt that I sweep up, hair - I have a dog, two cats and a wife that sheds worse than the lot of them, used paper-towels (as long as they're not "greasy"), kleenex and toilet-paper bits that end up in the bathroom trash, used toilet-paper and paper-towel cardboard rolls, I also had* (wifey just broke our 3rd one this year) a cross-cut shredder that is dedicated to shredding all paper that we receive in the mail that is non-glossy print. I rip the plastic out of the windows of envelopes and shred those as well. We also shred all used paper from "to-do lists" and other drawing/note paper that was used around the house. Really need to teach the wifey to stop jamming up & breaking the shredders though because they cost about $100 USD each...grr. I know some of you use the term "DH" but I should really use the term "DW" lol... I solicit my neighbors for all their yard trimmings and unwanted newspapers for my compost as well. Shredding newspaper for compost is typically done by tossing it in a 16 gallon bucket, filling it up with water and letting it sit for a day or two and then using a paddle-whip attachment on my cordless drill to turn it into a soupy slop. Brown, plain corregated cardboard can be processed the same way and serves as a good way to break down the glue that holds it together. ---- My goal is to have less than two 13-gallon bags of trash for the garbage man to pickup per month - or one every other week, depending on how you look at it...and we're pretty close as it is but I was vetoed on cloth diapers so that constitutes 80% of my current landfill contributions. :sigh:

Donna, I know this is going to sound cruel however it may save you from a lot of problems in the future. Whenever I bring my plants home from a show I always strip all the blooms from the plants as I pack them up to come home. The reason is that you never know what you've picked up at the show in the way of bugs. Thrips are the most common and most likely are present in the show room not neccessarily on member plants but at the sale table. When I do get them home I spray the plants with Lysol and keep them in their covered boxes overnight. When I put them back on the shelves I put them on a shelf that has no other plants on them from the rest of my collection. If I had a different room to use I would isolate them there. As I said I know this sounds cruel but it may save your collection from catching any bugs. If you want to look at your blooming plants longer, don't put them in the same room as the rest of your collection. Fred in NJ

I just want to know where to get pinkeye purple hull peas. My twelve year old daughter has declared herself a vegetarian, and I am trying to impress upon her that she will need to eat some type of pea, bean or nut(s) to get her protein. I wanted to go to the store to get pinkeyed purple hulled peas which is our family's traditional pea delicacy, but found everywhere I go these days there are mislabeled black eyed peas for sale. Is this treat becoming a rarity?

To me architecture is as much an art as it is a science. However, some prefer one type of art over another...just like in genre of music. I for one can't stand rap music. I detest it. My dislike does not make it 'wrong'. Yet, I will not spend any of my money on anything related to rap. Many love rap music and it makes plenty of money. So...apply this to architecture. Do many architects prefer a certain 'type' of construction and disprove of 'fat' layouts or big roofs? This is obviously not my profession, but I do love learning about other professions and other perspectives. I understand your analogy, but the thing is, you're not talking about musical preferences here -- you're talking about misplaced notes, or a tempo that doesn't work with the melody, or instruments that don't blend well together. Even when you're talking about forms of art, rules still exist. You got it right in your title: This is a first draft. It can be polished and improved significantly, but -- for that to happen -- you have to be willing to listen to advice. And you're getting good advice here. I have actually thought about an L shaped house, but I think for us the flow of this works better. Let's test that theory and see if the house has good flow. The red lines represent the path you'd take from the various parts of the house to the laundry room. Note that EVERY ONE OF THEM funnels through the kitchen, one of the busiest rooms in your house. So while you're cooking, people'll be squishing through carrying large baskets of clothes to and fro. This is the exact opposite of good flow. On the other hand, let's consider getting groceries into the house, into storage and to the table -- this works! You bring groceries in, there's the pantry, there's the refrigerator ... when it's time to cook, you bring them into the kitchen ... then straight on to the table. I'd think about the sink location, but everything else is set up to run like a well-oiled machine. So the question is, how can you make ALL (or at least most) of your daily chores run easily like the food storage ... instead of horribly like the laundry lay out? Consider all the other things you do on a daily basis that could either run poorly ... or be designed well: Bringing in the mail, taking out the trash, taking care of the dog, managing the kids' homework, storage of sports equipment, wrapping a present, sitting down to read a book. Think through all these things, and then work on laying out the house so that everything you need is logically organized.