It is my understanding that cats and foxes do fine together. But not coyotes or fishercats which are pretty darn vicious and will tear cats into fluff balls. What I cannot understand, since New England and other north eastern locations are long settled areas, is why there is such a deer and coyote population inside the small towns and city suburbs. Down here, of course, we have no problem of deer in the towns. If they showed up, some Cajun would be boiling rice and it would be on the table for supper. Most we find are the smaller wildlife creatures, like possums and coons, squirrels and a few rabbits, and of course snakes and a few alligators. Rats? well, they hang out in clumps of bamboo. Since they feel safer at night, the owls are helpful in controlling their numbers. With the movie Ratatouille I had a dilemma because the "hero" was a rat....not a mouse, which seems more acceptable .... but an animated RAT. It was a good story though.

Yes, those little FW are so darn cute they just steel a sewer's heart. Mine is a few months older than I am and "Gracie" came from Canada. Many FW enthusiasts name their machines! I've been sewing since I was 13 and quilting for the past 24 years. My maternal grandmother who lived in Kentucky quilted, so I guess she passed her genes on to me, but I did not learn from her. I took a beginner's class after I made my first quilt and I have taken classes often since then. The wonderful thing about a quilting hobby is that there are so many avenues to explore in quilting: traditional quilt patterns, applique, modern patterns, rag quilts, oriental designs, miniatures, art quilts, etc. etc. In the past year I have added redwork hand embroidery to my patchwork baby quilts and now I'm teaching myself Sashiko, a type of embroidery and quilting from Japan.

Oh double bummer. I hope you get it worked out soon. Glad to see that you have neighbors that let you use their computer. You must be a good neighbor yourself.

Mary, It is amazing how little I shop now (online or off) that we live out in the boondocks. There's just almost no place I want to go badly enough to spend all the time driving there and back when there's always so much else to amuse me at home. It is just as well. The money I used to spend out shopping at the mall (conveniently located midway between my place of employment and our house when we lived in Ft Worth), well, that now is money spent on the garden and on food preservation supplies....and I am much happier now than I was then. Our idea of a big shopping excursion is to drive down to the metroplex, go to CostCo, get gasoline at the CostCo station, then go next door to the Steak and Shake place for lunch and then head home. On the way home, we'll stop at Sam's Club in Denton if there is anything they have that we need and which CostCo does not carry (often it is certain supplies for the VFD), and then if we can think of anything we didn't get at one of the big warehouse clubs, I pop into the Wal-Mart next door to Sam's to get it. Our final stop is a Lowe's or Home Depot if we need anything they carry. It sounds like a long day, but we do it all rather quickly....bam, bam, bam. In and out of each store quickly, getting only what is on our list and zipping on to the next place. The whole time I'm thinking of what I could be doing if we were at home. There's always so much work in the garden and kitchen calling out to me. Because the garden provides so much of our food, we buy a lot less food than we once did which further shortens the shopping trips, other than buying he kinds of things we need to can or to preserve our food in some other way. Malls just don't hold the same attraction for me that they once did. I'm too busy to spend time in them. Maybe once every month or two, we add Central Market to the list to pick up a few favorite items that are hard to find. After even a half a day down in the D-FW metro area, I'm ready to go home and to go back into hibernation. Johnny, That's so true. One of the things that drives me crazy is how much fossil fuel is used to ship food not just across the country but around the food. The average food item in a grocery store travels at least 1500 miles to get to the store. The average home-grown food we love travels 150 feet at most from our garden to our kitchen. Which one is more sustainable? Dawn