Amy Currioman

After years of our family begging and pleading and reasoning with my younger sister for her to quit smoking, she has finally decided to give it up.  She would always say she didn’t care if she died of cancer because “every-one’s gotta die of something!”  But last week her doctor told her that her lungs were diminished and were like someone ten years older and fifty pounds heavier than she is.  I guess that maybe that shook her up enough to decide to try quitting.  She has quit several times in the past, but only for a few weeks or months – like the last time she was pregnant she quit smoking.  But she always went back.  I hope this time she STAYS quit!  I want her to live a long happy healthy life.

Have you ever shopped at the Red Envelope website?  I’ve heard that it’s a good place to buy gifts for almost any occassion.  My father told me that he has been buying his Valentines Day gifts from them the past couple of years and he has been quite happy with their selection of gifts and good customer service.   I like the way the website is set up; you can click on the different holidays, or if the gift is “for her” or “for him” which makes it easier to figure out what to buy.  I also like the fact that each product has a lot of reviews from real customers about the product – and not all of the reviews are positive ones!

Being able to see the negative reviews as well as the positive ones makes me feel that the company is making an honest effort to make sure that the customer has all of the facts about the product.  The selection of products is quite surprising!  The website has quite a few gift item’s I’d never seen before anywhere.  I also like the fact that there is a wide range of prices; making it easy to find something to fit almost any gift-giving budget.

We have a small herd of deer that we enjoy watching in our yard every day. They seem to be such gentle creatures; it’s a shame that they have those stupid ticks that carry lyme disease! This morning I went out to run errands and found a dead deer alongside the road just a couple of houses from our house. A sick feeling hit me as I realized that poor thing was probably one of “our” deer. I always feel so bad for any animal that I see lying beside the road, but it is much worse when you’ve started to feel like it is ‘one of ours.”  I am now anxious to see the herd again later today, to take a head count.

One of the things that I think is so marvelous about living in this technological age is how quickly technology is evolving.  I can remember when I was a young child, going to the store and having the old fashioned cash registers at the check-out counters.  The cashier had to punch in the codes and prices manually.  Now with modern technology, the cashier just has to use something like a PSC Powerscan bar code scanner to ring up the purchase; all the cashier has to do is make sure that the bar code is passed over the scanner!

That certainly lessens the human error side of incorrect charges.  Of course, the data has to be input correctly in the first place; as “they” like to say “garbage in, garbage out!”  And that is certainly true with electronics and computers!

I’ve been playing around with my new to me (picked up at thrift store for $3) bread machine and I’m really enjoying it. When I first picked it up I was afraid that it didn’t work; after all the first one I had bought there didn’t work, but I took another chance on this one and it works just fine. Although when I go through the owners manual and read through the trouble-shooting guidelines I see some of the problems marked with an asterick so it looks like the original user was doing something wrong. I say that because I am not having any of those issues with the machine.

Well today I decided that I wanted to do something a little different than white bread, french bread, sour dough bread, portugese sweet bread. I’ve had good luck with all of those but today I decided to shake it up a little and make some applesauce oatmeal bread. I am looking forward to giving it a try!