It's such a stormy early evening here (and it's tomorrow night that is supposed to be our real wind and rain coastal storm), I'd love to have my tree, its lights, fire in the fireplace and my quilt. But I took my tree down a few days ago, packed all the ornaments wrapping some, wrapped each piece of the santa figurine collection, thought I had everything carefully stored for another year. Then, saw a little ring sized box on the dining room table that holds the replacement bulbs and the fuses for the tree lights that didn't get into the lights box. And later that night, a chubby little sitting cross legged santa in his horn rimmed glasses still looking at me from the kitchen window sill over the sink. Second try, now everything is put away. I think.

Good luck to you. Our holidays were bittersweet, too. DS#1 got married this year to a real nice girl, so we had her with us this Christmas. However, DS#2 got divorced so that was hard. He has a 3-year-old son so we had to deal with sharing him for the holidays. We had to have our Christmas AFTER December 25. That was a bit difficult for us, but it will get better, we hope. I read somewhere that a mother can only be as happy as her UNhappiest child. That may be true.

I have a room like that. it is overwhelming to say the least when we bought this last year, there are no closets down stairs. so I proceeded to make it a closet I bought clothes racks, for all of the clothes I do not wear every day, and off season clothes. Then there was no linen closet, so all linens,meds,bandages, gift wrapping paper,etc extra toilet paper,bath soaps, shampoos. Then I bought a sewing machine.(the old sewing machine is in there too. And the tools that I need to often to go down to the celler for. Then the clothes racks (not being good ones) fell. It realy is overwhelming.So far I have wired one of the racks to hold til I can find some that are better built. thats as far as I have gotten.I need direction..L O L Gail

cicivacation, I should maybe give this it's own subject line but specifically what do you look for to come up with a virus diagnosis? My plants in my yard had some problems mid-summer; they started looking bad, yellowing and dying leaves from the bottom up. Since the plants improved as soon as the nights cooled I'm thinking the unusual heat or even mites, which like the heat. And the dahlias at the farm came from the same bags, the same stock, and didn't have this problem so I'm thinking not virus. I read that's what's so difficult about diagnosing virus is that the symptoms can be similar to other problems.