My favorite way to do that is to take an empty windowbox and put some peastone or gravel in the bottom of it, then take the purchased annuals (still in their flower pots) and set them inside the window box. Pack them as tightly as possible, and then fill in around the pots with cedar mulch. My grandmother taught me this method when I went up to the farm to visit her in the summertime, and every time I prepare the window boxes I am reminded of the good times I had with my grandparents on the farm. This method is quick and easy to do, and by swapping out the annuals as they fade I can keep the porch looking pretty for a very long time.

For example, this morning I saw a “fantastic deal” on this jumpsuit. Hopefully the photograph that I’m including will show up. I just can’t imagine how anyone in their right mind would find this jumpsuit appealing, and yet according to the website, the jumpsuit is sold out. I’m wondering if it was sold out because a lot of men that have no taste whatsoever thought that they would buy this as a Mother’s Day gift for their wife, hoping that the wife would be thrilled to pieces. I pray that my hubby has enough sense to never buy anything like this for me! The horizontal stripes on this would make my legs look so fat, and the entire rest of my body too! What do you think about this? Would YOU like to wear something like this?

Back when I was a newlywed, my husband was taking classes to become a paramedic he brought home some special vials that had hearts on them, and a big heart shaped sticker to put on the refrigerator door. He told me that the idea was people that have medical conditions that emergency response personnel should know about where supposed to put information about that condition in the vials and put the vials in their freezer. The emergency response personnel were trained to look at the refrigerator door for that heart sticker and if they saw it that they would look in the freezer for that medical information. Part of the reasoning for this was that freezers are insulated and would resist burning in a house fire, so that would be a great place to keep something important.

From my point of view that’s a good idea, except that my refrigerator doors are always filled with magnets and shopping lists – I’m not sure that anyone would see a heart sticker on it! But that was back in the 1980′s and I don’t have any idea if the rescue people still hand those out or not. And my hubby at that time is now my ex-hubby and I’m not very inclined to call him up just to ask him about it, so I may never know.

When we first moved into this house, one of the first things that I put on the wish list was to carpet the living room. The previous owners had put tile on the floor, and although tile is easy to keep clean, I felt that the room felt stark and uninviting. My husband was very good at finding other things to spend our money on though, for the first couple of years of our marriage and of living in this house. Until the year our first baby was born.

Suddenly he became quite aware of just how cold the floor really was. After all, he was sitting on the floor a lot, playing with the baby, and he could feel the coolness for himself. That really wasn’t an issue in the summertime, but summer is really short here and winter is really long. Once the baby started crawling it was fairly obvious that we needed to do something about the floor. Fortunately my hubby got a bonus check for Christmas that enabled us to go to town and buy some new carpeting. The carpet that we bought was a multi-colored sculptured carpet called “English Leather.” Although I’m not normally a big fan of brown tones, I liked the warmth of that carpet because there was a reddish quality to it, and it reminded me of the color of the riding saddles and bridles at my cousin’s farm where I had spent some time in my youth. So just looking at the carpet gave me a “warm and fuzzy” feeling, with memory triggers of some of the best times of my life.

Right around that same time we bought a brand new vacuum cleaner because the carpet installer told us that we should have a vacuum cleaner with a beater bar in it if we wanted to extend the life of the carpet. He explained that the right way to vacuum a carpet was to vacuum back and forth over the same spot four times before moving on to the next area. He explained that we needed to do it that many times in order to loosen up the dirt particles so that they would get sucked up into the vacuum. He also explained that a lot of dirt is very sandy and that sand is very sharp. Letting the dirt stay in the carpet will shorten the life of the carpet fibers because every time you walk over it the friction of the carpet fiber over the dirt wears down the carpet fiber. I think that was good advice, the carpet has lasted a very long time!

Boy was the store extremely crowded!  I really did not expect it to be that crowded that early!  We had to stand in the checkout line for over an hour!  We didn’t get home until 11:30!

I guess in the future I’ll have to just bite the bullet and force myself to get up and go early no matter what.

So, we talked about some different strategies on surviving the break up.  We talked about how he needed to take some time to heal emotionally, and avoid any kind of rebound romance.

The first time I noticed that type of arrangement was when I saw my mother-in-law was using a mailbox with a padlock on it as a drop box. She had a padlock on the box, and she explained that the office’s courier had a copy of the key so he could pick up and deliver correspondence independently of the US Postal service.

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.

The website I was looking at today that sells these mailboxes and offers free shipping is gainesmailboxesdirect.com. I was looking for a rural mailbox that might offer some theft protection features and saw that this website sells locking inserts for the mailboxes that they sell. I have never seen anything like that before; I think that is a good idea! There have been a few times when I have worried that just putting our mail in the mailbox was not protecting us from unscrupulous characters that might get into some of the mail and attempt some identify theft schemes. Having our incoming mail go into a locking insert would make it just a little bit harder for some unauthorized person to snatch and grab the mail quickly.

We all agreed that it was a darn shame that her table was ruined, and to make it even worse the company refused to pay her anywhere near the value of the table because they said it was so old that it wasn’t worth anything! And then they said that a little bit of carpenter’s glue would fix it as good as new. Obviously that was very distressing to Alecia, and she was asking us what course of action we thought she could take. Since she had not had the table appraised before the move, we agreed that there probably was not a whole lot that she could do other than to take the table to a restoration company and ask them to fix it as best as they can.

As far as I’m concerned, a guy has a better chance to attract women if a guy has a little bit of hair on his head. Now I’m not saying anything negative about guys who are balding; if they have a good hair cut that is not a turn-off at all. But I like a guy who has a little bit of curl in his hair, and my boys have curly hair. So when they cut their hair so short that you don’t see any of the curl at all, it makes me sad because I think that they are trying to repel women, not attract them!

I have one of those Littermaid self cleaning litter boxes, and I love it!  You have to use premium clumping kitty litter in it, which I use anyway.  There is a motion detector in the box that detects when the cat is in the box, and after ten minutes, the rake activates and sweeps the clumps into the covered container.  The only issue that I have with the litter box is the expense of the disposable trays.  The original intent of the manufacturer is to have you throw the tray away every time it is full.  That gets really expensive, really fast!  I have to empty the tray twice a week!  I have found that the plastic shopping bags that I get from Wal-Mart are the perfect size to line the trays.  So, I line the trays with a plastic shopping bag and when the tray is full, I tie the shopping bag closed and throw it away, line the tray again with a fresh bag, and put the tray back into the litter box.  That way one of the trays lasts for several months before it falls apart.

I found a cool website that sells furniture custom made to hide litter boxes.  I found one that I liked and bought it to hide our litter box in.  I love it!  When people come to visit us, they don’t even realize that we have a cat!  They don’t see or smell the litter box, and our cat is so shy that when strangers come to the house, he runs and hides under our bed.