Julianna - one of our club best AV growers came from Arizona and the AZ violets clubs do great despite the adversity. You can do it so much better than Lowes. There 2 things you need to consider - how good is your water and do you have a kind of separate room or basement where you can grow them - so you can have a place you can maintain a higher humidity. If you have it - you can grow AVs on the moon. Irina

Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU! Such wonderful tips you've shared, and now I'm feeling a bit more confident about the whole thing! I work best when I have an organized process going on. It's when things become jumbled and chaotic that I tend to feel like I'm going to lose it. And speaking of losing it - yesterday, DH and I were working together and found that we kept moving things. The scissors - which were JUST RIGHT HERE not five minutes ago, had somehow taken flight and flown two rooms away. The packing tape ... where'd the flippin' packing tape run off to? It went on like that for quite some time, until we determined it would work best if DH would go out and mow the lawn and leave me to the packing on my own. Sometimes having a helper isn't much ... help. Our boxes are all broken down into flat pieces at this point, and DH is going to "make" two or three of them that I can work on each evening. I think that methodically working my way through the breakables and getting them all boxed up will be a big load off my mind. I know this will all come together and we'll get it done. I appreciate the encouragement and the info shared here -- definitely ideas we will be putting to use as we get further along in this.

I thought I'd post an update here for anybody who might be reading this in the future. After reading the comments here, I decided that I was probably going to be most like the people who liked the drawer. So I set my sights on LG LRMDC2306S, which is a counter-depth with flex drawer. Then I tried to find one to look at. I couldn't find that exact one (yet), but I found a similar model, the LRMVC2306S, which appears to be exactly the same except with "InstaView," their window-into-the-fridge feature. And I could not believe how small the fridge interior seemed. I brought my measuring tape to see if a 12-pack of soda would fit, since I'd seen people complaining in a few places that it wouldn't. I thought it was hyperbole, but no, soda boxes are 21" long and the shelves were 16-18" deep. If the shelves inside the right-side door were arranged just so, and only contained small things, I think it would be possible to fit a soda box in there front to back, but it would overhang the shelf and go into the closed-door shelf space. (It's not possible on the left side door since the icemaker is there.) The InstaView shelving did not allow this, but it looked like maybe it would be the case on the original model I wanted to see. And it was the case on several other counter-depth fridges I tested. Not a great solution, and maybe soda boxes aren't my only constraint, but I wasn't thrilled about this. So I just started opening counter-depth fridges at the store to see what felt bigger to me. I settled onto two others: The LG LRFXC2416S, which claims to only have one additional cubic foot but seems a lot larger. The KitchenAid KRFC704FBS which feels a LOT larger but is similarly sized as well. The KitchenAid seems to be about $1k more for an equivalent feature set, but I haven't fully researched it yet. Consumer Reports scored both of these highly. I'm not sure yet what we're going to do, but I'm coming to the realization that although a flex drawer is nice, I think it would only be viable for me on a standard-depth fridge. I just can't take the overhead hit to the volume. I'm still trying to find a LRMDC2306S that I can see in person somewhere, but I suspect I'll end up with one of the other models. The KitchenAid is quite fancy and has nifty wood-look accents inside, but the LG makes "craft ice" (2" diameter clear ice spheres) which simultaneously seem like a ridiculous gimmick and also something I really want in my life even though I almost never use ice.

I don't know where you live, but if you have a good restaurant supply shop near you, they should have a good selection of soup bases, as these are used frequently by restaurants. It seems that most restaurant supply shops now sell retail, and so you do not need a resale license to shop there. I go to Surfas in Culver City, and they have a different selection of soup bases. I have bought chili soup base there as well as dried mushrooms. I use tomato powder if I want tomato flavor (or dried tomato flakes), but I have to store the tomato powder in a glass jar with desiccant packets and vacuum seal it. I also use the Knorr chicken/tomato soup base, although it does not have that much of a tomato flavor. I agree that it is difficult to find no-salt soup base, and I generally try to buy the reduced salt versions. I always consider soup base to be a substitute for salt, and of course I use no salt when I use soup base that is salty. I don't know how low in salt you want your dishes to be, but I particularly do not like salt, even though I do not have a problem with sodium levels - possibly because I've been avoiding excessive salt most of my life.