Gardening Service and Fencing in Swansea

Not everyone has time to care properly for their garden. With busy schedules, outdoor areas can quickly become overgrown and messy, giving your house a dilapidated appearance.

Based in Swansea, Mark's Garden Services offers a comprehensive range of gardening services available across the South Wales area.

General Garden Maintenance & Specialist Services

Alongside general garden maintenance, we offer some specialist services to ensure that your garden looks the best it possibly can.

From lawn care and rubbish removal, to all fencing work, hedge cutting and tree work, there's no need to get numerous contractors in. If you need a job done, we can take care of it for you, saving you time and money.

Painting works are also undertaken, so if your external or internal walls need a little upkeep, we can keep your whole house looking its best.

OAP discount is also available; don't let your lawn become overrun and unruly even if you can't manage to cut it yourself.

For more information, call us today on 07907 042530.

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Mark's Garden Services

Best Cleveland LED outdoor lighting
Call (440) 247-6300 for the best Cleveland-area outdoor Lighting. Outdoor Lighting Perspectives of Northern Ohio is passionate about the design, installation...

By: Outdoor Lighting Perspectives Northern Ohio

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Best Cleveland LED outdoor lighting - Video

Morning Minecraft: Hidden Outdoor Lighting
A good way to light up outside without spamming torches! Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/Apophii Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Apophii.

By: Apophii

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Morning Minecraft: Hidden Outdoor Lighting - Video

In a typical week, Ilene Scoratow does 30 loads of laundry, cleans two to four apartments and delivers groceries to at least four regular customers.

She has three children of her own, including an infant. But in her free time after her day job, Ms. Scoratow runs a service called Another Mother, where she performs some of the basic tasks one might expect of a parent.

I was reading a book on entrepreneurship because I wanted to start my own business, Ms. Scoratow said. All the advice she read suggested sticking with something youre good at. So I thought about it: I like to teach and I like being a mom.

She started about a year ago and sticks primarily to the East End, where she lives. From 6:30 a.m to 3 p.m., she goes to her day job as a Spanish teacher at Colfax Elemetary.

At 3 p.m., she takes whatever appointments she has that afternoon from her business. Shes not working entirely alone; her husband helps with the day-to-day business and at home, and she has brought two other teachers on as independent contractors.

Currently she has a clientele of about 40 people, including younger working professionals and university students. Its pretty evenly split among Pitt, Carnegie Mellon and Duquesne and Chatham, she said.

While shes done some modest local advertising, Ms. Scoratow says most of her referrals are via word-of-mouth. She charges an $8 delivery fee for groceries, and $1.50 per pound of laundry. New customers, most of whom come to her via her website, pay a $20 deposit via Paypal, then she invoices them for the balance after shes finished the job.

The personal chore business is no longer just the domain of professional maid services, but has become a fast-growing part of the so-called sharing economy.

For instance, San Francisco-based Taskrabbit lets users outsource small jobs and errands like food deliveries and furniture assembly via a smartphone app. Homejoy, also based in San Francisco, offers home cleaning services. Neither one offers its services yet in Pittsburgh.

Another Mothers true target audience, whether students or young professionals, is millennials, a generation that gets a lot of bad press for the perception that theyre too dependent on their parents and may be taking a long time to transition into adulthood successfully. A 2012 Clark University study found some 30 percent of the parents of millennials, loosely defined as 18- to 29-year-olds, provide at least occasional financial support to their children.

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Mother for hire: Start-up takes care of 'personal chores' for young professionals, students

TIME World India Indian Woman Looks to Sue Uber in the U.S. Over Alleged New Delhi Rape The 26-year-old alleged victim has reportedly enlisted the services of high-profile American lawyer Douglas Wigdor

An Indian woman who was allegedly raped by an Uber taxi driver is considering the possibility of taking the tech firm to court in the U.S., according to British daily the Guardian.

Authorities in the Indian capital banned the taxi service in December, when the woman accused Uber driver Shiv Kumar Yadav, 32, of attacking her. Yadav pleaded not guilty to charges of rape, kidnapping and criminal intimidation.

As the criminal trial unfolds, the victim is reported to have approached Douglas Wigdor, a high-profile American lawyer who represented Nafissatou Diallo, the New York City hotel maid who accused the former International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault. Prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorneys office went on to drop all charges against Strauss-Kahn, while a civil suit was settled out of court.

I can confirm that I have been retained by the young lady who was raped by an Uber driver in Delhi, India, last December, Wigdor told the Guardian, which said he was looking at the possibility of the New Delhi woman suing Uber for negligence in an American court. Having met extensively with her and her family while in Delhi, I can only compliment them for their bravery and fortitude during this very difficult time. We will use all of our resources to vindicate my clients rights, hold those responsible for their actions and ensure that this doesnt happen again.

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Indian Woman Looks to Sue Uber in the U.S. Over Alleged New Delhi Rape

Port Moody wants to find ways to battle the chafer beetle, but they won't renege on pesticide ban.

image credit: TURF TECHNICIAN

They're a tiny little bug that has caused a lot of damage but Port Moody isn't willing to budge on its pesticide ban to curb the spread of the chafer beetle.

At Tuesday's council meeting, Mayor Mike Clay, who said his own lawn has been torn up by the voracious critters and the raccoons and crows that like to feed on them provided a report with a recommendation that staff report back with options for minimizing the chafer beetle infestation, including pesticide bylaw exemptions.

"It concerned me that the pesticide bylaw prevents the use of two pesticides that have been shown to actually work," Clay said, noting it is important to deal with the matter quickly, before the beetle gestation period begins in April.

Clay's report notes that a large number of private and public grassed areas have been ripped up by the chafer beetle, most of which now require a complete sod removal, beetle treatment and replanting or sodding.

"The damage in landscape value in the city has been estimated to be several hundred thousand dollars," it adds.

But several councillors weren't keen on the idea of going back on the pesticide ban.

"This is a huge step backwards," said Coun. Meghan Lahti. "We're not being very progressive if the first step we go to is pesticides."

Coun. Zoe Royer called the chafer beetle an "epidemic in our community" and suggested there should be more information about the option of using nematodes as a natural remedy.

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Chafer beetle won't meet death by pesticides in Port Moody

Tracey Spicer Jan 18 2015 at 12:15 AM

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There is great joy to be had in staying at resorts designed specifically for children. I know that sounds like Special Subject: The Bleeding Obvious, but often, we drag them along to wherever we want to stay then berate them for behaving like well children!

At the Holiday Inn, you don't have to worry about how loud they are, whether there's anything they'll eat, or if they'll utter the phrase, "This is BORING".

The founder, Kemmons Wilson, created the company back in 1952, after discovering few hotel options for his family; it was the first to use the slogan, "Kids Stay & Eat Free".

Now, Nutrition Australia has created a revamped kids' menu for Holiday Inn hotels and resorts across Asia, the Middle East and Africa, to provide "a wider variety of healthy options for kids much more than just the standard burgers, pastas and chips", says Phil Broad, vice-president of food and beverage for the InterContinental Hotels Group.

We got a taste of this recently (pun intended!) at two of their properties in Phuket, Thailand. The buffet in Patong was one of the best I've ever seen, with a low bench for young children to get their own breakfast, and a cool room full of fresh fruit, veggie sticks, and sushi.

In Mai Khao, kids can tick boxes on the menu to design their own pizza, sandwich, or salad perfect for fussy eaters. We also did a mum-and-kids cooking class, creating tom yum goong, green chicken curry and green papaya salad.

Each property was a water wonderland, with a plethora of pools, fountains and waterslides. Activities ranged from animal balloon making for the littlies, to table tennis comps for tweens, and Thai kickboxing for teens.

Oh wait. Apparently, I forgot the most important point. "They had free Wi-fi!" the kids squealed. Not so they could incessantly play their iPods: so they could face-time dada. With hubby working, I thought these resorts would be handy in proving extra sets of er hands.

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Where kids stay, play and eat (healthily) free

Aerodynamic: Dylan Parker (left) with James Norton. Photo: Steven Siewert

Marketing specialist Dylan Parker, 27 , and landscape architect James Norton, 29, met at a paper plane competition in 2008. It was the start of a journey that inspired the film Paper Planes.

James Norton: We have both been fascinated with paper planes since we were kids. There is nothing like that feeling of seeing it get caught on an updraft and soar above your eyes. A passion for paper planes are hereditary. You take that family design down with you, the one that Dad showed you. The most common is the classic, thin-tipped, wide-wing version.

I met Dylan in 2008 at a paper plane competition at the University of Canberra, where we were both studying. He had a suitcase full of paper plane shapes of every variety. I had never been to a proper contest before, but there was Dylan with a suitcase, with [padded sections] moulded to the shape of his planes.

There were the flat ones that spend the most time in the air and the short bullet-shaped ones that fly like javelins. The designs were incredible. I just looked at him and the planes and I thought, "That guy is just like me, he likes planes just as much as I do and he is totally willing to cop all the shit that comes with it." It was love at first flight.

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While we were throwing at the university everyone was looking at us like we were freaks in a "Why are you taking this so seriously?" kind of way.

We had only just got to know each other when Dylan got sick. He was diagnosed with a brain tumour and had to go back to Newcastle to be with his mum [former NSW Environment Minister Robyn Parker] and dad.

He was in hospital for weeks with a golf ball-sized brain tumour they thought might be cancerous.

We still weren't that close as we had only really just met, but we kept in touch through Facebook. I thought it was best to give him some space with his family.

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Two of us: Dylan Parker and James Norton

Q I inherited a picture from a great-aunt, but I don't remember ever seeing it in her home. It's a mountain landscape with trees. It looks like a name is scratched into the lower right hand corner, as well as "48." It measures 24 by 30 inches, with its gold frame. Any help you can give me identifying and appraising this work would be appreciated.

A After living for 20-plus years in California, I'm finally beginning to recognize and identify certain landscape features in art. Mountain ranges, representations of trees and plants, and patterns of sunlight and shadow all help identify the work of California's en plein-air artists.

The French words en plein-air (literally "in open air") signify a work painted directly from nature and capturing an artist's immediate impression of a scene, rather than one done in a studio and based on studies. The development of the plein-air style coincided with mid-19th-century advances in photographic and moving-picture technology, which helped popularize the idea of capturing a scene at a particular moment.

One of California's most prolific plein-air artists was John Augustus Dominique. It is his graffito signature and date on the lower right of your painting.

After his birth in Sweden in 1893, his family moved to Portland, Oregon, when Dominique was still young. His father trained as a florist and worked as a landscape architect.

Dominique himself first was employed as a typesetter and cartoonist in Oregon, where he also took art lessons. In 1914, he moved to California to study at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) and the San Francisco Institute of Art (now the San Francisco Art Institute). At the 1915 Panama- Pacific International Exposition he saw works by Claude Monet and Edvard Munch. He continued to study art, and his biography indicates that most of his teachers were impressionists.

After military service in Maryland, Dominique moved to Santa Barbara, where his father had designed the gardens for a large estate. He lived and painted on Montecito's Ward Estate for nearly a decade and developed a love for the mountains near Ojai and surrounding areas, now recognized as a frequent subject of his paintings.

Your painting depicts one of the highest peaks in the Topatopa Mountains, near Dominique's Santa Barbara home. It illustrates an oak-tree landscape with Cobblestone Mountain in the distance. To judge from the foliage on the trees and the proliferation of red poppies, your work was most likely done in the spring or summer of 1948.

Dominique continued working, exhibiting and teaching art until his death, in 1994. Interestingly, an infection damaged his sight in 1975, and works painted after that date are done in an abstract style he had abandoned decades earlier.

This 1948 oil on canvas is a classic example of Dominique's work. Over the decades he was living in Santa Barbara, he likely painted hundreds of views of these mountains and canyons, capturing the light of the moment in each one.

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Jane Alexiadis: Painting by John Augustus Dominique

ABOUT EVERY three years or so, when the phone rings at architect David Colemans office, he will think to himself, You know, its about time for Cindy and Rob to call.

It is. And here they are, Colemans serial remodelers Cindy Chin and Rob Graham. The three of them working together to tweak and improve the couples Magnolia bluff Tudor into modern living. Since 1999.

We lived here 15 years before we started remodeling, says Graham. So we knew how the house lived. We never wanted a bigger footprint, but we wanted it to live bigger.

We couldnt figure out how to get modern into a 1929 house, says Chin. After touring a Coleman-designed home, however, they knew exactly how.

I think David has an idea formulated before we even know what were going to do. Chin laughs at the collaboration that, over the years, comes naturally.

Once they commit, Graham and Chin are a pair of troupers. No matter the scope of the work, theyve never vacated the place, even when, perhaps, they should have. At one point, if we wanted to come in the back, we had to use a screw gun to take down the plywood, Graham says.

Work began in the kitchen, opening it, connecting it to the backyard and dining room (achieved on both sides with steel and glass French doors) increasing storage and functionality.

Then it was down to the basement. David makes us call it the lower level, corrects Chin. Heres why: Large windows brighten spaces that are now media room, guest suite, a full bath.

In Phase 3, cabinetry was upgraded to match the new kitchen. (Theyre sapele.) Work then headed upstairs, new dormer.

And now, there is this, the front of the home, its public face, remade front door to sidewalk. Born of a desire for a new porch. The couple thought there was no there there. No place to land out of the weather, make the transition indoors.

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Magnolia Tudor shakes up the neighborhood with contemporary drama out front