I live in an urban area of Kansas City and have plenty of red fox, raccoons & opossums. Only the raccoons seem to bother with the water plants (they seem to be partial to my water iris) and fish. You might try a motion activated light to scare them away. If you try tapping & releasing them, try marshmallows & peanut butter (you do have to take them some distance or they will come back & there are laws in many areas about relocating wildlife). When I rebuilt my pond I made it 3 feet deep with strait sides & no marginal planters convienient to the edge, problem seems to be solved (now if I could keep them from washing this dinner in the bird bath & mudding it up)!

I don't know if a cat will use a litter box that had already been used by another cat. They may not really care. But I doubt a person would buy a used litter box, no matter how cheap it is. I had a yard sale a long time ago and tried selling an almost new box. We had filled it with litter, the cat used it once, we realized the box wasn't deep enough and the cat threw litter all over the floor, so we got a deeper one. I put a stupid little note on the box "practically new - only pooped in one time" with a smiley face - $1. A few people looked at it and laughed, but nobody bought it. I think we ended up throwing it away.

The pillow is beautiful. Annie's suggestion about an eye pillow is also great. Lots of people like to use one during final relaxation. It sounds like you have a real friend who can be honest with you about not liking jewelry. When I first started dating my now husband, he gave me a necklace. I don't like to wear jewelry and anything around my neck, no matter how light, makes me feel like I'm strangling. Since we were not yet exclusive, i told him nicely to give the necklace to someone else. The next time I saw him, he had gotten the necklace made into a bracelet. I wore it in front of him until it (thankfully) broke. He had always dated women who liked jewelry and he wanted to give me gifts. As my birthday approached, he talked about taking me bracelet shopping and I knew he was thinking about something expensive. You should have seen his face when I told him that what I really wanted was a crown! And that's how I got some expensive, needed dentistry for my birthday.

Actually I found out by comparison that a microwave vent hood does do something if it is vented to the outside. My original apartment had a 1960s range hood that was a little fan in the center under the duct and a bare light bulb. The apartment stunk like fried food when I bought it, but I moved in in the summer and there was still Christmas tree needles and a piece of candy the realtor's son had stomped under his foot at least 6 months earlier still on the floor when I moved in. So I don't think the smell was from actually Using an ineffective hood. The previous tenant cleaned by shoving the visible debris under the furniture. We reconfigured the kitchen slightly and determined there was another duct to the exterior, and we used that one. What we found out was it also connected to the powder room downstairs from the kitchen and when we fired up the MW hood you got a powerful blast of hot air from the kitchen when you opened the powder room door. So not only did it exhaust, it exhausted vertically Down, which the range hood experts in the Kitchen Forum says does not happen at all. I don't think the MW range hood is adequate for every situation, and I don't think down drafts are effective at getting the vapors Into the duct, but the "0" or "100" scale that they use to rate what you should have as a range hood (It should suck a tennis ball through a gardenhose to be acceptable at all), is kind of ridiculous.