Marian - the paper size is 11"x17" for the course but I gather in 'real life' it would be at least 24"x36" or bigger... Mary - I have noticed the ads for the English Gardening School in the RHS magazine. And there are the RHS courses too... I guess one advantage of the U of G courses is you can just take the courses that interest you and they can count towards a certificate/diploma or not, as you like. So there no feeling that you didn't complete a program if you want to stop after just one course. The Internet format was ideal for me; it's just that the course content wasn't quite what I was looking for. I'll have to look around at options and then see whether I'm still in the mood to do something more once the gardening season is over for this year. Saucy - The reference to the clematises is in the verbal description of the plan. You need the plant list key to find them on the drawing (and the drawing posted here is too small to read the numbers anyway! :-) GB - I was going to consult with you about what ones to use but ran out of time and just named ones I was familiar with! The transparent house was interesting. I had to 'build' it from scratch with only the floor plan outline, the height of the walls as provided by the teacher, and the fact that there was a 2' roof overhang! It's not quite right I think on the back part of the house but good enough for the purpose of the assignment. The whole isometric drawing thing is actually quite simple to do - if a bit fiddly and tedious! You follow a straightforward process using fairly crude shapes for the plants (drawn to scale based on mature height and spread) and, when you put it all together, it produces that rather astonishing drawing - with zippo artistic talent required on my part! Since it was all done at a scale of 1/8" = 1' small details were killers to work with. It took me two days to draw that table and tuteur! Rotating things 30 degrees when they're that small and have so many lines (all those chair legs etc.!) is hard on the eyes... And since the technique produces a 3-D effect, I kept losing track of what was bottom and what was top as the little image seemed to have a life of its own and 'morphed' a lot :-) And tilting everything at 30 degrees started to 'get' to me - when I was reading something after working on the drawings for a while, the text of what I was reading seemed to be on a slant! But it was mostly fun - and good mental exercise :-) But now it's time to mess around in the real garden! I do hope to get out and measure things next week and do a proper scale drawing of the front garden and the changes I want to make there. (I suspect I may end up just 'winging it' as usual if spring gets underway quickly sometime soon and I run out of planning time....:-)

Mindy, here's another thought....I thought clips DH thought hose clamps. Slip these on and tighten on the rebar, make the loop in the wire a little looser so these can also be slipped on, being a little looser the whole arm is moveable but won't drop below the clamp. Put two or more arms on and they can be moved in different directions. More clamps and more arms added as needed. Ohhhh, the possibilities. How about you sending the tip in to FG do it with my blessing, it's just not my thing :o). I come up with crazy ideas at times like how to make a temporary support to train my golden hops up a cherry tree, crazy glue and twine LOL. Now back out to my weed patch, Annette

Ian certainly use Christopher's link to select a firewall. Zonealarm is probably the most used free one. I used Comodo for a long while, it is good but requires a little more user input I found. You might want to turn this thread into a total security set of questions for your computer. I suggest that because something seems to have been allowed to set up on your computer in the first place. All safety programs can be found that are free. You should seriously consider - besides an anti virus program which I hope you have - a couple of anti malware programs. These need to be updated of course and ran every so often. The free programs usually are not automatic, they require you to manually update and run. This is not difficult. If by chance you are using AdAwareSE personal I believe support for it will end December 30th. I found the new AdAware2007 to need considerably more resources to run so I got rid of that and replaced it with Superantispyware. I also run AVG anti spyware, AVG anti rootkit, Spybot Search & Destroy, Spywareblaster and BOClean. Not all on the same machine of course but I do keep 3 on each computer.

When our contractor made a mistake on the cabinet order (the KD was one of the partners in our GC firm) they made it right. I agree with marcolo as far as cost - if what they charged you was for unfinished sides, all you should be responsible for is the uprgrade to a finished side. It is hard to say without seeing your cabinets and the type of UC lights you have, but I'd expect that at most they would have to detach the under cabinet lights and then take out the end cabinet that needs to be replaced. If they do have to take down the whole run, then that's their problem. One fix if there is enough clearance might be to get a panel for the exposed side - basically that's made the same as a door (without any handle) and covers the side - but usually there is a small sliver of the cabinet side still exposed so if the color is off too much that might not be acceptable. As far as neatness, both for our kitchen remodel and our family room remodel, our contractors and their subs were very neat. They did any sweeping and vacuuming necessary to clean up the area. Mostly they did that every day at the end of the day. They took care of covering surfaces that were already in so they didn't get damaged if messy work was being done near them. An employee of one sub left a mess and when our GC saw that he was mad at them and cleaned it up himself. That guy had made some other mistakes and the GC saw to it that a different employee finished the job. Perhaps we paid a premium for our job to get that service, but they worked neatly and it didn't take them much time at the end of each day.