Hi, James!  Recently you wrote in a message to Ardith Hinton:

AH>  I just had to do a double-take....  :-))

JB>  L!!! No, I was nowhere near, and nowhere near as grey.
JB>  I'm 45, BTW.


          That's more or less what I thought.  Glad you confirmed it,
though... I wondered afterwards if I should have said something.  :-)



JB>  ...And yes, I'm still >95% Ukrainian, in case someone wants
JB>  to get all PC on me. 


          No problem AFAIC.  The Canadian mosaic, eh?  You don't seem to
object to my being >95% British, and I've never met a Ukrainian I didn't
like....  ;-)



AH>  I had older parents, both of them raised on the prairies.

JB>  What a coincidence. I had older parents, too! (Yes, I know
JB>  when I'm being a brat. ;-)


          I thought so... my mother told me about how her little brother
pushed her head first into a rain barrel & whatnot!  As a child I often
wished I had a little brother.  Nowadays I'm quite content to borrow other
people's....  :-)))



[re serger]
JB>  I think this demonstrates how I try to work.


          Yes.  When I was growing up my parents always had a cardboard box
set aside for items to be donated to the church rummage sale, so it's
second nature to me to think "Who else might be able to use
this?"  Like you, I'm thinking of who in particular as well.  If you
enjoy fixing things but don't have the space for them all it makes sense to
give them away once they're fixed....  :-)



JB>  I now have to repair the factory second 400-thread count
JB>  sheets I just picked up.


          IIRC I've never paid list price for towels & bedding.  So
they need a bit of work?  If you have the skills & the time & the
equipment to do the work, you can save a lot of money.  I found one of
Nora's favourite sweat shirts in a charity resale shop.  The hand-stitched
appliqu‚ was an artistic masterpiece... yet the shirt was marked down to
fifty cents because it had a minute bit of egg yolk stuck to it.  Or maybe
that's the one which was marked down because it had a small stain on a
white background in an inconspicuous location.  With both of these I was
able to remedy the problem in five minutes or less, anyway....  :-)



JB>  I can't afford the space to house my backup everythings,
JB>  and it's good therapy for me to let go of those things.


          Uh-huh.  Same here....  :-)



[re $$$ value of plastic flowers in Calgary]
JB>  Ya... The shipping would kill the profits. 


          I reckon it probably would.  And I did find a suitable home for
them. I'd noticed, when Dallas & Nora & I attended a high school
production of LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS in an economically deprived
neighbourhood, that the flower shop would have been more credible if it
actually contained some flowers.  So I gave the drama department a few
items they could use as costumes & stage props.  :-)



JB>  Now, a confession. I've only gathered most of the
JB>  material to update my house.


          You have long term goals... I think that's very important.  While
you may have bitten off more than you can chew, it may be too soon to be
sure.  The people I worry about are the ones who don't do the sort of
self-analysis you've been doing, don't learn from adversity, and/or just
hang around waiting to die. If you keep more cedar scraps than you can use
immediately, what I'm hearing is that you're planning to be around for
awhile.  And I trust you will be....  :-)




--- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+