Home Builder Developer - Interior Renovation and Design

PORT RICHEY Raindrops kept falling on their heads, but that didnt stop Community Service Council of West Pasco members from completing a free yard makeover for a deserving elderly resident.

The outreach committee of the council partnered with Luke Brothers Landscape Services for CSCs 2014 Senior Spruce Up project at the home of Iselle Baptist on Bahama Avenue.

The rain delayed volunteers from starting by three hours until late that Saturday morning. But the workers persevered when Jennifer Selk of Verizon gave the go-ahead signal to defy the drippy skies, since there was no trace of lightning.

Among those joining Selk were New Port Richey Police Chief Kim Bogart and Pasco County lobbyist Shawn Foster.

The CARES Chore Team had nominated Baptist among several candidates in the event.

Baptist, 80, has experienced hardships from physical disabilities that require her to carry an oxygen tank, CSC publicist Becky Bennett explained.

Those limitations limit her mobility to do gardening and yard maintenance as she once could, Bennett added.

So volunteers helped by mowing, trimming, weeding, adding mulch and other greenery to Baptists yard.

CSC leaders thanked Scott Brantley, Pasco/Hernando branch manager of Luke Brothers Landscape Services, for supporting the project.

Sharon Tillman, a Medicare outreach specialist for WellCare Health Plans, donated coffee, water and doughnuts.

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PR woman gets free yard makeover

For Spring break, my family, a few friends, and I drove nine hours to camp amongst the cliffs and Fremont cottonwoods of Zion National Park in Utah. It was breathtaking.

The second day we were there, my kid wore a crisp white button-down and a nice pair of tan colored jeans.

You need to change into a t-shirt and shorts, or something. You are going to wreck your clothes.

He let out a lengthy sigh. "Camping is no excuse for bad fashion."

My response? Camping is the only excuse for bad fashion.

He reluctantly changed into something more sensible.

In my luggage I packed a pair of worn-in hiking boots, a plethora of yoga pants, fleece jackets, a thick wool sweater, tanks, ratty t-shirts, jeans, and my favorite beanie. It was an array of wardrobe items I normally reserve for bedtime, or yard work the kind of stuff I didnt mind getting dirty. And it was a good thing, seeing as our campsite experienced a caterpillar apocalypse so intense that one morning I put on my wool sweater and found that the caterpillars had built not one, but three, cocoons inside its sleeves and the same with my socks. Shudder.

One afternoon we drove out to nearby Bryce Canyon National Park. With my hair in a sloppy pony tail, wearing an old t-shirt and a pair of yoga pants, I hiked the Navajo trail. I ran into Rebecca Boland and Samantha Clark, dressed for the occasion Boland in an Aztec themed poncho and sun hat, and Clark in a simple patterned jumper. They matched the scenery. My sons sentence from the day before rang in my ears, leading me to question my assertion that camping is an excellent excuse for bad fashion. I had serious outfit envy.

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Natural landscape served as inspiration for stylish Canadians

Whether its for curb appeal or safety or even both, the lighting on the outside of your home can be as simple or as complex as you would like it to be.

From an aesthetic standpoint, Jason Keller, owner of Wolfes Landscape and Irrigation, of Topeka and Lawrence, since 2006, said outdoor lighting particularly up and down lighting - makes your lawn and property seem larger and it accentuates your whole yard.

It shows off all the plants, trees and trellises, he said. It just gives you a greater ambiance.

Keller said its important to have varying levels of light. He said a brighter light will draw the eye toward whatever the light is focused on, like a front door. However, he said lower levels of light are recommended for walkways and driveways.

Your eye is always drawn to the brightest part of the light, Keller said. You dont want to put bright spots in the middle of your yard. You want it softer as it gets away from the house.

Whether youre using halogen or LED bulbs in your outdoor light fixtures, Keller said both types of bulbs provide efficient lighting.

As a crime deterrent, Keller said outdoor lighting, including motion detectors, helps increase the safety around your home.

If you expand your lighting around your home, youll end up with a larger area of security around the house, he said. You want to make sure your surroundings are lit up.

While there are city ordinances that govern lighting around commercial businesses in Topeka, none exist for residential lighting. However, Sgt. Colleen Stuart of the Topeka Police Departments crime prevention unit has several suggestions as to how to make you and your property safer and less inviting to criminals.

The TPD, she said, uses the principles of the nationally-recognized program, Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, or CPTED, to make recommendations on how the proper lighting can reduce the chances of residential and business crime.

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At Home Living: Outdoor lighting offers curb appeal, safety

Roberto Burle Marx's garden outside Rio de Janeiro.

What with the World Cup this June, followed by the Olympics in 2016, Brazil has become something of a mega-sporting-event hotspot. Intermittent economic crises notwithstanding, we are talking billion-dollar stadiums, arenas and highways. Less, however, is being said about the planting plans. While horticulturists spent years perfecting the wildflower meadows that stretched around London's Olympic Park in 2012, it is still unclear what spectators will find growing in Rio de Janeiro.

Brazilian gardens, though - and South American gardens, generally - are increasingly in the spotlight. A string of South American designers have visited Melbourne in recent years to speak about the landscapes they are fashioning in Chile, Argentina and Brazil, while last year's Melbourne Food and Wine Festival featured a South American-style coffee plantation at Southbank.

And then there is a 2006 book, New Brazilian Gardens: The Legacy of Burle Marx, that has just been reprinted and released in Australia as a paperback. By Roberto Silva - a landscape architect who divides his time between London and Brazil - the book is full of pictures of gardens with oversized leaves, diverse textures and bold colours. It shows how luxuriant drifts of plants and expanses of water can be used to accentuate all manner of natural topographies in a similar vein to what Roberto Burle Marx began doing in the 1930s.

Both a modernist and a conservationist, Burle Marx used the native Brazilian flora he had come across while studying painting in Germany to create great curvilinear landscapes that read as abstract paintings as much as gardens. He was - in the words of Warwick Forge, who has been taking Australian garden tours to South America for almost 10 years - a "game-changer".

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Burle Marx has been cited as an influence by most of the South American designers who have spoken at the Australian Landscape Conference - a biennial event held in Melbourne and also run by Forge - with the Brazilian's aesthetic also fitting our growing penchant for the climatically appropriate.

While South American gardens span tropical, temperate, arid and cold regions, the celebrated Chilean landscape architect Juan Grimm told last year's conference that the key to good garden design was to understand the order of the natural local landscape. "It's important to observe how plants relate to each other in the wild and then forge a dialogue between the natural and architectural elements of a site," he said.

Chilean landscape architect Juan Grimm's Los Vilos garden.

On Grimm's own property overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Los Vilos (a place similar to the Victorian coast in its ruggedness), he has coaxed an array of indigenous plants to creep, intermingle and dissolve into the wider landscape as if they have always been there. He has also thrown into the mix an overtly designed, perfectly circular swimming pool.

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Taking Latin lessons

Accommodation Reviews Travel Travel News

Anantara Emei Resort and Spa, China.

Anantara's Emei Resort and Spa has just opened in Sichuan, in an idyllic landscape with ancient trees, waterfalls, streams and springs at the foot of China's Mount Emei.

The luxury resort adjacent to Exiu Lake has 90 guest rooms, 40 pavilions and 20 villas with oriental design and lush garden or tranquil lake views.

Some villas have their own spas or swimming pools and indulgences available from the resort's spa centre include exotic bamboo massage or a ginger bath ritual treatment. There are also children's facilities, a main tropical swimming pool, yoga and tai chi classes.

Anantara Emei Resort's interior.

Sichuan's culinary tradition is on show at the resort's five restaurants and there are connoisseur evenings with wines, gourmet snacks, spirits and cigars, as well as degustation menus.

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Personalised dining is also available, with "dining-by-design" menus available for a romantic candlelight dinner by the pool or in your villa.

The resort's cooking classes include market tours and there are also visits to Haochi Street in downtown Emei and to an old farmhouse where tofu is traditionally made in ancient stone pots.

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Spa in a sacred place

I'd be ur slavw, my suitor whispered to me through his keyboard. He immediately corrected his typo.

When this pickup line plopped into my OkCupid inbox, swoon I did not. Instead, I LOLed, then felt pity, for both my suitor and myself. I was 32 and single in a city of only a quarter million, with only a fraction of those available to me. The comedy of this online encounter competed with my despair.

I couldn't help but wonder, in a Sex and the City, Carrie Bradshaw type of way: Is this worth it? Will online dating help me find true love in Madison?

Dating in Madison often seems like another of what Rebecca Ryan called a "tier-two tradeoff" in the October 2013 issue of Madison Magazine. That is, we all make sacrifices to live in our beloved but small city. In dating, that sacrifice might be options.

Fishing for love in a small pond can make your odds of hooking a mate look grim. At a certain age, the dating pool dries up into isolated puddles. People become increasingly settled into relationships and families, and you find yourself searching for new and different waters.

Therein lie the hope, the horror and the humor of online dating in Madison.

Online vs. 'organic'

Now a nearly 20-year-old phenomenon, with the birth of Match.com in 1995, online dating seems to have reached its prime. In a 2013 poll by Pew Research Institute, 38% of single-and-looking Americans confessed they've searched for love (or something like it) on the Internet. Most users fell in the ripe age bracket of the mid-20s to mid-40s.

As with much of life, the Internet has colonized the dating landscape. Sites range from the big "markets" (Match, eHarmony and OkCupid) to niche communities such as GreenSingles for the Earth lovers, ChristianSingles for the Jesus lovers, and Vampire Passions for, well, you get the point. Mobile apps, such as Tinder and Grindr, connect potential matches based on tidbits like mutual Facebook friends and geographic proximity.

As the online market grows, success stories are accumulating.

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Looking for love online: Is Madison's singles pool big enough for dating success?

May 08, 2014 Professor Bond is a team member and lead author of of a summary on the use of technology designed to transform lignocellulosic biomass into a jet fuel surrogate via catalytic chemistry. Credit: Syracuse University

A key challenge in the biofuels landscape is to get more advanced biofuelsfuels other than corn ethanol and vegetable oil-based biodieselinto the transportation pool. Utilization of advanced biofuels is stipulated by the Energy Independence and Security Act; however, current production levels lag behind proposed targets. Additionally, certain transportation sectors, such as aviation, are likely to continue to require liquid hydrocarbon fuels in the long term even as light duty transportation shifts to alternative power sources.

A multi-university team lead by George Huber, Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has addressed both challenges through the concerted development of technology designed to transform lignocellulosic biomass into a jet fuel surrogate via catalytic chemistry. This promising approach highlights the versatility of lignocellulose as a feedstock and was recently summarized in the journal Energy & Environmental Science by team member and lead author Jesse Q. Bond, Syracuse University Assistant Professor of Biomedical and Chemical Engineering.

Lignocellulosic biomass is an abundant natural resource that includes inedible portions of food crops as well as grasses, trees, and other "woody" biomass. According to the United States Department of Energy, the United States could sustainably produce as much as 1.6 billion tons of lignocellulose per year as an industrial feedstock. Lignocellulose can be processed to yield various transportation fuels and commodity chemicals; however, current strategies are not generally cost-competitive with petroleum. Here, Huber's team presents a comprehensive approach toward streamlining biomass processing for the production of aviation fuels. The proposed technology hinges on efficient production of furfural and levulinic acid from sugars that are commonly present in lignocellulosic biomass. These two compounds are then transformed into a mixture of chemicals that are indistinguishable from the primary components of petroleum-derived aviation fuels.

The technology was demonstrated through a multi-university partnership that brought together expertise in biomass processing, catalyst design, reaction engineering, and process modelling. Economic analysis suggests that, based on the current state of the technology, jet fuel-range hydrocarbons could be produced at a minimum selling price of $4.75 per gallon. The work also identifies primary cost drivers and suggests that increasing efficiency in wastewater treatment and decreasing catalyst costs could reduce that amount to $2.88 per gallon.

"This effort exemplifies the impact of a well-designed collaboration," said Bond. "As individual researchers, we sometimes focus too narrowly on problems that we can resolve using our own existing skills. Biomass refining is complex, and bio-based aviation fuels are difficult targets. Many of the real roadblocks occur at scarcely-studied research intersections. In our view, the only meaningful way to tackle these challenges is through strategic partnerships, and that is precisely what we've done in this program."

Explore further: Vertimass licenses ORNL biofuel-to-hydrocarbon conversion technology

More information: Paper: pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2014/EE/C3EE43846E#!divAbstract

Vertimass LLC, a California-based start-up company, has licensed an Oak Ridge National Laboratory technology that directly converts ethanol into a hydrocarbon blend-stock for use in transportation fuels.

Dwindling crude oil reserves, accompanied by rising prices and environmental concerns, have led to increased interest in the use of renewable fuels. Biofuels produced from waste agricultural or forestry material ...

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Fueling aviation with hardwoods

Left to right: Michael Warren as Robert Bobby Hill, Ed Marinaro as Joe Coffey and Charles Haid as Andrew Andy Renko 20th Century Fox

The cop drama has been a staple of the small-screen landscape ever since "Dragnet" made the jump from radio to television in 1951, but after 30 years of police stories (including an actual series called "Police Story"), the genre got its single greatest kick in the pants, creatively speaking, when NBC the same network that served as home to Sgt. Joe Friday, as it happens introduced "Hill Street Blues" to an unsuspecting viewing public.

Created by Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll, "Hill Street Blues" earned eight Emmy Awards in its initial season alone, ultimately pulling a total of 98 nominations over the course of its seven-season, 146-episode run, but more important than the awards and acclaim is that the series helped to create a new template for the cop drama, eschewing walking clichs in favor of characters with depth and substance and delving into content theretofore unseen on prime-time television.

With Shout Factory releasing "Hill Street Blues: The Complete Series," Indiewire spoke to a quartet of cast members from the series Charles Haid, Ed Marinaro, James B. Sikking, and Bruce Weitz about how they first found their way into the precinct, who their characters were, what it was like to be a part of such a groundbreaking television series, and how it impacted them when it finally came to a close.

Secret Origins of the "Hill Street" Cast

Actor Bruce Weitz as Mick Belker in Hill Street Blues Photo courtesy: Twentieth Century Fox

Bruce Weitz (Mick Belker): Steven Bochco and I went to school together, which was then Carnegie Tech but is now Carnegie Mellon. He moved out to Los Angeles way before I did, and when I moved out to Los Angeles, we saw each other socially. When he wrote "Hill Street" with Michael Kozoll, he wanted me to play LaRue (Kiel Martin's character), but I read the script, and I asked him if I could audition for Mick Belker. What interested me about Belker was the vulnerability, or at least the possibility of vulnerability. It was appealing to think that he had such a hard shell, but although he was such a fierce person on the outside I visualized him to be vulnerable and hurt insideand, fortunately, that was the same way the writers visualized him, too! So, yeah, that was very attractive to me. Plus, I needed the money! [Laughs.]

Charles Haid (Andy Renko): I was doing a bunch of movies at the time, andI already knew Steven. My relationship with Steven Bochco goes back to Carnegie Mellon. But we were hanging out, we were at somebody's birthday party or something. and he said he was doing a show. I'd already done a pilot for something else, but I didn't think it was gonna get picked up, so when he said, "Do you want to be in it?" I said, "Well, who can I play?" He said, "Well, why don't you try this guy Flannery (later renamed Furillo) who's gonna be the captain?" I said, "Yeah, okay." But then he went to the head of MTM at the time, Grant Tinker, and Grant said, "Charlie Haid's not playing the captain of anything!" [Laughs.] So Steven said, "Uh, hey, man, why don't you try this part?" And it was Renko.

James B. Sikking (Howard Hunter): Steven Bochco and I had been longtime friends, our daughters became great pals, and I had worked off and on with Steven at Universal before he went over to MTM. Our relationship goes beyond the work, although the work seems to dominate it at times. But he and a few other people in the business, you just become close. Really close.

Ed Marinaro (Joe Coffey): I had moved out to Los Angeles after my NFL career was over it was 1978 and I had developed a little bit of an interest in acting, and prior to my retirement for football, I had worked in an acting class in New York, soI don't know that you'd call it a conventional route to a career in acting. [Laughs.] But when my NFL career was over, I kind of knew it was something I wanted to pursue, so I moved out to Hollywood, got an agent, and once I had one, you know, I tried to get parts.

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'I Just Got My Ass Broke All the Time': An Oral History of 'Hill Street Blues'

Georgia is one of the all-time great bass fishing states. Home to such heavyweights as Lake Eufaula and Clarks Hill Lake, Georgia's landscape is also dotted with small, lesser-known lakes that could just as easily give up the next state record. Target these five top bass lakes if you want to catch big bass, and lots of them. Lake Oconee March to May is the time to be on the water at 19,000-acre Lake Oconee, when fat pre- and post-spawn bass are shallow and easy to find. Target stumps, lay-down trees and boat docks with spinnerbaits, jerkbaits and soft plastics. Clarks Hill Lake Also known as J. Strom Thurmond Lake, Clarks Hill is a vast 70,000-acre impoundment along the Savannah River. Famous for its hybrid stripers, the lake is also an outstanding largemouth bass fishery, with some of the best fishing taking place around points and hydrilla beds. Lake Seminole Sprawling over the Florida state line, Lake Seminole encompasses 37,000 acres of water and is home to vast hydrilla beds, stump fields and groves of flooded timber that provide perfect bass habitat. Today, the lake is better known as solid, consistent bass lake than the trophy water it once was, but there's no doubt that 10-pounders still swim below its surface. Lake Eufaula Lake Eufaula extends along the Alabama border, and its 45,000 acres harbor some of the biggest bass in either state. Channels, ledges and tributary mouths are the key areas - Eufaula has very little vegetation - and plastic worms and lizards are often the lures of choice. Lake Lanier Largemouth and spotted bass are both abundant at Lake Lanier, arguably Georgia's best bass lake. The 38,000-acre reservoir is deep and clear, with no vegetation to speak of, but anglers who cast around deep points, drop-offs and submerged islands have a chance to hook up with 15-pound largemouths and 8-pound spots. Fish of these proportions are rare, of course, but healthy 3- to 5-pounders are so common you'd have a hard time not catching them.

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Top 5 Best Bass Fishing Lakes in Georgia

Berry Hill High School in Bucknall is among the schools to be demolished.

SEVEN former schools are set to be demolished so the sites can be sold off for redevelopment.

Outline planning consent is being sought to bulldoze the schools, which were replaced as part of the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme.

The scheme saw 261 million of Government cash spent on improving all secondary and special schools in the city.

Now Stoke-on-Trent City Council wants to demolish the redundant buildings to make the sites more attractive to potential developers.

It will also help address concerns over them becoming a blight on the landscape and attracting vandalism.

One of the sites the former Edensor Technology College in Longton has been targeted by arsonists several times in the last two months.

The buildings awaiting demolition also include:

The former Berry Hill High;

The ex-Mitchell Business and Enterprise College, Bucknall;

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The Sentinel commented Seven former Stoke-on-Trent schools to be bulldozed