Dear Betty,

You are obviously a dedicated employee. Please consider:

-CallerID
-VoiceMail
-Email once in a while.


All of these things are asynchronous, so you don't have to break pace to deal with them. And always remember, life can go on (if not a little cluncky) without you.

Love and hugs,

The Stoat XXX.

But she was looking out for your wallet!

And Betty, if there's another day off 'to save money' next week - listen to the Stoatmeister!

I was reading John Updike's obit and had no idea he wrote Witches of Eastwick.

I guess Updike won't be having another cherry. :(

I'm cleaning my office, and came up with a solution to the now-ginormous stacks of industry magazines. I'm going to go through each one, tear out the stuff I'm interested in and then recycle the rest. I'll put the removed articles in a binder, and eventually scan them so I have them for good without taking up any space at all.

From that point, I'll do the same as they arrive in the mail. Goodbye clutter! :D

Right on. We did some work on the garage over the weekend. Unpacked the very last of the boxes from when we moved what - 6 years ago now?

One box was trash. Must have gotten mixed in somehow but we moved and stored a box of nothing but trash that should have gone to the dump.

On the brighter side, I took a whole car load to the goodwill. Lot's of books and little kids toys and clothes.

I realize I could have had a great garage sale - but it's been sitting in there so long I just couldn't wait until we got around to having one.

I must tell you - once I started on the path to getting rid of stuff, it felt great. The more I got rid of, the more I wanted to get rid of more.

Next month's project is the garage. I'm actually looking forward to hauling crap off. It really is liberating! :snap:

That was the only thing of his I enjoyed reading. That man mastered the art of the neverending sentence & paragraph.

We've got 2 projects we're about to undertake. Replacing our absurdly noisy bathroom fan. Not to jinx it, but that should be straight forward. Buy a new one, make sure the duct sizes match, some screws some wires, voila.

Next up will be a complete rebuild of our bedroom closet. Right now we have one 9+ ft long rod and shelf. Like everything else the previous owners did, it's half-assed. The shelf supports they were NOT made to handle the weight of all of our clothes + stroage boxes across a 9ft span. The need to replace it became urgent when we tried to put a box back up this weekend and it slid right off of the sagging shelf.

So we're going to rip it out. In its place will be multiple heights of hanging rods, a couple shelves, and space for some sort of shelving or cubbies or something tbd. And we'll be adding lighting.

We'll also be getting rid of the absurd doors on there. 8ft. x 4ft. x 2in thick solid wood sliding monsters. Hanging from a track that barely supports their weight. They're a bitch to slide and a bigger bitch to re-set onto the track when they fall off due to the track being bent from their weight. They also prevent us from decent access to the middle area of the closet.

If we simply take them off and make them go away, it'll be an improvement. Eventually I'd like to get a set of 3 light weight doors on there, but that will be phase 2.

If it goes well, we'll move on to the closet in the guest room. Gotta get some use out of the circular saw I just bought for the project :D

If it helps, we were able to replace just the actual fan unit instead of having to pull and replace the entire fixture. No problem with ducts because the duct attaches to the fan enclosure, which we didn't touch.

Check next to the full fan fixtures for smaller boxes with just the fan units. Less expensive, too. Something like this, though not exactly.