The Great Moving Debacle

Believe it or not, this picture is not a screenshot from the show Hoarders. I really wish I could say that it was, but I must admit that this has been the sorry state of the Room Formally Known as the Living Room for the past two weeks. I have a life-long habit of waiting until the last possible, yet still manageable minute to do much of anything, so you would think that when I was made aware of the date in which my partner and I would be moving that I would put off packing up all of our belongings until that date was right around the corner. Normally this would have been the case. In fact, that was supposed to be the case.

We started to look for possible new places to live …

Winterizing Your Yard: Better Late Than Never

I look forward to gardening season like kids look forward to Christmas, and I always feel a bit melancholy when winter comes and I’m stuck indoors looking at seed catalogs. However, the season doesn’t end with the first hard frost.

How you prepare your garden for winter will have a huge bearing on how easy and successful gardening is the following spring. There’s still time if you haven’t already winterized your garden. Plan to spend a few hours outdoors the next time it’s mild and dry, even in the dead cold of winter you do get a few scattered warm days. Here’s the to-do list that I follow each fall and winter:

Trim back damaged or diseased plants and tree branches. Do heavy pruning any time between early and late winter, when the tree is …

Stop Bad Pet Behavior — Comfort Zone with Feliway Review

I have written about our younger cat Vincent here before, and about the behavioral issues we experienced with him from the time he first came to us when he was just 8 weeks old, up until fairly recently. Vincent was the second cat to come into our home. We also have Devin, a female cat who is significantly older than Vincent, so I really didn’t know what I was getting into when my partner and I were asked if we would be willing to take in a kitten who was very different than the exceptionally-behaved, low maintenance cat we had for years.

Vincent had energy like I had never seen before; he climbed up curtains, scratched our furniture obsessively, was afraid of the lid on his litter box, and would urinate where he slept, whether it …

Hoarding Clean Up: Leave It to the Professionals

I used to have a particularly negative attitude towards documentary/reality television shows documenting a person’s struggle with a mental illness, an attribute that sets them apart from the society-accepted version of “normal,” or the challenge to change themselves in the face of discrimination. In my estimation, these shows, while they did strive to reveal a supposedly honest depiction of living with conditions such as substance abuse issues, obesity, and particular phobias, they were doing very little else but exploiting the subjects that were plucked from obscurity and put on the television screens of millions of homes nationwide. I saw the benefit of these shows in the sense that they bring a certain level of success to the television networks who produce and air them, and for the viewers who typically see quality entertainment value in the …