If it were not for parchment paper, I would NEVER roll & cut-out cookies! Parchment makes the whole process fast, easy & goof proof. It might sound more complicated than it is, just because it's harder to write about it than do it: 1. As soon as you've made the dough, put a blob of it between two sheets of parchment. The fresh soft dough quickly rolls easily to the desired thickness! If the parchment wrinkles, peel off the top sheet and put it back on to straighten it. After you are done rolling, put the parchment paper with dough between on a cookie sheet in the fridge. Keep rolling and layering the sheets in the fridge. By the time the last is rolled, the first is chilled enough to cut. 2. To cut..remove a rolled layer of dough with parchment on both sides from fridge. Peel the top parchment sheet off and cut the cookies out with the bottom parchment in place. Keep the top sheet for reuse. Remove excess dough from cookie shapes for re-rolling. 3. Slide the parchment with cut cookies onto a cookie sheet & pop into the oven. When done, slide the parchment with cookies off the cookie sheet onto a cooling rack. I usually wait till cookies are almost cool to remove from parchment and continue to let them thoroughly cool on the rack. 4. Repeat the process. Re-roll excess dough between two sheets of used parchment. Keep going until all of the cookies are baked. ***Notice that you never transfer a cookie until AFTER it's baked and cooled a little. That means NO misshapen cookies! Also saves tons of time transferring cookies from cutting surface to baking sheet. ****If you cover the whole stack of dough rolled between parchment with plasic wrap, you can keep it in the fridge for as long as your dough permits. If you double cover the stack tightly, you can freeze the stack for as long as your dough permits. You can also cut the cookies, remove the excess dough, place a sheet of parchment on top, wrap, refrigerate or freeze and bake later. Or to save space, freeze unbaked cookies until firm and layer between sheets of waxed paper in a plastic box. When ready to bake, just place the cut cookies directly on parchment and bake immediately, adding just a few minutes for the use of frozen dough. If you want to thaw frozen dough, leave it wrapped in the fridge for half the day or so, then, leaving the wrapping still on, place on counter until it reaches the temperature you want. Don't thaw unwrapped dough or skip the fridge stage of defrosting...you can wind up with very wet dough from condensation. I've used most brands of parchment, in rolls and sheets. I like having the sheets precut but I haven't found a parchment that I really like that comes precut. I've found most precut sheets wrinkle more during rolling and can't be reused too many times. The best I've used for this process is Beyond Gourmet, it doesn't wrinkle as much as the others but it does curl a lot and I can't get it to cut well on the box. Instead, I fold stacks of it and run a long knife through the folds to cut into sheets. I can't believe how much you get in one roll and how many times I can use one sheet. It's deceptively thin and light. The cutting and curling is a bit of a pain but overall it's worth it. I bought it very cheaply online and stocked up. I think I might try re-rolling a box in the oppositive direction and letting it sit till I need to use it. It might even be faster to just iron a roll of it flat and cut into sheets in advance! What I won't do for a pretty, well baked cookie!!! Barbara

Interesting thoughts -- we could all improve on paperwork storage in our homes. Two things I think I'm doing well that differ from the above mentioned Script, and someone else might find some ideas in my methods: Taxes. Yes, like Script, I am scrupulous about maintaining records for my taxes. About a dozen years ago I went to the office supply and bought two big boxes of BRIGHT GREEN folders (green like money). I labeled them Taxes 2000 ... Taxes 2001 ... Taxes 2002 ... Taxes 2003 ... and so on. Given my family's typical lifespan, I made enough green folders to take me to age 110 -- probably more than I'll need, but I'm ready! They're all stored in my file cabinet, taking up very little space. Now when I receive anything tax-related -- a charitable receipt, an end-of-the-year bank statement, whatever -- I have a place to file it. In April, I have a place to file a copy of my taxes, and I can go back and see previous tax years. For the rest of my life, this system is in place. Death folder. Ours is a notebook. Two identical notebooks, actually, since we have two children. Our girls are young adults now, but they've never dealt with an estate -- even if they don't open it 'til they're old, it'll be useful to them. It contains a lot of stuff: - A personal letter to the two of them - A list of our wishes about funeral and items we'd like donated to various family members or charities - A list of things they must do immediately; it starts with going to our house and taking possession of the dog, but it also includes small details like canceling our voting registration and destroying any medicines in the house. At every turn this list includes addresses and phone numbers, including the lawyer we suggest for probate, the funeral home our family's always used, and family members who should be contacted. - A copy our will; they know what's in it -- everything split between the two of them - A list of our financial assets -- bank accounts, investments, insurance, deeds/maps of real estate ... when our youngest became a legal adult, we made the two girls co-beneficiaries of every account; note that this was done before either was married, so our two kids -- not future son-in-laws -- will own these items. - A list of the bills we pay each month -- electricity, phone, even the guy who cuts our grass. - Official copies of our birth certificates, our marriage certificates, and the girls' birth certificates -- they might not be needed, but the girls won't have to scramble to find them - A flashdrive with all of the above in digital format plus photographs that might be useful in putting together the funeral Our rule: We keep two years of tax returns in the notebooks ... the reason being that someday an accountant will file our final estate tax return, and he or she will want our last two years of returns -- so every April we pull out the notebook, discard one old return and insert the newest ... so our rule is that every April we look over the notebook and update anything that's changed. For example, last year we changed bank accounts, and someday we hope to add items concerning grandchildren to the book. Our girls know that the notebooks are stored in the safe, and they know where the key to the safe is hidden, and they know it's labeled with a misleading name so that a thief wouldn't look at it twice. Last thought on this notebook: Though this project took us the better part of a year --- we kept remembering one more thing, one more thing that really should be included -- we didn't find it difficult emotionally. I suspect that if we were older and/or one of us were in poor health, it might've been different.

You are doing great! And it sounds like you are doing some of the same things that I am! At the moment, I'm procrastinating (taking a break) from cleaning up my worktable so it can get in gear for Christmas. It's been the world's slowest quilting station for the past few months (in that I only get to it a few minutes here and there), but now I need to change gears and put that away for a short while to start getting packages ready to ship- within the next 2 weeks :) Medical stuff is interesting in some ways. It's not something that I've had a great deal of experience with, but am getting a little more. From my perspective, I would keep the more bureaucratic end of things in a 'to be shredded' type situation, and keep information pertaining to your actual medical health in chronological order for the long term. Sometimes it's helpful to look back at your medical reports/results over the long term. In some cases you can probably do this online, but I can say for myself that keeping paperwork that you can lay out and look at can be very useful. I'll give you a very recent example. This week, DH got results from a routine blood test that said it was out of acceptable limits. Very quickly we were able to pull out paperwork results from the last time he had these tests from two different sources (4yrs and9 yrs) and the levels were almost identical- and considered normal then. This was incredibly helpful for us to not panic and to come up with suitable questions regarding what is going on (i.e. was it suppose to have been a fasting test they did, but they forgot to mention that to him?) This is a little bit difficult to write about, so I will try to keep it succinct, but last year a family member of ours overdosed on RX drugs. What happened was he messed up his brain and essentially made himself a dementia type patient for 5 months, unable to care for himself. During that time, we ended up setting out and tracking down as much medical information as we could about him, because he was not capable of answering questions from a standpoint of reality. It would have been much easier had we had paper copies from his home to begin with. For the first few months, we didn't have an accurate medical picture of who he had been for the past years (he is a hermit, for lack of a better word) which made his doctor's appointments a hit-and-miss proposition. In the end, my DH ended up collecting everything we were able to get from the past few years, and filing it in chronological order inside of a binder. I would definitely go that book-style route again with medical records and decide on the topic whether they should be kept for 2 years, 5 years, indefinitely. Right now, DH, DD and I are able to keep all our medical stuff in a small folder, but as we get older and have more things going on, I will probably look into using a binder, maybe even filing by year with page separators? Hope you find a good system and get your packages out on time :)

The portion of the house that my plants are in is half underground. We run central heat at about 70F, but it stays cooler downstairs usually and that room in particular has all the vents closed. I'd say with big circulation fan blowing on them it's probably in the mid to high-60F range, probably closest to 67-68F during the warmer weather we've been laughingly calling 'winter'. I don't have a thermometer in that room but the living room registers a solid 68F most of the time. Might be a bit warmer considering the lights -- they are LEDs though and do not give off a lot. Probably just got lucky. The rest of the pieces are doing nothing except a few that are possibly molding. Do not quite have the sterilization washes down. I'm a clumsy gal and while my brain understood the concept, my hands were not always as quick to obey, haha.