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Born April 13, 2005

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^{2005 July 31}
Goatheads: It took us about 5 years of manual weeding to rid our 9000 sf lot of goatheads. Now I see there are weevils available to handle the job on a large scale. I never knew these vicious weeds were also called puncturevine but that makes sense. I don't know about flat tires, but I sure had more than my share of punctured feet!

My own favorite form of biological warfare is the regular addition of ladybugs to the garden. Ladybugs eat aphids and other tiny garden pests without introducing any apparent negative effects. Besides, I like the colorful crawlies among my flowers. I'm seriously considering adding praying mantises for control of mosquitos since the ladybugs have done so much to reduce damage to garden plants. In the house we have had such good results from electronic pest control that it has been years since we have used any poison pest control. I hate to mention fireants, but for whatever reason they seem to have moved away from our property. I wonder if the electronic ultrasonic devices have any effect outside. It doesn't seem to dissuade gekkos or garter snakes whose numbers have increased in recent years, however.

Becky |

^{2005 July 21}
Is Your Home Alone?: (Institute for Business & Home Safety)

More than 15 million homes sat unoccupied in 2003. Almost another four million were used only seasonally, according to the U.S. Census. That means sixteen percent of all homes in this country were left unattended at some point for an extended period of time.

There's lots of vital information here, from protecting plumbing to making a vacant property looked lived in, whether the vacancy is temporary or long-term. Jim and I spent one Christmas Eve responding to broken pipes and a flooded home for a buyer client of mine who never dreamed it could freeze in Texas. He had turned off the heat before leaving his new home for a two week vacation. He needed this information, and I, as his agent, should have provided it!

Becky |

^{2005 July 20}
Blog Quotes:

California Dreamin' (Neo-neocon)

GREAT STARTER HOME IN HIDDEN HILLS

Wonderful starter home on prime street in Hidden Hills. Beautiful wooded lot...Potential to build your dream estate here, great upside for developers. $1,175,000. I know that Hidden Hills is one of those exclusive gated communities, so I suppose this represents the low end of the Hidden Hills market. But surely the phrase "starter home" is a bit of a misnomer?

Real Estate Bubble is Global (Thomas P.M.Barnett)

But I will tell you, the scariest data I've come across in these articles is the "what does one million dollars buy you around the world." Here are the square footage totals for some big cities: London at 841, Dublin at 1152, Barcelona at 1238, San Francisco at 1414, Hong Kong at 1520 and Paris at 1182.

Becky |

^{2005 July}
Book Reviews and reviewers: I'd have said nothing could entice me to read Jane Fonda's autobiography, but it is possible that this hilarious review might do it! I have not read Tom Carson's reviews before, but will be looking for them in the future.

  Meanwhile, on the subject of book reviews, I just finished the Audible.com version of So B. It, by Sarah Weeks, a gem of a book that defies classification. I didn't know it was apparently directed to the 9-12 age range. This must have been a holdover from her previous children's books, but this one is appropriate for readers 9 to 90. I was drawn in by the brief excerpt

You couldn't really tell about Mama's brain just from looking at her, but it was obvious as soon as she spoke. She had a high voice, like a little girl's, and she only knew 23 words. I know this for a fact, because we kept a list of the things Mama said tacked to the inside of the kitchen cabinet. Most of the words were common ones, like good and more and hot, but there was one word only my mother said, soof.

Heidi

If truth was a crayon and it was up to me to put a wrapper around it and name its color, I know just what I would call it—dinosaur skin. I used to think, without really thinking about it, that I knew what color that was. But that was a long time ago, before I knew what I know now about both dinosaur skin and the truth. The fact is, you can't tell squat about the color of an animal just from looking at its bones, so nobody knows for sure what color dinosaurs really were. For years I looked at pictures of them, trusting that whoever was in charge of coloring them in was doing it based on scientific fact, but the truth is they were only guessing. I realized that one afternoon, sitting in the front seat of Sheriff Roy Franklin's squad car, the fall before I turned thirteen. Another thing I found out right around that same time is that not knowing something doesn't mean you're stupid. All it means is that there's still room left to wonder. For instance about dinosaurs—were they the same color as the sky the morning I set off for Liberty? Or were they maybe the same shade of brown as the dust my shoes kicked up on the driveway at Hilltop Home? I'd be lying if I said that given a choice, I wouldn't rather know than not know. But there are some things you can just know for no good reason other than that you do, and then there are other things that no matter how badly you want to know them, you just can't. The truth is, whether you know something or not doesn't change what was. If dinosaurs were blue, they were blue; if they were brown, they were brown whether anybody ever knows it for a fact or not.

Becky |

^{2005 July 5}
Blame Bush: Rarely have I ever seen such a blatant case of seeing the glass as half empty! Newsday's columnist Les Payne seems to be acknowledging the phenomenal economic growth in Iraq over the past two years, but he sees it only as a source of weapons for car bombers. No wonder the mainstream media seem to be so hell-bent on declaring a loss and a quagmire in Iraq. It's far more interesting, and informative to go straight to the sources and read what Iraqi locals have to say about the status of Iraq.

Becky |

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