The folks on the Yahoo groups that I belong to are frequently writing about how they keep a small flock of backyard chickens to help keep the ticks at bay. In addition they say that they enjoy all of the fresh eggs that they could possibly want. From time to time they offer up some chickens for sale and my hubby and I discuss the ins and outs of owning chickens. My biggest concerns involve predators and who would care for them if we went on vacation. I really don’t think we just dump a bunch of chicken feed in a trough and leave them for a week.

When my hubby and I moved into our first house, we were so excited to share our joy with our friends. So we had a big Independence Day party; complete with a pot-luck barbecue and pool party. The guests were completely enamored of our litter of five week old keeshond puppies, which were confined inside their six foot tall chain link kennel run.

One of our guests (which I did not want invited but hubby insisted) decided that he would light a string of black cat firecrackers and throw them into the kennel run. The quick bang-bang-bang and yelp-yelp-yelp brought my hubby and me running quickly to see what in the world was going on. When we saw the inebriated guest laughing at the upset puppies, we asked him to leave the party. Needless to say, feelings were hurt.

The next morning when we went out to feed the puppies, we discovered that someone had removed them from their kennel and put them inside the fenced in pool area. The puppies had all drowned in the pool. My heart was completely broken. Later that day we went to the pool supply store and bought a pool cover for our swimming pool in the hopes that this kind of tragedy never happens again. And I never spoke to that guy that had thrown firecrackers into the puppy pen, as we suspect that he was the one responsible for relocating the puppies. It would have been impossible for the puppies to escape their pen and enter the fenced in pool area on their own.

One thing worries me, though. If I recall correctly I saw a special about the Tom Kincaid dynasty and I worry that my sister is over-valuing her collection. Sure, they are limited editions, but there are thousands of them out there. Not quite as valuable as if the limited edition only had less than a dozen. I guess only time will tell, and for now she is just as happy as a pig in mud with her collection, so who am I to rain on her parade? As a famous advice columnist advises from time to time “MYOB.”

I was trying to use thewww.texaselectricityproviders.com/ website to figure out what the best options were for my energy utilities. I really need something I can rely on. At my one of my old houses, we had some problems with the provider. My husband and I always felt like we were being overcharged and it seemed like the electricity would cut out randomly for what seemed like no reason. We both decided we really wanted to do our research for the next house and avoid the same problem. We are set to move into our new house next month. We are both really excited. It is a lot bigger and a lot nicer than our first house together. However, since it is so big, I am a bit concerned about the price of our utilities and if we can handle it. My husband told me that he really thinks we will be fine. I just get a bit concerned because electricity is essential. I do not want to be strained for money so making the decision for the most cost-efficient and reliable source would be ideal for me right now.

I got my card a few days later, but I noticed in my email in-box was a rejection letter for my hubby’s card.  It turns out that he was rejected because they don’t think he is him!  They said that they rejected him based on information from a credit report company.  So I printed it off and gave it to my hubby and told him to call the credit report company, which he has been trying to do all morning long.  I am concerned that this may have something to do with an identity theft attempt! 

I think that if parents allow their kids to spend their money in that way, they should be ashamed of themselves.  What a waste of money, and what a terrible message to send to the kids – you don’t have to work hard to make it look like you worked hard.  I think it is a form of “cheating” and I don’t like cheaters!

Au contraire!  The Gray Ghost winery in Amissville VA has wonderful wine!  I had the opportunity to taste their 2006 Adieu wine at a wine tasting party that a friend held, and I fell in love with it.  I had to go to the winery myself and buy a couple of bottles of it to have for special occasions.

After I learned about The Gray Ghost winery, I went on the Internet to find their location, and found their website.  I was impressed to learn that they have won numerous awards for the wines.  I think that the Gray Ghost is giving the Napa Valley some competition!

I found myself thinking about that when I was doing a CBT today at work about the proper storage and disposal of different materials. To be perfectly honest, I never even gave it a second thought about how there might be chemicals at work that would need to be stored in flammable lockers.

When I stop to think about how many liquids and solvents are flammable, I’m amazed that there isn’t some kind of building code that requires every house to have Flammable Cabinets in their garages and pantries!

I wonder how many house fires would be prevented if the homeowners kept their flammable liquids in the proper Flammable Cabinet Storage.

However, with the thought in mind that my eyeglasses are getting more expensive every time I buy them, I have been giving serious thought to Lasik surgery, as I think that eventually the cost factor will end up being a mute point!

So the first thing I did was to design a new brochure and flyer. I started to do some comparison prices for brochure printing to see if it would be less expensive to print them at the local office store or send them off to a place like the Superfine Printing Company. The club president asked me to simply print them as color copies off of my own printer and then manually fold them up but I told her that the ink for my printer was prohibitive and I didn’t want to have to manually fold them myself.

Right about that same time the president came down with some health issues and had to step down as the president and leave the club. The new president of the club decided that she wanted to micro-manage every part of the club and suddenly everything that I had done was subjected to her nit-picking and directions to change things around and do everything “her way.” It wasn’t too long before I just decided that I had more pressing things to do with my time than to kow-tow to her every whim and I resigned from the club myself.  I heard that a couple of weeks later that new president was asked to step down and leave the club as well, and I was asked to rejoin the club. By then I had such a sour taste in my mouth from the club I declined. I don’t know if I’ll ever rejoin the club or not.

Seems as if now, more than ever, the friends and neighbors are giving each other the gift of wine for a gift giving occassion. More of my friends are keeping their wines in vino temp beverage coolers to keep them at their best flavor. To be honest, I’ve never paid too much attention to which wine should be served at what temperature, but as I become more knowledgable about the different types of wines, I’ve started to becom interested in looking at the different vino temp wine coolers to see if there is a vino temp cooler that is nice looking and within my budget.

One of the things we were talking about was about how it was a major ordeal just getting to the mailbox everyday. Especially in the winter time – the snow plows always plowed in the rural mailboxes or knocked them over when they drove by.

There was a lucrative market selling rural residential mailboxes in Maine – especially the ones that were advertised as plow-proof. When I lived in Maine, I had a post office box so I didn’t have that problem. The post office was not open twenty four hours, though, so we had to make sure to go get the mail during certain hours. When I was working full-time, that meant I went to pick up the mail once a week because I couldn’t get there when they were open. There’s a price to pay when you live in the country!