More exciting news.....Firemanswife and hubs became the parents to three precious little girls. Children of her cousin. Their instant parenthood has been the sweetest news I have heard in a long time.

In order to get my college degree I had to take business mathmatics, statistics and an algebra & trig class. In high school I took geometry & algebra to prepare me for college. I was hiking with someone a couple of weeks ago. They started talking about a Satyr. I said a what? Half goat, half man. I said a centaur....nooooooooooooooo......that's half horse. :0) Last night we rented the movie Percy Jackson & the Lightning Thief. I asked DH didn't you take the test where you had to know the Roman gods names AND the Greek gods names. He asked, "What class was that?" It's ALL schooling and then remembering it. JMO

Hi, I did not see the original question when I posted above. Sometimes, the posts take a while to load. Irina made an announcement why she was not able to post regularly. I think she and others also mentioned other gessie forums. When I posted and tried to give credit to those who mentored me, I realized I should stop referring to "experts" by name in case anyone wanted to Search for them but might just bump into my Posts in error and get frustrated! Linda probably also got really busy, too. Or sometimes people migrate to other Forums for a while. For myself, life was very hectic for the past 9 months, with my collection showing symptoms of limited care, especially the last 3 colder months. Joanne

Mary, It is amazing how little I shop now (online or off) that we live out in the boondocks. There's just almost no place I want to go badly enough to spend all the time driving there and back when there's always so much else to amuse me at home. It is just as well. The money I used to spend out shopping at the mall (conveniently located midway between my place of employment and our house when we lived in Ft Worth), well, that now is money spent on the garden and on food preservation supplies....and I am much happier now than I was then. Our idea of a big shopping excursion is to drive down to the metroplex, go to CostCo, get gasoline at the CostCo station, then go next door to the Steak and Shake place for lunch and then head home. On the way home, we'll stop at Sam's Club in Denton if there is anything they have that we need and which CostCo does not carry (often it is certain supplies for the VFD), and then if we can think of anything we didn't get at one of the big warehouse clubs, I pop into the Wal-Mart next door to Sam's to get it. Our final stop is a Lowe's or Home Depot if we need anything they carry. It sounds like a long day, but we do it all rather quickly....bam, bam, bam. In and out of each store quickly, getting only what is on our list and zipping on to the next place. The whole time I'm thinking of what I could be doing if we were at home. There's always so much work in the garden and kitchen calling out to me. Because the garden provides so much of our food, we buy a lot less food than we once did which further shortens the shopping trips, other than buying he kinds of things we need to can or to preserve our food in some other way. Malls just don't hold the same attraction for me that they once did. I'm too busy to spend time in them. Maybe once every month or two, we add Central Market to the list to pick up a few favorite items that are hard to find. After even a half a day down in the D-FW metro area, I'm ready to go home and to go back into hibernation. Johnny, That's so true. One of the things that drives me crazy is how much fossil fuel is used to ship food not just across the country but around the food. The average food item in a grocery store travels at least 1500 miles to get to the store. The average home-grown food we love travels 150 feet at most from our garden to our kitchen. Which one is more sustainable? Dawn