I feel this. The insecty things really should steer clear of my garden. What we really need is for someone to figure out bug language, and then create a bill board for them. 😁

Congratulations! Grandbabies are the best kind of babies!

I had no idea notate is so prolific! Jealous of your dwarf pomegranate. I say find the snail and feed it to a bird, relishing the thought as you do. Stupid thing. I really get peeved with the bad invaders in my garden. You have no idea how viciously I ended cabbage beetles that went after our eggplant!

Could you harvest snow, melt, and water plants with that to avoid the chlorine? Ya. I know. A pain in the neck to do it!

I approve of all this lovely festiveness! And as a former quasi music therapist, thanks for thinking of a lovely solution for your special needs students. You are the best!

It truly is. In recent years, though we are a 40% of all revenue comes from agriculture, they tried to eliminate the county extension office because they are required to pay about $60,000 a year towards its operation with the rest coming from the state through MSU. People went nuts on them! No soil testing, water testing horticulturalist, no master gardener program, you name it, in a rural, agricultural community. They were going to give tax rebates to some friends of theirs for doing well, exactly nothing for the county, and then vote themselves huge pay raises. Sigh. Anyway. Off topic and getting political so I will seethe quietly to self from here on out!

Okay, see, ya'll always come through! The Hive for the win. I will buy a couple and roast them to see what he thinks, and then see if I can get my hands on some celeriac. I am not certain I have ever seen it locally, but I am game to try it if I can find it.

I ordered a book on Michigan soils and micro-climates, and I picked up a pamphlet from the Extension office on encouraging my blueberry bushes that struggled this summer. Apparently yelling at them and telling them they are a disappointment, and stop loafing around like a teen on Saturday morning just isn't cutting it! 😂 So I will read these in January when the holiday insanity has subsided and I am staring at 3 ft snow drifts outside. I know with hoophouses and growing lights indoors, some of our Northern folks might still be harvesting. I am curious how our Southerners are doing. Are plants flourishing? Has anyone had their first ripe tomato?

And especially just more workers. About 15 years ago or there about - Under Governor Granholm - the budget was cut to the bone and the caseload for social workers left behind was tripled and in some cases quadrupled. So a lot of stuff never even get followed up on, and families under supervision aren't actually supervised. Burn out is beyond the pale of reason. So for Michigan, a massive problem. Then the state got behind on billing the counties for their portion of the foster care bill for their children in the system. Our county didn't know it was $400,000 behind on paying the state and then had 30 days to pay it. They basically ordered CPS in our county to return every single child to their bio parents that month in retaliation since they fired a bunch of county workers in order to take the funds out of payroll. No flipping joke. Our stupid county commissioners bungle every budget they have, spend on stuff they shouldn't, never put a dime away, and then fire people when things get tough only to have to rehire those positions later. Corruption, corruption, corruption.

Dh got his bloodwork back from.his annual check up, and he had elevated AIC, not high, not diabetic, just bumping toward the lower threshhold of prediabetic. Diabetes does not run on either wide of his family. No one has it. Genetics possibly at play because their Scandi genes seem to keep them long and lean, and everyone on that side is a big foodie eats tons of veggies and fruits. I think what has happened is he has an absolutely ridiculous sweet tooth, eats quite a bit of candy, puts sugar in his tea, sugar in his spaghetti sauce, his chilli, you name it. He is now determined to get that back down. He is a mashed potato lover and doesn't want to give that up. I am going to stock red potatoes which are lower glycemic index than my usual yukons, but I was reading that parsnips are quite low gli high in fiber, and some people eat them mashed. I don't think he would go whole on parsnip mash. But I am wondering if I could put some parsnip puree in with mashed red potatoes and up the fiber content, lower the gli, and have the flavor still be "mashed potatoes". Don't suggest mashed cauliflower. He hates and despises cooked cauliflower....probably the only veg he cannot stand cooked as again, he is a major foodie and if it doesn't moo or baa from the plate or bite back, he likes it! 😂 I was thinking maybe 1 - 9" parsnip to 4 red potatoes, for 2-3 people. However, since I have never cooked with them, I don't know what to expect from the flavor and texture. I will be shunned by my family if I make nasty mashed potatoes at the holidays! 😜 Is that ratio even worth doing in terms of making the dish more glycolic friendly?

The corruption never ends!

Welcome to 1980's politics in Michigan. It was dumb, wild ride. So basically they made it legal and made it sound like it was restrictive, and then promptly made it so there was ZERO teeth of any kind. It would be like prohibition with no enforcement so Budweiser keeps making beer and distributing it while illegal but no one gives a crap, but the state can say 'we have laws to control it". Crazy.

Same here in Michigan. Legally, if you aren't a licensed teacher, you can't homeschool except by religious exemption. But no one has to file. We homeschooled for academics primarily, but when asked - and this is true- I explained that the current white European bias and Manifest Destiny emphasis in US history and civics education went against both the bitter truth and our personal beliefs, and that was NOT a lie. But ya, even the statute here requires homeschooling parents to cover a laundry list of academic subjects/topics, but there is no follow up or enforcement. I would not be opposed to a portfolio review where even just 80 lessons/papers for each su ject had to be handed in. I am against it being the public school that looks at it. I would rather it be an independent group, maybe the teacher education professors of a university or developmental pediatric psychologists or something, anything but the local ps who would have a vested, financial interest in saying they never received it when they did or lying about the contents in order to get the kid forced back into PS for the per head funding. That said, just freaking reform public education to start. In my state, they really do not have a leg to stand on pointing fingers at others for the moment, except the egregious violations.

I agree 100%. The vast majority of kids attend public and private school. The vast majority of kids who are in the foster care system were public and private schools students who languished for years under terrible abuse and neglect. Our lack of value of children historically in this nation is the issue. The general we, the leadership doesn't care enough to reform the system, take decisive action, stop reuniting children with their abusive parents, and fund foster care and group homes, possibly even nice, loving boarding schools. They don't, and if you bring it up to a lot of people, they will complain that they don't want their tax dollars going to it. On the subject of education itself, I wish that portfolio review or something was a burden on the homeschooling community because I see soooooo much powerfully egregious educational neglect in religious communities here. These children really would be better off in our sad, pathetic local public schools which is a real endictment of "using homeschooling as an excuse to keep my kid blindly ignorant so he/she can't imagine leaving this religion." We need a children's bill of rights to start.

Heart, since you are a brand new employee, I would also send photo documentation of the road being flooded or a link to an online news source stating the road is flooded and shouldn't be traversed. This way they don't think the new employee is just being a flake and trying to get out of working on the weekend already. I am going to take a wild guess that the thermostat on that dryer is going up which is why the previous tenants didn't take it along. But just in case they didn't know about lint blockages in the hose and vent, it is probably worth checking out before declaring the dryer worthless.

Heart, if you can slide the dryer out and remove the hose that vents it, you can check to see if it is plugged which prevents proper air flow and is also a fire hazard. It might need to be cleaned. You can also take a stick and feel around in the wall opening and see if there is lint clog in there. That does happen.

You warned me at the word "glitter". If there is a satan, glitter is his muse!

AA batteries. Everyone needs them for a wide variety of devices, and it gets old buying them. If providing recharging stations at the office, giving them rechargeable batteries is great. Mark puts six in each of our adult kids' stockings at Christmas with a little note, "Amazon basics. Gift not included." They love it, and their friends think it is hilarious as well as a much needed gift. I am a big fan of those pocket size LED flashlights as well. So handy to keep in pockets, purses, glove compartments, etc.

I am so sorry! This has been such a long journey for your mom and your family. Many hugs from me to you.

Agreed! When books are actually removed from public funded libraries, not just potentially re-shelved in an agreed upon age/grade appropriate area, then they are being banned. From publication? No. But they are being effectively banned for the economic class of families whose tax payer dollars are being used to fund the library, and then they are told they have no right for their child to have access to that book at the library whereas they had it before. That is an official ban, and the actors involved in making these decisions are elected school board members being paid with tax dollars to do the job, by township officials, city council members, etc. all on the public dole making official decisions. Just because a state legislature or congress does not decree this through a vote on the hill, doesn't make it less of a ban. It isn't a private decision by a privately owned, privately held company. So therefore, it does meet the qualification of a ban. The definition of ban is not restricted only to what the federal government restricts. But in this particular case, the biggest issue is that this fallacious argument of "got addicted to porn because a scholastic book contained a cartoon illustration of two people kissing" has been used to further the business aims of one of Scholastic's, competitors. Beyond that, this is also a case of one woman making a very public announcement that either she is a paid agent of Brave Books OR she is a sex addict and needs therapy ASAP. I suspect the first, but since she has conspired to be a part of this crap, I am fine with her being labeled and hounded as the other. You reap what you sow, and it is time to allow this to happen to the bad actors involved in this constant attack on everyone else's choices. Taking a leaf right out of the usual outrage groups' playbooks, if they don't like the books at the public school, then send they can send their kids to private school or homeschool. If they don't want their kids to read something that violates their family values, then get their a$$es off the couch, and go to the library with their kid and actually parent said child. It is not the librarians' jobs, the volunteers' jobs, to keep track of the whims every parent in the district. Take some responsibility for their own kid instead of having a winge and a nutty about other families literary choices.

We were invited back to Egypt. The DWB clinic needs Mark to do more IT work for them. He would love to go. But given the unrest in the region, and the fact that Egypt is in the thick of this in terms of refugees, border security, etc. we are opting not to go at this time. I have decided to avoid Paris for a while. I would love to go back, but man that place has been riled up messy, and since sis lives in Nice` now, I can fly there and bypass Charles de Gaulle by choosing a layover in London or Amsterdam. About the only international travel we are currently considering is Denmark, possibly a trip back to Iceland, and Nice` plus potential Carribean beachy thing next winter. As for people coming to the US from other countries, I don't know why unless you live somewhere like El Salvador. We have so much darn gun violence, I just don't see what the allure could be. Go hang out in Barabados, New Zealand, Costa Rica, Norway, Canada, somewhere else. I can't recommend my home country to anyone.

We appreciate them being lead free and lightweight. I have plain white, and use them for everything. On the holidays, I break out my King Crown Ruby Thumbprint. Otherwise, always the white corelle and it works well. I like the fact that with my white, I can use any color scheme, and all my cloth napkins regardless of pattern, look just fine with them.

What kind of cracks me up is "unopened package of hot dogs" 2 weeks. Really? The amount of preservatives in them is rather astounding. Ya. Not buying a lot of these recommendations.

I wish I had purchased extra of a glass bead garland we used for 20 years. We absolutely loved it! So pretty. But over time, due to the strain of use, the string deteriorated, beads fell, some cracked when they hit the hard wood floor so we couldn't restring them. We never found anything like it after that. If I had purchased extra, we would have had that waiting to be used when the first set wore out. We still miss that garland. So I am very pro, keep the extra for a later date.

Also, is the school board planning on banning kissing? Just wondering. I am pretty certain most kids have witnessed their parents kiss at one point or another. Maybe a ban on children attending weddings, watching Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, Shrek, Princess Bride, Beauty and the Beast,....what next? Their brain cells don't seem to connect in such a way as to make common sense a possibility.