Welcome to Gaia! ::

Wow! congratulations! I hope everything goes well and all the flowers bloom on your day. Best of luck on your cake, I'm sure it'll turn out amazing.

One day I will have a cake and there will be jam filling in it.

OMG PEAS!
Finally! 3nodding

They were the snap ones and not the normal ones, I'm looking forward to the normal ones but this was close enough. There are enough at half-size that I should have more by the end of the week, and there were several teensy tiny ones in the Normal Peas section of the plot.

The raspberry baby I dug up from the back yard has not died yet, which I am hoping means that it won't die at all.

And one of my lettuces is almost big enough to pull up. It's being crushed by peas, so it had better come out soon.

I'm glad everything went well, Rilsin! Congratulations again! I wish you many good wishes and fortunes for the future!

Congrats on the wedding!

Congratulations rilsin-b heart

I, myself, have been recovering from a cold/flu. I've never been sick during the summer and I rarely get sick other times, so eh. Aches, chills, headache, sore throat, tummy upset (painful gas that causes me to burp a lot) sniffles. I actually ran out of hankies, and I have like, eight of them. gonk


dragon_of_emry: What the should be doing, is building houses for the weather they get there. You can't expect the same type of construction to be efficient in the diverse areas that people populate. It should be illegal to build inefficient buildings. And yes, they should landscape for the climate too.

Do they have basements there? If so, you should open a basement window and a top window to get a breeze going through your house.

I found in Ontario, where it gets hot, is closing the curtains helps greatly. We just had white Ikea ones. Also, our house was built with the garage to the west, so the afternoon heat was contained in the garage which acted as a buffer leaving the rest of the house cooler. The windows in the front too were angled so the sun in the summer would be above them and heat the roof/attic instead of shining right in, heating the living room.

The government should give grants to home owners to instal solar panels or vertical wind turbines (not sure how windy it gets there).

You could write to ERCOT (and possibly cc a government official) them and give your thoughts on better ways to conserve power. I do it all the time with my government. :3

http://www.ehow.com/how_2386499_create-cross-ventilation-home.html

Here, we're finally getting some sun. It's been a record cold June. I'm sick of the cloud and rain.

@Telith: Tomatoes in pots are very easy. The biggest problem I ever had with mine (besides the one year the bugs got most of them) was blossom-end rot. The tomatoes set and look great for a while, but then these nasty large brown rotten spots start forming on the fruit. It's caused by calcium deficiency in the soil (most potting soils don't have enough for tomatoes.) I started mixing in about 2 tablespoons of gypsum per cubic foot of soil (about 6 tablespoons for a three-gallon pot) and have never had a problem since. You can also use crushed egg shells (rinse them first) if you notice a problem. Watering with milk a couple of times might work, too, but it will make the pots smell. Good luck- growing your own tomatoes is very rewarding (and tasty!).

@Pirhan: No basements here. Houston is only about 50 feet or so above sea-level. Much of the land (especially downtown in the Houston Medical Center and Herman Park area) was originally swampland that was drained when the area was developed. Since we are low-lying and former marshland, flooding is a very big problem here and basements just don't work.
The city does have lots of ordinances in place to make sure newer buildings are more eco-friendly than older ones, but we still have a long way to go. Most of the focus here is on building things that can withstand flooding and hurricanes, so sometimes the creating cooler (temperature) houses goes out the window (oh- bad pun lol but I'm leaving it XD). The main problem is that we have a lot of older buildings that were built before there was such an interest in energy-efficiency and before many of the newer solutions were available. Hopefully, over time we will be able to upgrade our structures. No hope of a grant on the local level right now, though, since both the city and the state are still coping with the effects of last year's drought. We didn't get any federal money to help us since our governor, Rick Perry, was running for president against our current president, Barrack Obama, and the two of them let politics get in the way of solving the problem. Typical.
Solar panels work great here. We have lots and lots and lots of sun. Lots. Whole lots. biggrin The city is doing some cool things with them- like using them to power flashing lights on school-zone speed-limit signs when the reduced speed is in effect to avoid confusion. Hopefully, the price of solar panels will start coming down more as more municipalities and corporations use them so that they become affordable for home use. (I do have some solar-powered outdoor lighting, though. Very cool and completely fuss-free.) It does get windy enough outside the city for turbines, but inside the city we have too many tall buildings blocking the wind. There is a big push to build wind-farms around the city to supplement the power grid. I hope more of these happen.
I don't think I've seen houses here with windows like you are describing. How much of an angle should they be at (roughly)? Many people have wooden awnings over their windows for shade. I have trees (which is good for cooling the house but bad if we have a hurricane.) Curtains, blinds, and shutters are a must here. We need them for privacy as much as for cooling. Neighbors are pretty close together here- I can look out of my windows and see into my neighbors windows if they don't have the shades drawn. Hoshioni suggested I look into better insulating though, and I think I will.
Hope you are feeling better heart

@ Anyone who isn't tired of my super-long post yet: Today I hung out with one of my best friends. We don't get to hang out enough. I promised my Dad I would water the plants since there was no rain in the forecast for a few days. Then we had a giant thunderstorm so I din't have to water after all biggrin My iPone still swears it is sunny outside lol.

You can also bury bone fragments into the soil too. We use to make soup from pork or cow bones, and after we're done with the bones and scrapped all the edible meat left over we give it an extra rinse and scrub and bury into some parts of the yard, and after a month or so depending on how lively your soil is, it will be gone.