My Family has severe drop-itis, but I have it too. Also, I have more hobbies than they do and like many women, more of the stuff in the home is seen as "mine." Also, I am more likely to make a mess but EVENTUALLY pick it up ( I get organizing and cleaning spurts) , rather than create the archeological piles my other family members accumulate. Very frequently I want to rant at DH or DD about their mess. But, if I look around, I see, my laundry is not put away, I have a pile of mag's here, some gardening stuff there... I have made up my mind to work through all of my own clutter, habits, zones--whatever--meanwhile picking up others' stuff as much as I wish, or not, and just not say ANYTHING until I think I am in control of my own habits and stuff. I mean, I want to be able to look at a room and honestly see nothing there that I caused, did, bought, dropped, causing a problem. Because I know that that is what is bothering me the most--my own habits that I would like to change. In my family, there's not a big fuzzy feeling of "let's get organized together." And I don't feel comfortable spilling the blame out of frustration with my own problems. I also am taking a hard look at all my "homemaker" jobs and streamlining them ruthlessly--simpler groceries, meals, hobbies--so I don't blame someone else for my "complicated" life. I am lucky that my family also, to their credit, does not sit around expecting Betty Crocker or Martha Stewart. Instead, I'm the one who likes to cut and arrange flowers, or change the throw pillows, or cook, and then I find, maybe I took on too much for all of what else we've got going on, and no one to blame but me. This doesn't mean that DD or DH would not have their own chores or responsibilities or that I can't say to DD, please pick up your stuff from the den, we're trying to tidy up today. It just means I've decided not to aim any "we're such a mess!" at them at this point, because I don't feel I'm a good example myself, yet. For me, I need that feeling of personal control to have credibility to ask someone else to try to do more to help.

Yes, I don't mind if the dry season is dry, which is where we're supposed to be now. But we had rain all winter till a couple of weeks ago and after a week of heavy rain with no time to dry out, the ground is totally saturated here already. We've had flooding inland in spots where it never floods. So if we continue to have so much rain and then get a wet storm, we'll be in trouble in this area. I live on the Treasure Coast and over the past years the daily afternoon rain storms of summer and early fall have slowly been disappearing I live on Hutchinson Island and I'd say they've been shifting. We've had much, much more rain out here the past few years than used to be normal. ETA And I don't get the people who say lots of rain = no hurricane. It's rained like heck the past two years and Matthew, Irma.

"Some folks really need to get off their high horses!!" If people would like to, volunteer for your local Goodwill or other agency. That'll knock most folks off their high horses very fast as they see that they'll accept anything and gladly. The worst of the worst gets thrown out. The reason is that they won't refuse anything for fear that word gets around that they're picky and people will stop giving. There's a little lesson. "Perhaps the onus is on the organization to whittle down the nature of the donations accepted then. " They do, in a sense. There's an old saying, "One man's trash is another man's treasure." It's both true and false. I volunteered for Goodwill around here for ages until it changed a lot in the area, and people really do donate some questionable things. Interestingly, we'd take it all, but the really questionable stuff went to the bulk store. You could get cloth by the pound, and so on, to do with whatever you wanted. People used it to make quilts, as cleaning cloths, to scrub a garage floor, shredded it for thread, and so on. Almost everything had a use, and at a quarter a pound (or less sometimes), there was somebody or some company willing to buy it for that. "Good" stuff--good being relative in the sense that it was single items people would buy for appreciable cash--went to individual stores where items sold well. This wasn't something I did much of (I wasn't good at it, they laughed at how bad I was actually, so I did the main sorting of good, bad, awful, but saw how it went). Books did not go to rural stores. They just don't sell well there. Sorry folks, but there it is. :-) Textbooks generally got sent to the poorer stores to try to fill in for the fact that schools just didn't have the same funding. Clothing styles and sizes were apportioned to the stores where they would sell well. Knicknacks would depend, as would glassware and kitchenware. And they're not above, in any sense, "regifting" their donations to others if another agency can use it better. However, if you walk in with a bag full of filthy T-shirts covered in grime? They're going to smile at you, accept them, and give you a receipt for your items, just like we did. Those filthy ancient T-shirts are worth $0.25 per pound to somebody after we clean them up.

Oh, I hate my dishwasher's racks, it seems that nothing fits well! That dishwasher is the one big do-over, if I could, of my remodel. I won't be getting them because I don't need and am still happy with my Mikasa set - but I may drop by Costco to see them in person if they are there. ETA: I've had bad luck with very glossy glazes from the lower-end manufacturers as well - very easily chipped.