Hi lovetogrowflowers. I don't think you are bothering anyone. Lucy is right, try not to stress yourself out. Take deep breaths. LOL. I think your plan for the two potted ones are perfect. I read in one of your earlier post asking about if the crawl space was ok and someone I believe said yes. For me, I WOULD strip the leaves first. The brug will be trying to take care of the leaves instead of useing its energy to go dormant. Plus you wouldn't want bugs to sneak in on a leaf and spend the winter eating your brug. :( As for the one in ground...well people cut back or don't cut back for different reasons. One of the biggest I think is for safety and the health of the plant. During the winter the brug branches will freeze so they cut them back so there is less of a chance this will happen. Who wants a mushy rotting brug in spring? How tall is the brug you still have in the ground? How close to the ground is the Y? The experts can chime in if this is a bad idea, but how about if you...1.Stip the leaves. 2.Cut off only the top green tips. (Save them) 3.Mulch as high as you can get it, at least to the Y if it's close to the ground. 4.Cover the brug with a REALY big rubber trash can or tub. 5.Maybe even cover that with an old blanket. Or would that be over kill? The cuttings you could take in and root them. Hopefully none of that was bad advice. Me and Lonny are newbies too. This will be our 2nt winter. We killed one of the two brugs we had last winter. But that was because we brought them in and tried to keep them growing. This year we brought all in again. This winter we have many more, plus young ones. We made a Brug room and have been learning lots. So we are going to give it a try. If they had been bigger, we would have left them out in ground to go dormant. Now that I have writen a novel.(sorry, long winded) Try not to worry, you brought them back to health and they are doing well enough to be around to overwinter, so I think you are doing well. Kim

Check the colors against your furniture and such. If you are starting with the walls first then I suggest you do like I did. After painting my 25"walls by myself, yeah really scary up there, I did the following: We purchased a rug that had all our favorite colors and put it in our family room as the anchor. I went to store and picked one of those pallet cards that gives a group of colors that go together. Mine are the Biltmore Estate colors. All my favorites are there with even a few I would never have thought of. And it turns out all the colors in the pallet are actually in the rug we got. It took a few months before we realized that there were colonial blue areas in the rug that actually matched the blue we used in one room. I used the neutral tan for my entry and stairwell, used a lighter version of the tan for my kitchen, family and hallways. I used the red in my livingroom, hunter green in dining and the blue in my upstairs bonus room. I just did my guest bath using the same blue in the rug andthe bonus room and it is actually my unexpected color in the house. It matches all the other colors but you would never really think to see it. But together they all match really well. I carry my colors in my purse and use them all the time when I am out and about and tempted to get something for the house. So pick that tan and find a pallet that goes with it, it really helped me a lot.

It seems that if you have two parents who are living together and fighting all of the time/not getting along, that is definitely detrimental for everyone involved- if there is eventually a divorce in the equation, and the custodial parent is unable to let go/angry/etc., and there is a new partner for the other parent whom the custodial parent resents, and the custodial parent is basically trying to turn the child against the other parent and the new partner, how on earth can anyone win in a situation like that? I've been on both sides- my ex and I absolutely couldn't get along, and there was constant bickering which the kids saw, and didn't need to see- there was a divorce, with one of my children wanting us to get back together, and that is totally understandable- kids want mom AND dad...together- but what children don't realize, and I've told this to my kids along with my stepdaughter (who is 9, and who lives with her mother- her mother is angry, bitter, and tells the daughter things such as I "stole" him from her, which isn't true--)is that mom and dad will ALWAYS be mom and dad, even if they don't live together- and that sometimes, both mom and dad can be better moms and dads if they DON'T live together- It shouldn't ever be about us as adults, in adult relationships- it should always be about the kids, and in a perfect world, both parents should be united on that front; realizing that it is about making the kids feel safe, feel secure, and realize that they are not losing either parent because of a divorce, when if both parents are together on it, it isn't that way- there are parents who live together where mom or dad has to go away on business a lot of the time, and isn't there that much as it is- the main thing is being involved in your child's life if you aren't the custodial parent- I think that maybe the new partner doesn't always feel that they 'don't want the child around, involved in their new life', although I will admit there are probably quite a few of them who feel that way- so much as it is that when a custodial parent is telling the child not to get along with the new partner, etc. because they themselves can't let go of the relationship, it makes it very hard on the new partner- letting the custodial parent and the child basically 'call the shots' about who sees who, when, and where isn't a good thing, especially if the custodial parent is angry and bitter about the breakup and would like nothing better than to cause problems and see the new relationship fall apart, and to use the child to help bring that about is definitely not right- the custodial parent needs to help the child/children feel secure with their relationship with the other parent, as well as the new partner- and the new partner needs to help the child feel secure as well- It really should be all about the kids.

Another thing that could be slowing down your connection is the router itself. If yours doesn't have a reset button, unplug it and remove the backup battery (if there is one) and let it cool down for 10 minutes, then plug it back in. It could take a long while to fully reinitialize, so do it before you start cooking or something, and let it get a clean load without trying to connect until it's done. Also, check your settings. If your browser cache empties automatically overnight or something like that, it could just be that the first connection to Houz, lags because you have to download all that gobbledegook, but later on it's cached so you can reconnect more quickly. Have a full cache can bring on lag, as others have said, but having commonly visited pages cached really speeds up the loading time.