Hey Gang and especially hey Herb Oil. Thank-you for being 23 and calling me "hot", I know many of the gardening folks here personally and guarantee that gave them all a good laugh!! I am married, but I don't have kids and although I like old-fashioned and heirloom plants, I lead more of a modern alternative lifestyle. Botany rocks. When I was in University (many moons ago) they required me to take a science course of some kind to graduate. UGH! I'd been outta high school for so long I'd forgotten a lot of science, but they let me take botany - so of course I got an A+ because after two classes the prof. made me a class assistant. I am in East Atlanta Village which is just off of I20 and Moreland Aves. Here's the Farmers Market website: http://www.farmeav.com/ but it is not updated. You can see one of my classes listed there from last year! My seeds are almost all flower seeds (some herbs). Since my veggie garden is so small I don't collect my own seeds. Maybe someday, but not right now. I'm too busy being a pig and eating them all. Plus if I save them all then I won't need to buy so many - and after all, a girl's gotta shop, right? Anyhow, the market Re-opens again the first Thursday in May and this year we are running into November. This is a cool neighborhood and there are quite a few gardeners and more people are starting to garden all the time. There are several cool in-town gardening neighborhoods. Grant Park has quite a few gardeners, Ormewood Park has a few and a community garden. We have a teensy community garden and are growing more gardeners, Oakhurst has an awesome community garden (that's where I teach adult garden classes) and loads of amazing gardeners. When I first moved to Atlanta, there was a sure lack of greening and vegetable growing. It has surely changed in 11 years! Shot, it's the lucky lady who gets a Fig Tree for a valentine. One year I did get a sledge hammer. Boy, that sure was the best valentine I ever got, and it gets used all the time hammering up old concrete pieces for my garden edging! GGG

Just had a great alfresco dinner with DH on the porch after I got home from the YellowHammer. We had a Parker Sonoma white....grapefruit flavors...the wines I bought at the Green Market are WONDERFUL. I am planning on having some shipped to GA as that is OK legally...my DD will accept them at her address . I will tell DB you loved Buddy :)....the cat ?? Can't stop telling DS1 how great NYC food scene is....he is sold...now to get time off to bring him. c

It was fun to check in with this forum for the first time in quite a while and see this thread on the first page. I appreciate all of the comments, especially the newest ones. So let me share what I've been doing about organzing my lifef. I have been struggling with the "control journal" concept since I posted this thread over three years ago! for starters, I dislike the name, "control journal." The system seems inflexible. And something that I don't care for about Flylady is that there is a high level of emotionality in that system. But I will admit that she is spot-on about many things and I appreciate all of the insights that I've gained from that system. But back to "control journal" I prefer kitchen binder or household binder. Maybe I'll call my the household binder. But that's not the point. I do have a white 1/2" binder with all of my zones and lists in it... it just looking at that binder every day that is a huge challenge for me. I have seven children and my days seem to bring me such a variety of things, many unanticipated, that it's hard to keep everything on track. Plus, I'm a lazy soul, so it's hard to get me moving. But of course, if I'm not going to work the program then it won't work for me! Just a last week I found a Franklin Covey planner on clearance at Target, so I finally took the plunge to organize my time better. This is a smallish size #4 planner in a six-ring binder, so it doesn't give an hour-by-hour breakdown of the day, but it does provide two pages to a week, a two-page spread for the entire month, and then lots of other forms for a lot of different purposes. Before, I've just used the fridge calendar to keep track of activities. That was hit or miss (things didn't always get recorded). Plus, it's inconvenient to take the enormous calendar off of the fridge door and write things down in front of the computer (we get so much schedule info via email). Now, when I'm going through email, I take my planner with me. That makes it so much easier. And rather than writing things on post-it notes and sticking them to my microwave door, my coffee maker (the really urgent reminders go there), or my key ring (see how zany I was) I jot things down in the planner. So for the first time in the 20 years that I've been a wife and mother, everything is being written in one place. However, we still put notes on the coffee maker when something is very, very important. I make myself read the planner while I drink my coffee in the morning. And now I feel so guilty about not using my control journal *household binder* in three years that I will take that binder with me and my planner and my cup of coffee every morning. Something else that I also do with my *household binder* is put paperwork that needs immediate attention into it so that this stuff doesn't get lost. I noticed on the Franklin Covey website that you can buy "Forms Wizard" which is software to create personalized planner forms. I would love to take my Flylady zone lists and make forms to fit into my planner. By the way, I am a stay-at-home mother and my planner doesn't leave the house. both binders stay on my microwave oven during the day. I read Julie Morgenstern and liked her notion that time is like a closet that you fill with tasks, rather than a real closet that you fill with stuff. It helps me to see my time more concretely. Something else I'm learning is the importance of goal setting. That seems to be a Franklin Covey focus as well. I personally have had such a difficult time (throughout the years of raising my seven children) of actually accomplishing anything for myself, that I really just gave up trying. But about a year ago I decide that the extra weight had to go. So I have lost 55 pounds. That has been my focus in life. But now I can shift back to the household since one of the most important issues in my own life is finally being dealt with successfully. I need to revisit Flylady, I'm sure she's added new ideas to her program. I will check back to the forum for more advice and encouragement on how to get it together and become more organized. Thank you for your posts, I appreciate reading anyone's story, even if it's still in process, of how they created a system to manage time better.

thyrkas, I have a collection of fountain pens, mostly inherited from my grandparents and great-grandparents. They are not the ones I use on a daily basis as they require a bottle of ink and need to be re-filled. While the process is fairly simple, with curious kids in the house, it's far more tidy to use a modern fountain pen with a cartridge. I've a Parker fountain pen that was quite reasonable in terms of price and the cartridge refills come five per package, if memory serves, and only cost a couple of dollars. Many types of daily use fountain pens and refills can be found at the big square office products stores like Staples. The beauty of a fountain pen is that it slows down my writing and in doing that, forces my brain to slow down as well. It's a lovely way to write and nothing else can really compare. If you try it, I will be interested in hearing about the experience! I like the idea of only writing on one side of the page. With a fountain pen, you sometimes get a blotch of ink that could soak through and writing on one side would keep it a bit more tidy. And there is that bonus of editing...although I may have some rather sparse pages here and there in relation to my earlier post...if you get my drift. PAM