When my sister moved to New York, I was so excited to have her nearby. We have not lived close to each other in a long time. Even though we are sisters, we grew up being the best of friends. I feel sorry for people that do not have any siblings. You miss out on so much if you don’t have someone to share everything with. And after you lose your parents, it is always good to have someone that can remember the good old days when you were growing up. My sister’s house is only a few miles from mine. When she was moving in she needed to save as much money as possible because she lives on a limited income. I told her to go to NY natural gas to find a good deal on her natural gas. These days everyone has to try to save as much money as they can on all expenses. Then I had to show my sister the best places to shop for groceries, the best mall to go to for buying clothes, and a lot of other places. I want to help her as much as I can so she will be happy living here. We have spent a lot of time apart, and I don’t want her to ever move again.

I am hoping that maybe businesses will adapt to the situation by letting their employees work four ten-hour days a week so that they will not have to commute five days a week. In order to do that, however, the day care providers need to be willing to extend their hours. I feel really bad for the people in rural areas where services like that are hard to find.

I really can’t say that I blame them one bit. When I get to be their age I won’t want to have to deal with the rugged life out here either. Of course if I were to suddenly come into some money so that I could hire a gazillion people to take care of the harder physical labor things that would be different. But I certainly can see the appeal of going south for the winter and back up here for the summer. We do have beautiful summers up here. Ron and Mary told us that they are going to go back to Florida next fall and look at buying some Port Saint Lucie real estate for their winter place. They will be looking for a gated community, and are thinking about a retirement village of condominiums that will have lawn care service done for them as part of their condominium annual fees. That sounds good to me!

Several years ago, my husband was introduced to a group of investors who were trying to secure financing and capital to buy into alternative energy companies. This company originated in Holland where there is huge use of windmills as a form of alternative energy. These turbines can be expensive to manufacture and position, but in the end, they may a safe, clean energy source that has yet to be tapped into in our county. I was absolutely astounded when he approached me with this proposal. I have never really thought about alternative energy other than nuclear energy. This particular source scares me with the potential for dangerous environmental impact as well as dangers to human health. Harnessing wind energy, however, is totally safe to both the environment and people. As the trend to “go green” continues, I hope that such safe alternatives become possible choices for Americans. When we moved to Texas, we logged on to Bryan, TX – Are you looking to save on electricity because we were looking for alternatives for our own energy consumption. We were pleased to see that we had choices as consumers in who our carrier would be.

We have a smoke detector in the upstairs hallway and also downstairs, so if there is ever a problem we should get plenty of warning. I hope we never have to hear either of those alarms go off, though.

We had a fire drill a couple of years ago when my daughter came home from school with lessons about fire safety. The teacher had asked all the parents to go over escapes routes from our home and have a plan of action in case we ever have to deal with a house fire. I’m glad we took the time to go over it with her – I feel much more comfortable that she will know what to do in an emergency.

I always said that you could never have too many clothes. But I guess that I’ve gotten to that point where I have so many clothes that I’ve even forgotten some of the things that I have. And then I also have a whole lot of trouble figuring out where any of my clothing items are that I would like to wear. So I have to say that organizing my closet was a necessity instead of more than an exercise.

I’ve tried to organize my closet over the years, but it’s been way too long since I’ve been able to bear throwing something away. It’s just too much emotional anguish for me. So I went online to see if I could find some ideas about what exactly I could do differently this time. When I was searching for that, I ran across some cable and internet packages and after I showed them to my husband I decided to change over our home service to one of those packages.

I invested in some additional shelves and hooks to put in my closet so that once I got everything organized and threw away some stuff, I would be able to see what I have better. They really came in handy for my purses and belts.

I think part of the issue at that time was that perhaps some of the products were on the market, but not widely advertised anywhere.  And without the Internet to allow consumers to search the global marketplace to see what items are available, and without YouTube videos to show us how to install the products that a lot of people resorted to doing without or trying to reinvent the wheel.

I logged onto HOMESECURITYSYSTEM.com to research getting an alarm system while I was watching Rachel Ray today. Before I could finish my research, I had to log onto RachelRay.com to enter an on-line contest. She was having a drawing for something that I absolutely love in her television show kitchen. It is the Carolina blue fridge that is named the “Big Chill”. I would love to have one in my kitchen. It is retro looking. It looks like it was probably produced in the early 1960’s, but is as energy efficient as today’s model fridges. I would redecorate my kitchen if I win this fridge. A couple of years back, I really wanted one and looked into purchasing one. Unfortunately, dealers were really far away. The prices listed on-line placed the retail value at well over three thousand dollars. I just knew that my husband would never go for a three thousand dollar fridge, no matter how much I loved it. Who knows, hopefully I will win Rachel’s fridge and get to do a little redecorating of my own!

I got an e-mail from Barbara this morning suggesting that our movie club girls come to her place tomorrow night and watch a variety of shows and movies that she recorded from her Direct TV over the last few weeks. Barbara’s husband will be out of town on business for the week-end and Barbara does not like to stay at home alone so she wants to turn it into a pajama party sleepover.

The last time that I went to one of Barbara’s movie night pajama party sleepovers Cathy drank too many wine coolers and became very obnoxious. I’m not sure I want to go to the party because I don’t like being around obnoxious drunks. I wish that Barbara would just by a home security cullman alarm system or a couple of dogs so she would stop being afraid to be home alone.