Infoalmanac

Landscaper Secret 3: What Garden Tools Do I Need for Tree Planting?

A nursery truck pulls up to your home, offloads a couple of trees, some dirt, two guys and four or five tools. You go into your garage or tool shed and look at the thirty or forty gardening tools you've got. Forty-five minutes later, they return and pickup the guys and the tools, your trees perfectly and professionally planted. What gardening tools were they using and just how did they do it so fast and so well?

This article is for the gardening tools required for planting a tree. The list is not long: you'll need a spade, shovel, hose and a rake. That's it. Well, not really. First the secret:

Landscaper Secret 3: Professionals use virtually the same tools as you, BUT they keep them clean, very sharp and well oiled.

The two other tools that you didn't notice them pitch off the truck were a file and some oil, like WD40. That shovel and spade have been ground down with a grinder similar to sharpening a knife.  If you don't own a grinder, ask at your gardening supply store for a referral.  If you live far enough out of town, the feed store will be the one who knows somebody.

The file they carry is for quickly restoring the edge to their tools. If they're good, they'll clean their tools before they leave your place and may oil them then. Or, if it's early in the day, they may wait until the day's work is done before the final sharpening and oiling.

Now, the tools:

Landscaper Secret 2: What are My Tree Planting Options?

You've made a decision about what size tree to plant with the help of the previous article and your, hopefully, trusted landscaper. There are four decent ways to get that tree successfully in the ground and growing. A landscaping service can help you with the first three. The fourth is DIY landscaping (with exact instructions to follow in the next article).

Some of the big landscapers out there come out with a huge machine. They drive it into your yard and scoop out a hole as deep as a grave, six feet in diameter.  In one motion.  The crew drives away with your dirt and comes back a little later.

The machine now holds a fully mature tree, root ball and all.  The landscaping crew backs it in.  Some poor soul carefully directs the placement. Then, they lower the tree in. Hey, presto! Instant, fully "mature" landscaping. (This tree was already at least five years old.)

For the rest of us,

Landerscaper Secret 1: What Size Tree Do I Plant?

Everyone loves the landscaper's pictures of beautiful shade trees framing a house, lining the streets.  You can buy a home like that, maybe. Or you can start out with a blank slate, perhaps the home you're in now, and make it like that.  Large trees or small, landscapers have a vested interest in doing it the best way. You can watch and learn or read it here.



Landscaper Secret 1:  In the long, or even short, run, size doesn't make a whole lot of difference.



Along the Texas Gulf Coast, in my family's nursery and landscape experience from the 1920's on, there is not an appreciable difference in the size or quality of the trees five years later from a tree you can handle yourself.



Why is that?  This landscaper's secret has a lot to with what a truly mature tree is.  Most shade trees aren't really mature until they're 20 years old. What people think of as mature is a 15 or 20 foot tree with a nice, sturdy trunk. That's about five years of water and fertilizer supported growth.

Do I Need a Power of Attorney?

Of all the documents surrounding end of life concerns, besides a will, the power of attorney is the one you are most likely to at least heard of. A power of attorney works at any time of life and needs to be considered in your arsenal for protecting your decision-making ability.

Basically, a power of attorney gives the legal right for someone to do business on your behalf, in your name, signing legally for you.  This document, governed by each state's law, can be temporary for one occurrence, such as someone signing a real estate transaction in your place in a distant city.  Or, it can be permanent, allowing that person to do business for you in any and all situations.

A power of attorney is durable.  This durability means that it continues in the case of your disability or inability to communicate. It ends with your death when your will enforces your final wishes and distribution of your assets.

Does this mean a person with the power of attorney has the right to make decisions for you? 

Guardianship of Someone You Love

Becoming a guardian for one you love requires you to put aside tearing emotions and take a cold hard look at the situation.  Worsening Alzheimer's is a clear-cut case. A slow decline of an aged parent is quite another. 



At some point, your mother or father may not be taking care of her or himself in a reasonable fashion: not eating or sleeping, not taking care of their own finances, or, even worse, making apparently rational choices which may harm them physically or financially.



These legal documents, living wills, powers of attorney both durable and medical and wills, do not address this problem.

The Serenity Prayer for Geeks

In the past few weeks, I've been learning what to do to make this information blog useful to you.  Cleaning up the extraneous clutter on the pages, adding the needful back in and providing opportunities for your feedback.



Like most website owners, I've continued to sweat the small stuff, often waking in the middle of the night with an answer or another item for the to-do list.



There are three possibilities in this (and any kind of work)

1. Find the problem and accept that you cannot fix it. There may be a work-around, but computers live by rules. Some of those rules, when broken, cause it to crash.  Don't break those rules.     

Your Medical Power of Attorney

In the process of "getting your papers in order", you took care of a living will, that document which directs how you want to be cared for when you cannot say so for yourself. Now, you need a medical power of attorney. This confers the decision-making rights to someone else who stands in your place.  That person, armed with your living will, which states your wishes, and a medical power of attorney can deal with any decisions when you are too sick to do it for yourself.

A medical power of attorney does not do some things.  It does not give the right to have you committed to a mental institution. It use cannot force you

Glossary for Living Wills and End of Life Concerns

When it comes to severe medical situations and end of life decisions, there's a lot of jargon floating around.  A big part of what you need to know is buried in the vocabulary.  You may not be writing or communicating what you hope.  Cruise through these explanations to help yourself along.



Any determination of what's legal is made by your state. Check with your lawyer to make sure you've got it right for where you live.

• Advance Directive: Legal document in which you tell (direct) others in your health care preferences when you are too sick to say so yourself.  This is about what you want and prevents others from making decisions, contrary to your wishes, for you.  You can revoke it

Your Living Will: The Right to Live, The Right to Die

A living will is a form of advance healthcare directive.  These directives are your voice when you are too sick to speak for yourself.  In them, you can specify what direction your medical care is to take when your health takes a turn for the very worst.



Although valid nationwide, each state may vary in the way it prefers the living will to be worded.  And, while legal help is not absolutely necessary, it is a good idea to become informed and get some good advice.



Living wills, in particular, come into play during terminal illnesses. They can direct how much, if any, intervention is to be taken to prolong your life when death is imminent. 



Some people prefer for all measures to be taken for as long as possible.  This includes artificial ventilation, feeding tubes and other means to sustain life when you cannot do it for yourself. A living will can guide this.



Others abhor the idea of becoming a "vegetable."  This means experiencing periods of wakefulness and sleep without response to the outside world. They could use a living will to allow few, if any measures, to be taken. 

Keywords on Your Resume?

What is this about keywords and getting a job? I have been able to find out that there IS a list of keywords, and if your resume has them, then it goes to a human.  If not, the computer kicks it back.  Can you help me with this?



Keywords and resumes, both off and online, go hand in hand.  Keywords are words or phrases people search databases with to find the information they want.



Yahoo, Google and the other search engines don't really go out looking for your phrase on the multitude of sites on the Web.  What they do is look in their databases where their spiders have stored the information they've collected. When you type in the keywords to search on, they compare it to their databases and send the best matches back to you.



Other information is stored in databases. If you have an address book on your computer, it is likely to be a database file.  Financial programs like Quicken also use databases. If you've ever used Excel to create a spreadsheet to organize information, you've created a simple (or even, complex) database. 



Companies and job placement services also have their own databases. 

Your Living Will for Peace of Mind Now, Quality Care Later

After reading the past two posts on wills, one reader contacted me.  She and her sister have been caring for their father for several years.  Following Hurricane Rita, which passed through their hometown, they could no longer do it all themselves.



Their father was placed in a nursing home. The older sister now visits several hours daily supervising his care. She also spends hours every week taking care of his affairs.



She spoke of their difficulties sorting out various legalities with nursing home and government officials.  These next few articles will deal with those questions that they ran into.



You see, wills, provide direction for the distribution of your possessions. Further, they can detail how businesses are passed and the family is cared for.  But, wills do not cover every eventuality.  

Get Help with Your Will

While you can modify a will as needed, it is most important to get one done before it is too late. You have the right to distribute your property to any persons you choose without  another's permission.



However, to be certain your assets are disbursed the way you want, you have to have a will. And, that will must meet legal requirements, leaving no loopholes.



It is a fact that all die.

Write Your Will Now

Yesterday was the perfect day to write a will; today is the next best choice. Dealing as it does with sad thoughts and fears, it is no wonder that you may want to put it off. But, if you look at the reasons for writing your will now, you'll delay no longer.



If you want to make your own decisions about your final arrangements, the dispostion of your property, the care of your family, your will must be drawn up while you're in relatively decent health able to think clearly.

• With a will, you decide on who may care for your minor children.  Without one, the state decides who gets custody. 

Information Finding — Do It Yourself Research 1

Locating information without a clear system for finding it is something akin to driving sixty miles an hour down a foggy Texas coastal road.  Either you get lost or wind up in the drink!



Folks who were brought up with encyclopedias and dictionaries and library cards seem to intuitively understand how to find out what they want to know.  Flipping the dial on the TV as a pastime instead makes it harder for the rest of us.



Here's one way to cruise the foggy info-highway for obscure sites:



1.  Brainstorm some different versions of what you want to know.  Lean toward two or three word searches.  (Yahoo's information search options listed below the search box when you type in your search term will suggest some to you if you want to dive right in with one word.)



2.  Search on the first term. 



3.  Open every site on the page that's not an ad.  (I open these in new tabs so I can keep the original search page up. . .