This thread is so good for the soul. I've been screaming with laughter at every single post... and almost lost it when emily06 said: > Hilarious! So.... in addition to many of the things above, I will stop telling hubby I'm going into the garden for 5 minutes. I will revisit the idea of meal times at the table I will remember to eat during my gardening days instead of feeling sick and dizzy outside and grabbing a not very filling apple off the tree. I will use the bathroom before I go out, instead of suddenly running into the house, getting into the bathroom, trying to wash dirt-covered hands while the maddening tap is running and I'm having to do a mad dance at the sink until my hands are clean enough to touch my clothes! I will try to wear gardening gloves. That may solve the above problem. I will sit in my garden from time to time and enjoy it without a critical eye. I will graciously accept Christmas presents like "Handbook of Weekend Gardening for All Ages" accompanied by a small dish of "Magic Bamboo for a Long Life" I will not yell at hubby and the kids for leaving coffee mugs and glasses around the house, because the garden is full of my tea cups placed under things and perched in weird places. I will not show hubby endless pics of every shrub and plant at every possible angle. Or at least, I'll try not to comment on the fact that he's sifting through the entire pile at a tremendous speed, saying, "Where are the people? We had guests here that day, didn't we?" I will stop intruding on the conversations of strangers in the garden centre. Even when a wife is telling her husband that she's going to buy that nice big tray of impatiens for that hot dry spot in the front yard. I will not plant my annuals too close together for that "full" look. I will accept compliments graciously instead of pointing out the huge mass of weeds next to the shed and the lack of edging and the lack of lawn care. I will stop pretending that the rabbits, squirrels, blue jays and cardinals are MY personal wildlife visitors and that they are on a first name basis with me. I will stop trying to avoid the neighbour who gave me 6 Canna Lilies one year, and told me to dig them up in the fall. They were gorgeous and I kept meaning to get them out of the ground but the whole process really didn't have much appeal. Then I felt quilty and always imagined that she was checking out my garden the following year looking for them. I will accept that some people love to put stark red and shocking white together in their flower beds. I will not make a "throw up" noise when we drive past those houses. I will not ask my brother-in-law if he wants to smell my heliotrope. My sister is STILL trying to convince him it was all above board.

Well thanks for the good ideas y'all! Right now I'm leaning towards trying to do some cat related craft things and selling them with all proceeds going towards the group. I have seen great plaques and stenciled pet food buckets. The group has a table where things are sold every weekend during adoptions. I am thinking of trying to work out a system where materials from say a JoAnne Fabrics are donated to the charity and I get them to a group of teen sewers I know to produce tote bags and pretty aprons in some of those adorable cat fabrics. The kids in our area need community service credits to graduate from HS and thru the group I can arrange for them to get those credits for their sewing. They can do this on their own time at home where most other volunteering jobs are scheduled hours. I also think I could get art students to make cute plaques with cat related quotes. I've seen these in upscale boutiques and they don't look hard to make at all. I'd like to get Joanne's or Michaels or ACMoore to donate materials, kids donate time and receive community service credits, and our group sells these things at the mall where the pet store is. We could also rent flea market tables. Oh, and I thought for next year maybe we could make christmas tree ornaments with a cat theme, again utilizing the talented high school students who need those community service credits. What do you guys think? I would like to take on silent auction/wine event type things in the future. I'm just wanting to "work up" to something like that. The pro bono vet services would be great but that's really hard. Right now we are having a very hard time getting any medicines for the cats. These are tough times for all businesses and Vets are feeling the same pinch as everyone else plus there are more needy animals than vets could possibly help plus people with money troubles aren't able to take sick animals to the vet. We collect a small fee for the adoptions, under a hundred dollars to defray vaccinations, neutering, and other costs. Because there's been a huge drop in adoptions this year (due to the economy, we believe) those funds aren't coming it like they have in the past. Tough times!

Wow, nice to see my friends from Smaller Homes here! I am sorry to hear of the loss of your Joe, Chris. I don't think I heard that before. I knew he was ill. Hope you are doing well on your own. Steph, we have been thinning out books, too. My text books have to go, as do my professional ones. DH needs more room on the bookshelves as he is now reading everything in hard cover! I have moved to Kindle because my hands won't hold books anymore. I have been in his office/library/music room a few times and have tried to declutter a bit. It is a challenge! We are buried under clutter most of the time. Just a thin layer, covering all surfaces, one layer deep! DH drops anything where he uses it, including any packaging it came in. So some mornings as I feed the dog, I go through the kitchen and toss garbage and recycle-ables into the correct bins. Then there are the things that do not have a good place to live, so they just sit out. I have worked at finding homes for things. I have three boxes of things to build sitting against walls - a shoe organizer, a CD shelf, and now a golf organizer for the garage. Meanwhile, I am back making final purchases for the always-in-the-future bathroom gut and remodel. We have both gone through closets and thinned our unworn clothes out, and I have moved a chest of drawers to where I can use it for our sheets, blankets, pillowcases, and stuff for packing for trips. DH is taking occasional business trips. I also organized all shoe-shine equipment into a hand-made shoe-shine box I bought at a garage sale 15 years ago! I had help one day in the basement and built two shelving units we had down there and started going through boxes and organizing things down there. I also got a great deal on a big steel cabinet with shallow drawers that was designed to hold microfiche cards. It has 12 drawers that are 18" front-to-back and 3 or 4 ft wide. It is very heavy-duty and perfect for holding stones. If we could move it, we could get it in the house and I could fill it with all the stone and glass and metal beads I have for jewelry-making. I could easily see what I have then! The only problem is that once it is in place, it will be too heavy to move and the place it will have to go does not have a floor down, just a sub-floor. We pulled up the yucky carpet in that bedroom after Dad died. So I think I have to wait until the bathroom remodel is done, since that is going to steal 6 inches or so from this room, and it does not make sense to lay a cork floor down before we tear out the bathroom wall and rebuild it. Last year, though, we did get new gutters and gutter guards and covered the soffitts and fascia with aluminum and vinyl trim and we replaced the last 4 windows! The bathroom project is down to choosing the bathroom flooring material, the shower pan, and buying the swanstone walls for the shower. I also have to finalize the toilet choice - ie: do I need to get one with the tank in the wall to give the shower doors more room to open, or is a regular toilet okay? So I am at the point where I need to call Jim, my contractor, and get his input and get scheduled. I have a new bath fan/heater fixture to buy, a new door to get, and just a few other really minor things. I am zeroing in on a color for the vanity. As soon as the weather warms, I can paint it. I have it all filled and sanded, sitting in the garage, waiting for the warm weather.

I've paid everything online since Quicken introduced Bill Pay in the early 90s. However, I am grateful I'm compulsive enough to keep my statements. After 2 pretty serious thefts and a house fire, they made my life a LOT easier. When you have to prove cost to an insurance company, they're invaluable. Online statements are fine, but they usually only make them available for a year to 18 months. Sometimes that's not enough. I have a basket by the door into which I put important mail. It organizes itself as newest to oldest, because I put the newer in front. At tax time I go through and sort them into companies or accounts. Stapled, they go into a credenza that has file drawers in it. I might refer to them once in a couple years, but I have them. Legal papers go into another file in the same place. Junk mail goes into a paper grocery bag, really neatly, which I turn around and usually bury in the garden. Paper recycles well and prevents weeks when the thickness of a section of news paper. Now magazines? If I like an article or ad, I've started tearing off the cover of that mag and putting them into a binder with a pressure clip holding them in. This has come in extremely handy when talking about ideas, and I can throw away the TONS of magazines I seem to accumulate. I'm considering that neat desk scanner thing I see advertized on TV. It has an auto document feed, where my scanner is manual. Last year I scanned statements before and like it. I did them individually and am storing them by account/month on a CD for that year along with a .pdf of last year's tax return, the TurboTax version I've used, and any receipts I might need to reproduce for a deduction. I'm storing that in a binder with 1 printed copy of my tax return. I'm anal enough I am thinking of going thru previous years I'm saving and consolidating like this. Imagine the space I'll free up! But that's after a gudzillion house projects that need finishing. That's a task I'll do when I'm procrastinating about something else.