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The Garden

Thanks for your opinions.

It all started when I helped a friend of mine calibrate his new projector. I had been a skeptic of projection systems, as they were both as costly as a medium sized home and offered washed-out images of low resolution. All that's changed, as my experience setting up my friend's 1080P projector showed me. I came home and scoured eBay for a projector and found one. Oddly, the seller was an Objectivist! There were only 2 bids and I got this $5500 (street price) projector for $1425 with only 82 hours on it:

I built my own projector sled mount out of drawer slides, saving hundreds more:

Then I got to work building a 154" 2.35:1 Cinemascope screen:

..and we finally finished building, including our own hand-sewn velvet drapes with materials I bought at Jo-Ann's Fabrics:

It looks like I spent a lot more on the screen, but the screen itself is acoustic transparent from Seymour AV Products, a company that caters to DiY theater builders. I built the frame within a frame and hung the screen in that subframe in the screen wall. Quite a project, but all the materials, and three new chairs, came to just under $2500, not including sound system, which preexisted.

The biggest problem I have with my place is clutter. Be it with documents, clothes, shoes, books, whatever. I was wondering if anyone had any advice or any recommendations on organizing clutter.

Because I rent my apartment, I don't want to do anything permanent, I was thinking more along the lines of shelves, storage bins etc...

I also don't plan moving anytime soon due to financial reasons.

I love the feeling of a clean, open space. It helps me think better. But on the other hand, I also don't want to stop aquiring things ie: gifts, clothes, etc...

My one friend told how on Oprah, there was a man who would start with the person instead of the space. He analyzed their personality and would ask the person what their reasons were for keeping most of their things. And it turned out that people were pack rats or keeping the stuff for a weak reason.

Has anyone heard of him?

Any advice would be much appreciated!!

Because of foundation issues, this project has dragged into December. (Fortunately, we've had a mild fall this year in NY.)

The problems I'm having fall into two categories:

1)

They contractors and crew chiefs are constantly contradicting each other and themselves. I can't get an answer I can trust. Consequently, I spend hours researching and verifying everything on my own. When they're wrong, or I find a solution that's better, all heck breaks loose.

2)

Although I checked out every contractor as much as I could, coordinating everything has been a nightmare. They don't show up when they're supposed to. Worse, they sometimes show up when they're not scheduled to.

Other than withholding funds until all the work is done, and maybe introducing a penalty clause for delays, does anyone have any idea how to get these people to do the work as and when they promise?

(There's a third category of issues, namely, the amount of time and expense involved in getting permits for every little thing. But sine I don't see municipalities that have strong regulatory practices pulling back on permit reqs anytime soon, I've made my peace with this particular drain.)

Aside from the time these games have cost me, my relationships with various employers have been strained.

Other than doing all the work on one's own, how does one get anything built in a predictable timeframe?

(I am doing a lot of the work on my own early next spring, but I don't have the expertise to tackle all of it.)

JohnRGT

Considering that it took another 7-10 minutes for the Firetrucks to get there, had no one there been in possession of a fire-extinguisher, the fire might have become uncontrollable and destroyed their room, and possibly our entire complex.

After this event, I'm going to get a fire-extinguisher for myself, and for my girlfriend, and I recommend everyone else get one as well!

I have watched just a couple of them so far and they seem quite helpful. My husband and I are going to take on the task of fixing up our outdoor carriage lights instead of buying new, and "the Janes" give a good step-by-step tutorial for just such a project.

There are numerous indoor/outdoor project video tutorials, as well as articles. Have fun!

I live in Virginia, which is for now at least, north of the fire ant swarm. So instead of fire ants as the main ground pest, we have "yellow jacket" hornets. They are about half an inch long with yellow and black stripes on their body. They swarm if you are near their nest and sting you anywhere they can. Yellow jacket swarms will chase you for about a quarter mile at most (in my experience, at least). They nest in the ground with an entrance about the size of a dime to at most a quarter (if it is a really big nest). The nests, if collapsed, look like layers on a cake going several feet into the ground.

The best way that I have found to kill a ground nest of yellow jackets is to make note of where they nest. They all go into their nest at night, so at sunset take a lighter and a can of gas to the nest. When they are dormant, pour a gallon or two of gas down the hole. Ignite it by creating a small trail of gas to the side and holding the BBQ lighter as far from face and torso as possible so not to get hair singed in case the fire flashes back. It doesn't burn the hornets below the first layer or so of the nest. But the fire burns on after those hornets are dead, taking all the oxygen out of the nest and killing it completely. This method usually kills the entire nest in one treatment, but I've seen one big nest need a second night's treatment.

On a side note, here are a few things to *not* try in killing a ground nest:

1 - Filling the nest with water doesn't work. Even in Virginia red clay, which isn't terribly great at draining water, I have run a big well dry trying to fill a nest with water only to have not even made a dent in their population.

2 - Raid (or other product) is a wonderful tool. Always keep a can handy for shooting down stray hornets or killing a nest inside of a tubular metal gate or other enclosed space. But don't try to take on a ground nest with it. All you will do is kill a few on the top layer of the nest and anger the rest, which will chase you all the way to the car or house.

3 - Car exhaust does not kill hornets. Do not put a hose on the end of the exhaust pipe and shove the tube into the nest. The angered hornets will make their way into the exhaust system and make noise until they tire out and die. This was an old myth that started as a way to humanely kill off groundhogs (which also doesn't work).

Groundhogs

They make several huge holes in the ground, endangering horses and other livestock. A groundhog *never* makes just one hole, so look for more holes around the hole you find. The easiest way to dispose of them is putting poison bait inside their hole (not outside of it incase livestock eat it) or shooting them. In Virginia, they are vermin, so you need no permit to shoot them and there is no limit on how many you can kill or when. Reference

However, if you don't want to kill them, there are humane traps you can bait and leave out for them, then release them in an area they won't be as pesky. I didn't like doing this too much, since traps will catch other animals as well - especially skunks. Letting a skunk out of a trap is sort of like disarming a bomb you don't want to jostle or get close too.... The groundhogs can also make their way back to their old nest in the troublesome area. A side note on this method tho, is that I think you have to release them elsewhere on your own land because groundhogs are a pest by law.

Filling the holes with dirt, gravel, or even concrete doesn't work since they'll just dig more holes or dig out of your fillings. Sticking car exhaust down the hole doesn't work either. Groundhogs have several holes to their nest, so they can just go out of another hole to escape if need be. The nests are also fairly well ventilated. If by some extreme amount of effort, you manage to seal all the holes to the nest, it still wouldn't be a good method to rid yourself of groundhogs because car exhaust isn't a good thing to use if you wanted to suffocate it, since unlike in On The Beach, cars don't have too much in the way of toxic exhaust anymore.

Of course, there is always the Caddyshack way of killing ground vermin, but try that one at your own risk ... and then tell me how it turned out!

Any ideas for how we might stop this noise (without blocking the downspouts)? The house has vinyl-coated steel siding, and I believe that the downspouts are aluminum. We had the siding company put some additional fasteners on the downspouts, but this reduced the sound only a little, so that it's still noisy enough to interfere with sleep.