Jan, YEP, that too was the day it snowed in Palmdale. My older son Sean was in Palmdale that day and told me about that. I know some who really GET snow are laughing at me---but to me that IS snow even though it didn't stay. Good for you getting your baking done! I'm in the process of finishing up a whole lotta glass flowers for selling this Saturday and a friends vendor sale. I've come up with a new display and now I have a big truck to put more of them in! :-)I took some photos of the finished ones yesterday and hope to post them soon. I'll be getting work/teacher gifts wrapped and the Christmas letter all printed up today. I still cannot believe it is December. It didn't seem like November was here at all! Just flew by in Mach Speed! Love, Jules

Great idea on the tipping working well for young non producing trees, its the best time to shape them "if" you're looking to keep your trees small. Of course that Glenn has never given me fruits in the four years I've had it...every single time it blooms...the freeze kills the blooms and branches. Sometimes I wonder why I bother pruning it,lol...I need to cover it with a greenhouse with a heater! Marin, glad to tipping and tie down methods worked well for you...I'm definitely not a big fan of the tall and scraggly growth habit either, my Keitt and Lancetilla seems to grow that way...so for me its tip, tip, tip as MG mentioned! MG, glad you enjoyed the videos.

Cat5e will work fine for HDMI, and indeed, probably for anything you'd need in your house. That said, the primary expense in cabling is the labor, not the materials, so running Cat6 is generally not dramatically more expensive. I personally prefer to run Cat6 for future proofing, unless the cost is dramatically different. Cat6 is somewhat harder to work with and terminate properly than Cat5e is, so you'd want to make sure your installers are capable of doing it correctly. My multi-room TV solution is not the best you can do, but it works for us. I have coax and network run to each room with a TV, and a Tivo there. That allows me to watch live TV, and I can also watch recordings from any other Tivo in the house, as well as Netflix, Amazon Video on Demand, Hulu etc. I also have a file server that has some saved video and audio content on it. The Tivos can play that over the network from any room. And I have a blu-ray player in each room for playing discs. It's not what some would call a "whole house" solution, but it works really well for us. Yes, it would be more convenient to not have to put a disc in every time we want to watch a blu-ray. But the alternatives for that are either a pain or expensive (or both). The coolest way to go is something like Kaleidescape, which gives you a true whole-house movie library with no discs. But it's insanely expensive. You can rip your DVDs, but it's time consuming and most of the solutions for playing them back aren't that great in my opinion, especially if you have non-technical people using it (which is true for most of us, and even those of us who are technical don't necessarily want a challenge when we're kicking back to watch a movie). You could have a central disc player and distribute the video, but then that leaves you having to go there to put in the discs, and the only real benefit is that it saves you the cost of a player in each room. Blu-ray players are cheap. There are tons of things you can do, but I think a lot of it is overkill for most people. A Tivo and a disk player in each room with cable and network is a good way to go. Or even skip the disc player if you don't watch many discs.

dd50 -- I got rid of my salad spinner too -- it was dusty pink and didn't match my kitchen. Then, when we started harvesting lettuce from our garden, I realized we needed a spinner after all. Well, what do you know, a friend found a virtually new OXO spinner for us at the thrift shop for less than $2. So I got a better quality spinner and a white one that matches my appliances. DH and I remind each other when clearing out our clutter that it's OK to get rid of something that we *might* need again. We're learning to trust that our needs will be met at the time we need that item -- and that might include an unforeseen upgrade. In the mean time, we'll celebrate the space and serenity that less clutter brings.