verasue's Profile

Emily is the best! Her show is so much more fun to watch then anything else on HGTV. Everything else just feels like product placement. And her fashion sense is ueber cute!

I agree with gardenroze. Also, it's a bit deceptive how most of these photos have been styled by plunking healthy, hot house grown plants into the containers right before the photo shoot. I think the salad in #5 might have come straight from the grocery counter. Though, #1 is a very snazzy idea!

I have to say that this is the most helpful book tutorial I encountered in a long time. And the star wars theme is AWESOME :)

Unfortunately Luca and Marco will be drawing the short end of the stick in this move - unless the kitties had a lobotomy, they will try to explore these fluffy cuddly things, whether to eat or to play with and it will be traumatic for the birds.

I think you will have to keep a tight "out" time schedule for the 'tiels, assuring every time that the cats are locked up somewhere else. Also, if you can designate a room, for example the office (never a kitchen) as the birdy room, while the rest of the apartment can be cat space - that would allow the birds some out time to explore and keep them very safe. Of course one will have to be super vigilant about the door. However, since you are moving to a new place, the cats will not know the entire apartment and should accept that that one room is off limits. If you just put them in the same living room as the cats, the 'tiels might be perpetually stressed, noisy and worried, which is bad for their and your mental health.

All that said I strongly feel that you should try this arrangement and not try to re-home your cockatiels - they are such beautiful and friendly looking guys and it's easy for them to end up in wrong hands.

PS: Oh yeah, another suggestion is to get rid of ALL the feather cat toys the cats might have, so that feathers are not associated with fun anymore. You should also contact people at www.mickaboo.com for any advice, I am sure they have dealt with such a situation before.

Plants will block the view form the street during the day really well, but come night you will have light on indoors and the plant's foliage will not really block much of the view the way blinds would do it, right?

I say this is a great set up for a Betta! Also, since the topic of oxygen competition between Nemo and the philodendron has been brought up - Bettas have the labyrinth organ for breathing surface air and have little need for dissolved air in the water. Yes, wild Bettas might have higher requirements for dissolved air in their rice paddies, but a fancy Betta from a store has never seen a rice paddy, but mostly jars of various size, so he is very happy with using his labyrinth organ to breath almost exclusively.

While being a bit "overplayed" what about compromising on having him paint one of his walls black, aka "focal point wall" (or whatever it is called). And the wall to pain black would be the wall a visitor does not instantly see when he walks by the room, but your son is facing all the time, like the wall against which his compute desk or bed are. I think making the wall magnetic is an awesome idea, but chalk board wall might become too messy after three months. Oh yeah, and have him paint his wall himself, including taping it all up, covering the floor, passing your final critical inspection of his work before any paint even comes out of the can. Because the beauty of having a 14 year old paint a wall black himself is having him realize how long it will take to paint the entire room - for a good solid black from a light base should take 3-5 coats, which of course will take time drying, too. Oh yeah, and don't forget the pink primer layer, either. I say after he kills his entire Saturday painting one wall he will be proud of his accomplishment and cooled off on the idea of the entire room being black :)

This is energetically ludicrous.

Dumb. A hydroponic set up should include a high power grow light, since that is the most essential requirement for a plant's life.

Regarding the "cloned beef on the market" story: Cattle is cloned to "copy" champion bulls in order to use their sperm to breed cattle with best meat qualities. The cloned bulls will not be slaughtered for meat. They will sire offspring who will be slaughtered for meat. The children of cloned bulls are not clones themselves, but are a genetic mix of the bull and a cow. They will all have somewhat different appearance, if that is the worry. Besides, most meat cattle is so inbred anyway, they already look like clones. That article highlights ignorance of basic genetics.

That aside, to say that meat from a cloned cow is somehow different from the meat of an average cow shows total lack of understanding of what "cloning" something actually means ... these animals are not genetically engineered, they are identical to the bull they were cloned from.