I guess the the thing I do for myself, after thinking long and hard and reading this thread, and not sure how to answer...is living my life on my own terms. I quit a corporate job after they gave me grief for caring for my terminally ill mother. After that I bought a Fetch! Pet Care franchise (not a commercial!) and use my time to care for animals. I don't make a fortune, but that's okay. I love my job....which I really don't even consider a 'job'. I enjoy buying books and reading, both novels and homesteading type books. I really enjoy starting my plants from seed for the garden, mostly heirloom tomatoes and peppers. Growing things is such a nice thing...it just makes me realize how great it is to watch things grow from seed and eat your results! Nothing better. Because I am self-employed I also enjoy spending time with my dad. I can go over to his place in the early afternoon and watch a movie or right now we are into the early season of season 4 of The Shield. I bought him the 7 series set for Christmas. I suppose I do those things for myself because after my mom passed away I realize time is precious and I only have so much time with him. When he is gone I can't do that and I want to make myself available as much as possible. So I guess the nice things I do for myself are living for me and my loved ones and spending time and enjoying our pursuits that bring happiness. Also, I enjoy travel magazines, car magazines and other 'fantasy' things that spark my imagination. I doubt I will ever live in Bora Bora or drive a Lamborghini, but is sure is fun to dream! Duane

For regular household chores, things in our house sort of just get done when they need to get done. We both have things that we tend to do -- he waters the garden, scoops the cat box, takes out the trash, and usually loads the dishwasher, whereas I do more of the general tidying of each room (he's better if he's given a specific task; if I told him to "clean the living room", he'd have no clue). Usually every week or two we jointly clean the entire house, which involves mopping floors, scrubbing toilets, and all that stuff -- realistically, I do the lions share of that work, but he tries his best. One thing that has made housework a little more fun for us is this thing called Chore Wars -- if your husband (or kids) is into D&D or other roleplaying games, it's a way to track your chores, and gain "experience" while doing it. My husband and I compete to gain more points than the other, and right now he's beating me :( Because my husband is such a geek, though, he's been so willing to do chores lately, just to be able to enter them into this Chore Wars thing, so I love it. As far as household maintenance type stuff, like fixing things, generally hubbie asks me what our plans are for the weekend. I tell him if I think we need to work on anything special, and if he's noticed anything that needs attention, he'll add it in. We also keep a list up on the fridge of things that need to be done, and try to knock off 1 or 2 of those regularly. I'm very lucky that my husband is always very willing to pitch in and do his fair share -- I try to return the favor by making sure that he has plenty of his own time on the weekend to do what he wants (play video games, watch TV, whatever).

Maui banned plastic bags several years ago. The aina (land) is sacred to Hawaiians. (And tourism is the #1 industry. Maui is selling *beauty*.) There are no ugly plastic bags draping trees, flying out of garbage trucks, blowing into the ocean. Birds and fish aren't eating bits of plastic. Tourists have a pristine landscape to admire. Cigarettes are also banned in public, including on beaches; sales unlawful to under-21's. My reusable flat-bottom bags with handles are convenient and stable. Grocery 'bag boys' like them. I have a few with insulation and zipper tops. I don't miss trying to corral a slew of slippery plastic bags from the car, each containing only a few items -- minus those that have escaped to roll around loose in the trunk. If you can remember your shoes and car keys, you can remember your bags. (Not to say I have never arrived at the store and realized I was wearing my slippers. Not to say I've never locked my keys in the car.)

I really enoyed planning my kitchen (with help from here). It's not perfect because there are always constraints in any project, but I'm really happy with how it all came out. I remember your post from before. Do you have an updated layout to post? One thing I was thinking is that you could extend the run on the right side of your drawing to fill the available wall space up to where the patio doors start. If you want to extend further you could make the patio access just a single door instead of double. Your trash can move to your prep zone and be a pull-out. That spot might be good for the kid-stack. Here are some of the things that I feel we got right: (You should definately read all that design stuff that Buehl posted and start making a long list of all your thoughts so you can prioritize and widdle the list down later 1) Measure: This is free. Measure all your items (such as cookie trays, serving trays, casserole dishes, crock pot, prep tools like cuisinart, blender, juicer, stock pot, pots and pans, slow cooker, etc, basically everything). Then you will be able to design drawers the right size so you have a place for everything. If you're building a pantry, you can plan to store some of the large items in there, but you still have to measure them so that you build the pantry accordingly. Also, are you storing seasonal things in the kitchen such as holiday dishes and serving items? Plan on where all that will go. 2) Ask: This is free too. Ask your family members if there is something that they really want to be incorporated in the kitchen. For our family of 6, only younger DD and DH each had a specific request. DD (age 9) was just getting into baking, so she wanted an additional electrical outlet away from the all the zones, so that she could plug in her mixer without being near me if I'm prepping, cooking or cleaning. There was a perfect place behind the trash pull-out in the island seating area. Now we call that side of the island the baking zone. DH wanted to be able to access his blender and juicer without having to get down on his hands and knees to dig through a cabinet. He got a tall drawer where those items can stand up straight and are easy to access. 3) Hide the MW: We like cheap not-built-in microwaves because we don't use it very much. Cabinet builder made a spot for it where we can close the cabinet doors if we want to. The doors slide back out of the way when it's open. But if you are a heavy microwave user, then you might want it built-in or above the oven so that it is more prominent and accessible. 4) Almost all drawers, maybe a cabinet if you need it: Agree about having lots of drawers. I do, however, have two shallow cabinets in the island where the stools are. It's wide but not deep. We ended up doing that because the island is 4' wide and on the opposite side there are drawers. That left a wasted space on the stool-side, so we put cabinets there. In there I put things that I don't use often, such as long serving trays, a long skinny bread basket, and extra casserole dishes for Thanksgiving and other gatherings. These would not fit well in a drawer. Also in there go vases and other things I want to access but not often. Sometimes one cabinet is needed somewhere. It just depends on what you are storing. 5) Trash can at the prep zone. 6) "Kid/sports stack": For school age kids and people that are always packing coolers for sports, having a stack for them is great. I call ours the "kid stack." We put in a 4 drawer stack at the end of a run. In the top are the school lunch totes, school cutlery, wet wipes, etc. Next drawer has small lunch tote sized water bottles, insulated food bowls for school, reusable snack and sandwich bags. Next drawer is the snack drawer. In there we have all manner of snacks that they can grab while packing their lunches. The bottom drawer has sports water bottles. After the kitchen was finished they actually started packing their own lunches because it was all set up to be easy. Also when people are leaving for sports, they can load a small ice chest (kid stack is right by ice maker), throw in some snacks and water bottles. This stack is not anywhere near my cook, prep, or clean up zone so we're not tripping over each other in the morning. 7) Coffee/tea stack: If you are coffee and tea drinkers, see if you can put a drawer stack under where you keep your coffee maker. Ours is a 3 drawer stack. Top 2 drawers are all about coffee and tea, and the bottom drawer has dishtowels. 8) Bright LED lighting on dimmers. It's so frustrating to not have good light in a kitchen because it is a work zone. But at night or while entertaining you want to turn it down, so have everything on dimmers and try to incorporate under cabinet or over cabinet lighting if you can. 9) Cleverly placed electrical outlets: Place your outlets as low as allowed and turned sideways. Try to match them as well as you can to your backsplash material so they blend in. If you have an area where you don't want to see the outlets (for us this is a long run that is away from the zones, and has glass cabinets and such, so it's the "pretty part"). There I didn't want to interrupt the pretty backsplash with outlets, so we put an outlet strip up under the cabinets. This works for outlets that don't have something always plugged in. But for things that are pretty much always plugged in such as coffee maker and toaster, it doesn't work bc you'd see the cord; for those a low/sideways outlet is best so the cord is hidden behind. Note about that -- since the outlet strips are there (where under-cabinet lighting would normally be installed), we turned the under-cabinet lights around backwards and mounted them under the cabinet, but in the front rather than the back. 10) Venting: Have an appropriately powerful vent over the cooktop. My DS has NO venting in her kitchen. It's awaful and this is a $$$$ house. It's so stupid that the builder did that and the previous owner never addressed it. 11) Niche above cooktop: Before the remodel, our cooktop was in front of a window and I got in the habit of putting the salt, pepper and olive oil on the window sill. When we remodeled the cooktop moved to a regular wall. So we made a niche with a sill where we put these things. I like having the basics within easy reach. Mistakes/oversights: - I forgot to plan a place to hang the dishtowel. This really bugs older DD. - I didn't think about the paper towels. We have them on the counter. But after we finished, I saw a picture where someone had built the paper towel holder into the place where a drawer would be under the counter. It was such an awesome idea, but too late for me. My thoughts on your layout: