I would love to have some of your seeds. What r u looking to get for them?

What a neat idea! I'll have to check out those buttons. I wonder if they can be ordered online.

Greg H, Your message tells me how you are managing ... debt. Wisely, yes. To your advantage, yes. It's still ... debt. D-E-B-T - a four-letter word! Cut it whatever way you like, it's still debt. Which can be become a *serious* problem when it's misused. That you are obligated to pay - even if you get a temporary lay-off, or with certain specific skills no longer in demand, a pretty well permanent one, or suffer permanent disability, or have a kid who subsequently develops a need for $50,000. worth of uninsured medical care - or even die. There's only one way you can avoid it - go bankrupt. Which steals from other folks who gave you services in good faith, from which you walked away. Some do that several times - walk away ... smiling. The message was, as I said earlier, not directed to the likes of you or people anywhere near as smart as you when it comes to managing money. Like, maybe, your friend's kid who, though s/he was in college, wasn't too smart when it came to money management. A local Canadian financial consultant complains that they don't teach much about it in school. If the corporations, including the financial ones, get their feet more heavily into the schools, there'll probably be even less. In his book, he offers advice on how to make a rate of return of 40% or better on your money - guaranteed. Proviso - you can only make that (before-tax) rate on store-issued credit cards whose balance you pay off. Maybe, had your friend's offspring not been willing to pay attention to his/her parent, as being out of the dark ages when it came to instructions as to wise ways to live, s/he'd have listened to you had you offered some advice. The reason for making the point about it actually being a debt that was being incurred when you use the card was to try to get some people who know much less than you about money management to begin to think about it somehat differently. The point of the message was to show them how they might reduce their cost somewhat if they followed a different pattern than some may have started through following the easy path of signing up for a store-issued card. I approached it with some trepidation, for I was advising ... taking out an additional card. Which could (too?) easily have a major debt run up on it, as well - leaving the holder in a deeper hole than previously. Should I become aware of that result springing from advice which I had given, it would trouble me greatly. Much more concerned than I was about complaints such as yours - which I hear about half of the time that I make this point. By the way - you didn't say that I was wrong - you just said that everybody does it, right? By the way, elsewhere in the message, when I was not dealing with the specific issue of the debt aspect of the card, I referred to them without using the quotation marks. Your country - government and people - is drowning in debt. And digging the hole deeper, daily. The "value" of your dollar is dropping - had you noticed? Good wishes to you for wise management of your money - and assets, Greg. ole joyful

I'd like to suggest taking a picture of the entire family instead of just your daughter for the Christmas cards. It'll mean a whole lot more in the years to come. I was looking through the photo album that my in-laws kept for their kids this weekend. FIL took pictures of the 3 kids and put them in the album every year, but there are no family pictures. It just seems like the missing years without everyone in there. In some cases, those are the only pictures of the family during those years that the relatives and other close friends have. You can still do a really cute picture with the whole family. Last year was our son's 1st Christmas. We did the basic pose standing in front of the tree. My husband and I wore Santa hats. My son wore reindeer antlers. The picture that we ultimately used for the Christmas cards is priceless. We got lots of compliments on that picture. This year, we're going to pose in front of either the state capitol or one of the downtown Christmas light displays. If ds cooperates, we are all wearing Santa hats. A suggested cute pose for daughter only is Baby New Year. Last year we posed ds up in front of the tv while we were watching the ball drop. Ds was nude, but the picture would have looked cute with him in a diaper. We used a beer bottle as a prop, but if you have the fancy bottle of grape juice or something else nonalcoholic, that would look cute also. We emailed the picture out to close family and friends as a New Year Greeting. We put a picture in ds's baby book for posterity.