Now it's been exactly 2 month and today I'm moving my plants indoors again. On the first picture here in the plants haven't been watered for a month (the bigger pots for more than a month) so they already rested a bit before ... I guess it should be enough now. I'm anxious to see which of them will bloom for me again and how many leaves they will produce this time. First I'll leave them on the heated windowsill, once the first leaf has emerged they'll be watered slightly from below. When the flowering bud has emerged fully from the bulb they'll again get a good gulp. All right, I'm off to the friends cellar, another friend of mine helps me with his car. They all think I'm crazy but that's nothing new ;)

As an intellectual property lawyer, I'm going to weigh in on the question about the plans. Without seeing the agreement between your builder and the architect, I can't say for sure but... When an architect creates a plan, he automatically has a "copyright interest" in those plans. Copyright is a valuable intellectual property right. The holder of the copyright has the complete right to determine who can and cannot make a copy of the copyrighted materials. Anyone who makes a copy of copyrighted material without permission from the copyright owner is guilty of copyright infringement and could be liable for damages if sued. Copyright infringement damages can be quite hefty. Building a house from a set of plans is considered to be making a "copy" of the plans. Next, typically architects do not "sell" their plans. What they do is LICENSE others to make copies (either additional paper copies or an actual house or both). The license may limit the licensee to a certain number of "copies" or it MAY give him the right to make an unlimited number of copies. The license MAY also give the licensee the right to sublicense the materials. But a licensee can only sublicense what he has licensed. So for example, if the licensee has a license that allows him to make 100 paper copies and 20 house and allows him to grant sublicense; and the builder builds 18 houses using 30 paper copies, he can still grant sublicenses to build 2 more houses and make 70 more paper copies. If the builder even attempts to sublicense 3 more houses instead of two, he has breached his license with the architect and would also be guilty of "inducing infringement." Further whoever got that extra unlicensed sub-license could also be held liable for infringement. Fortunately, if that person had a good faith reason to believe his license was valid, he would probably be assessed only nominal damages. All those online plan sites have licenses from the architects with include sublicensing rights. When someone "buys" an online plan, what they are really getting is a license (sublicense, really) allowing them to make ONE copy of the plans. That is, they can build one house. If they build more than one, they are infringing! But, since on-line plans are often licensed to numerous licensees who are each granted the right to sublicense an unlimited number of copies, the chances that anyone will ever catch the infringement if someone builds a second house is infintessimally small. However, when an architect licenses a plan to a local builder, the license typically does NOT include a sublicensing right. Without a sublicensing right, the builder CANNOT contract with the homeowner to allow some other builder to finish the house if the original builder goes bankrupt. If the original builder can't/won't finish the work, the homeowner has no choice but to work out a deal with the architect... and if the architect wants to play dirty at that point, he pretty much has the homeowner over a barrel. That is not the time to be "working something out with the architect." No language in any contract between the homeowner and the builder will help if the builder goes bankrupt because the architect is the ONLY ONE who can grant the homeowner a license to use his plans. The architect has to be a party to the agreement. The builder simply CANNOT contract away rights that the architect controls. If the architect and builder are working together and the homeowner decide he needs to fire the builder, the homeowner could easily find himself stuck with having to bring in a new architect to revise the home enough that it no longer infringes the original plans. That could get awfully expensive if a house is already half built! Before the building process starts, the homeowner needs a written agreement with the architect giving the homeowner a contingency license to complete the house using the original plans in the event that the original builder does not complete the house for any reason. Such a contingency license should be really cheap before homebuilding begins. It may cost a whole lot more if the homeowner waits to ask for it until they desperately need the license. (Simple law of supply and demand!) Before building, every homeowner should find out who OWNS the copyright and get a contingency license. The agreement doesn't have to be complex but it does needs to be between the homeowner and the whoever OWNS the copyright to the house plans. $100 for a contingency license up front could wind up saving the homeowner thousands and thousands down the road. I personally know of a case where a builder decided to build a house based on a floorplan licensed to another builder. The other builder didn't like the competition and told the architect about the infringement. The architect sued the unlicensed builder. The case settled with the infringing builder agreeing to pay $25,000 in damages to the architect! The builder probably could have licensed the plans for $2,000 originally! Now the legal disclaimer: The above is legal information. It is not legal advice and no attorney/client relationship is created by my posting of the information.

Jane The lists for Costa Rica 1400/1700 species of orchids alone !! In my minds eye I'm thinking there must be dozens on every tree maybe thousands lol There just might be but actually seeing them was a real challenge. Of course you can go to the reserves and they happily show you many orchids but then you find out they were all planted . I even hired a guide and went to the huge park in the Talmanca mountains that straddles the border into Panama. Magnificent in every sense of the word except for orchids . At the camp I asked about orchids and they showed me some Dends and Vandas attached to a palm !!! When I finally got across that I wanted to see wild orchids growing naturally They closed the border because of the US invasion of Panama !! In revenge I stole some seeds of a Geonoma palm which I ID as the very rare "Stained glass" variety. Brought them home germinated them and guess what all are of the very ordinary green variety!!! I did get to see many Morpho butterflies even some I think were M. rhetenor !! A family of Tapirs that scared the hell out of me . Most memorable the gazillions of Hummingbirds in a endless array of colors and forms and what I believe was a Resplenant Quetzal in full color for 3 seconds lol Incredible tree fern forests and what I believe were Gunnera of some kind .They called them "Poor mans umbrella" Orchids in the buff ,a total bust!!! lol gary

We've had 4 contractors...no GC. 1 plumber to move the gas line, but they didn't seem to care about building codes when they drilled though the ceiling joists and didn't listen very well when I told them where to put the gas for the range. The actual gas supply is where it needs to be but the shut off valve is *barely* not behind the adjacent cabinet. We did our own water supply. 2 drywall contractors, the first of which was recommended by neighbors and were HORRIBLE, the second were reasonably good where it counts but still haven't come back out to sand in corners near the floor so we can have straight baseboards. Good thing we're nowhere near ready for baseboards. And to be fair to them, we did have a hurricane get in the way of everything. The 4th is a very expensive electrician, who my dad has known for 20 years and does all his electric. They've been pretty good too but a lot of junction boxes are still set back to far for proper seating of covers, and we haven't even tiled the backsplash yet, which will make it even worse. Long story short, there are many out there who won't do the job you would do in your own home if you were able to. So now my regrets...we're not finished, so they haven't all come to light yet...I only have 1. I wish we had better quality cabinets. They're not terrible. They were already assembled RTA we bought off Craigslist and they saved us about $6000. The thing is, if we gotten the ones we were planning to buy (Shenandoah from Lowes) we would probably have run out of money by now. So there's that.