Sure, but, first let me just say again, that botulism is very rare and most consider it a non issue. I just wanted to let the OP know that there are disagreements to BWB. And again, it's just a personal preference to me. I was the unfortunate witness to an toddler dying with acute botulism poisoning while I was working in an ER. It marked me. *CDC. 1998. Botulism in the United States. 1899-1996: Handbook for Epidemiologists, Clinicians, and Laboratory Workers. Atlanta, GA: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. *Sobel, J., Tucker, N., Sulka, A., McLaughlin, J., and Maslanka, S. 2004. Foodborne Botulism in the United States, 1990-2000. Emerging Infectious Diseases, 10:1606-1611.

I like two stories. The blue prints for our log home are two stories (3 with basement) with a very open layout. Master bedroom and laundry on main level (preparing for old age ;), with kid, guest, and open loft (homeschool room) upstairs. When considering building costs, for us, the lesser sq foundation was important. We get 3 times the square footage. If you are not building your own, however, extra stories can be labor cost prohibitive. Also, with the open floor plan heating and cooling is more economical.

Actually, as I understand it. A pH near 7 or neutral favors the growth of Clostridium botulinum, while growth is inhibited at a pH of 4.6 or lower. It does not kill it. Only high heat kills it. But, I may be wrong. :001_smile:

When you say you've built sites, do you mean with a site builder, writing code, or using something a HTML editor? I'm not familiar with GoDaddy's design services, but I don't think they offer templated site builder options. I could be wrong. I use Dreamweaver and I've used GoDaddy to host sites before. They were efficient, I liked their SSL security certificates esp. since I've incorporated e-commerce, have very fair pricing, and I have never had an issue with support.

Any pot can be used for a water bath, just make sure that your jars don't bang around and hit each other. However, I've been canning for twenty plus years and I would not water bath tomatoes in any form. I know that some do (have for years, Grandma did it ya da, ya da) and have great results, however I just won't take the chance of botulism. Botulism is rare, but very deadly especially for infants and older people. Spore is in very soil virtually everywhere in the world, however it is anaerobic, growing and thriving without air, i.e. a canning jar. You can not see it either. In order to kill the C. botulinum spore you need to reach very high temperatures which you can not do with water bath canning. This is just MHO. Please check into it.

Great post! We try to live as fugally as possible not only for the savings, but for the health benefits and our lesser basic footprint. WATER: We, too, are on a well; however, we use two systems. One is your standard pressure tank to the house. When you use up the pressure your well pump kicks on and refills. This sporadic surge creates wear and tear on your well pump, but we do use this system some of the time. The second system in place is a 2,000 gal cistern tank. We pump (depending on our static level) a few times a day and run a 12-volt surflo pump to the house and barn. We do have a battery charger, but you can easily charge the battery off of your car alternator while going back and forth. I also only line dry; all year. I do have a fancy dryer, but ended up asking my DH to stick it in the barn. It was collecting cobwebs. We live in NE Washington State. Right now it’s 16 degrees outside and I have a load drying on our indoor line next to our wood stove. I wash all dishes by hand. Dishwashers take electricity. ELECTRICITY: We are fortunate to live in one of the lowest electrical districts in the country. However, we are still extremely frugal and aware. All lights are florescent or LED’s. Yes, initially they are more expensive, but I have yet to replace an LED light bulb, they are rated for 10,000 hours. I’ll probably pass them on to my kid. ;). One 2.5 watt LED replaces a 60watt incandescent. We have electric heaters, heat lamps, and an electric fan/propane furnace; WE DO NOT USE THEM AT ALL. TV is on only in the evenings, (no cable or sat) and we are avid library users. Yes, we are very rural, but most counties are on an interlibrary system. We also frequent pawn shops and get really great classic movies and documentaries for less than a $1. We have a point of use propane water heater and cook with propane (I cook A LOT, in fact everything) I find electric ovens and stoves extremely inefficient. Our propane usage for those two appliances is around five gallons a month (@ $2.3 a gal. bulk). Our monthly electric bill last month was $42.00 in the dead of winter. HEAT: Wood stove. We live in Washington State…it’s a renewable resource. We have our own twenty acre wood lot that we replant, but we have gotten permits too. In our area the BLM, the Forest service, and big logging operations will have sales on their slash. For instance, the Forest Service gives out permits for $20 for 10 cords of wood per family. That’s a two year supply for us. We’re below freezing for five months out of the year. All you need is a truck or trailer, a chain saw and a bit of elbow grease. Besides, wood warms you twice, in the cutting and the burning. ;) I also made Warm Windows, even though our windows are double pane Energy Star. I make snakes for all outside doors. We don’t use our front door in the winter only the back door, because it opens into our mud room (where I root cellar a lot of veggies) and we don’t heat it. Then we always keep the mud room door closed with a snake. Doing this creates a wind lock and significantly decreases heat loss from going in and out. FOOD: I’ve written a few posts about this already. In gist, I grow most all of our vegetable needs for the year. I can, dehydrate, freeze and root cellar to preserve and have an indoor salad garden in the winter. My yearly produce shopping list made from seed catalogues. I’m about ready to order next week. So far I’m under $100, and that only because I’m buying a few perennial vegetable plants. I also incorporate somewhat of a cook ahead plan. In the beginning of the month everything I cook is in double or triple batches then I freeze the other portions. I use almost the same energy, but it’s less work for me. We also raise our own livestock for meat and try and grow most of our own feed. I do buy other staples in bulk, store and rotate. I know you said you don’t have a cell phone, but I find my little camera an easy way of price comparison shopping, although you do kind of look like a spy. I’m sorry for being wordy, I’ll shut up now. :blushing: I love this subject. I’m hoping I can glean a few more ideas from others.

Just breezing through, catching up on posts and what not, when I caught this. What a very nice, insightful, and thoughtful thing to say. :)

http://dehydrate2store.com/ has some wonderful recipes and videos. I just love her. Talk about someone that dehydrates....:D

My 10 Y.O. DD has her room just the way she wants it, however I have the last say in the neatness factor and that’s only because I want her to treat her possessions with respect. We also head butted for many years regarding her pack rat tendencies. And admittedly some things I thought were junk she assigned sentimental value to, I needed to relinquish a bit of control there. Our compromise was that once she had all her things neatly on shelves (She has over sixty Breyer horses on shelves that she has to keep dust free) or in baskets, all of her “extra stuff” went in a big bin. Occasionally she’ll pull things out of the bin, but if she hasn’t played with something in a year then it gets gone, unless it’s heirloom worthy (which it shouldn’t have been in there in the first place) then that goes in her hope chest. She must change her own sheets once a week. We do a supervised room clean once a month, but other than that, I ask her to keep it neat. If not, then I follow through with consequences i.e. she can’t ride her horse for five days (that’s almost death to her). That was the ticket for us. But if I threaten then I must follow through or else it doesn’t work.

I received this email from Angela last week "....I anticipate having Astronomy and Geoscience published within a few weeks. Since I've already outlined Chemistry and Physics, I expect them to go rather quickly, but am reluctant to offer a firm publication date...."

Oh and if you are really interested in the Classical Method read Susan Wise Bauer's, The Well Trained Mind,....she stared this amazing forum. Cheers

First, welcome. Second, you should re-post this on the curriculum board. There are lots of the same helpful people over there. :D . Thirdly, my 10 year old DD is already in 6th so I don't have a grasp on all the new curriculum out there for the wee ones. But there is a lot. Good luck.

I guess I was thinking both were sound cards, got confused. I did look at the XPS 8300 and that comes with the AMD Radeon™ HD 6670 1GB DDR5 video card, would you still change that to a GeForce 560 Ti? I figure with Win7(64) and CS5.5 Master I'm already out a grand...(education discount at the Academic Superstore). If you don't mind sharing what would all your components be when you build your own? And how much less expensive would it be? It sounds like you have similar uses. Thanks again for all your help.

Perfect advise, thank you. Wow, this is going to add up. Other than price is there much of a difference between the nVida DirectX11 and the GForce? I was thinking about customizing a Dell, but I'm not sure I can get close. I might have to build this myself. What kind of GHz are you getting with the overclocking on your processor? The only reason I saw for the i7 was speed. Or would there be a greater advantage of having the quad core? Thank you so much for your help.

I’m looking to upgrade to a new desktop come tax return time. I still need to keep it reasonable. I haven’t had a desktop in a long time, I’ve had laptops for years, but I need some more power. I need something that will run Adobe CS5.5 Master Collection. Now, I run CS3 barely on my Dell Vostro with an Intel Duo Core w/3G RAM, and I don’t have Premiere or any of the other video components. I know they have the monster machines out there, but I was hoping someone could tell me the minimum they would use to run everything without freeze ups and slow rendering times. I’m especially confused as to what processor. An i7 sounds like it would work, and do you really need 12G or even 24G RAM for the video applications? I’ll be using Windows 7 64 bit so it can access that kind of RAM, but we are talking $$$$$. I use Illustrator, Photoshop, and Dreamweaver the most, but really want to expand into the video realm. Any suggestions would be helpful. I’ve gone onto the Adobe and other computer forums, but they kind of go crazy with their dream monster computer scenarios. I thought maybe other fellow homeschoolers would understand my plight a bit better. ;)

Thank you, I'd appreciate it. I did a search but a million things came up with 'timeline' in it. I waded through for a few hours and gave up the ghost. :)

Anyone? :blush:

Does anyone use http://www.timelinemaker.com/index.php?p=products_pro? It looks very cool and I like that you can print it. See the video tour. I downloaded it and played with it a bit. With the on slot of logic stage change needs to occur for DD’s sanity and mine, but most of all for time. We had been keeping a history notebook style timeline and spent a fair amount of time printing out color stickers, drawing, crafting, and all sorts of things for this thing. But I’m thinking for the sake of time and subject combining to go digital. As a computer science credit it would allow her to learn a new program. She would create each event, stylize it, categorize it, and insert clip art/images. Then when a page is done she could print it out and place it on the new wall space that we are creating for it (20ft wall – might have to go two rows). This year in history we have all the outlining along with all the other note booking, the heavier reading schedule (plus her classics literature), and narrations. I’m hoping this works. I would love to hear if anyone else does this. Thank you almighty hive masters! :cheers2: Have a safe and happy New Year's.

:bigear:

I did it. Not only was I raised very urban, but very jet-set and international. I loved it, was fairy adapt, and I learned a lot, but I mostly learned that I enjoy being more self-sufficient. Now we do it all. We live on twenty VERY secluded acres. We have a horse, goats, chickens, ducks and soon a milk cow. We raise pigs and meat birds (turkeys and chickens) seasonally. I have a huge garden, too. We grow and raise anywhere from 80-90% of our own food. Twenty years ago I had no idea how to can a jar of preserves, now I process and preserve everything. I read A LOT, and taught myself. I couldn't imagine life being different. My family was weirded out at first, now they are pretty impressed. There are some days I think back to some of the convenience, but it's a fleeting thought when I look around and see my child safe and healthy and having the time of her life. :001_smile:

I looked into it at one time and got dissuaded by some comments that it was more geared for conventional class room use. I heard the situations the character goes through are school and school friend related. I didn't think that would be a fit for us. But if it's different, please let me know.:bigear:

Oh man, I'm bummed. I put my DD's B-day in, because I thought they wanted to know how old she was, and it said 'only grown ups'. Now I'm locked out. I even tried to open it in a different browser.:sad:

Thanks, I could never figure out the new levels. :) Hmmm, I have a ways to go before I'm back to a Larvae???:001_huh:

That is cool. My DD knows a lot of things. :glare: but as far as anything unusual, she can draw, describe, and tell you about every pokemon character EVER, oh and what they evolve into. I'm sure there will be a bonus question on the SAT's about it. :lol:

Coolio for you! What are the levels anyway? I've tried to search for them, but ....