Raising money for a good cause

I am not supposed to mention the cause out of respect for privacy...so I won't.

Open hearts, open wallets, great stuff at a huge yard sale.

If you are anywhere on the eastside of Portland today, please check it out:

http://www.yardsalesearch.com/yss-garage-sale.jsp?id=20989620

Bye Diana...

Tomorrow we will gather at Willamette National Cemetery to say goodbye to a family friend.

Fred and Diana were friends of my Mom and John. They came over a lot with their daughter, Danni, when I was in high school. We were at her mom's beach cabin when Mt. St. Helens spewed ash everywhere.

Fred was a vet from the Vietnam war. Not a bragger...a kid doing what he was told to do he would say.

Diana was the girlfriend waiting at home.

Life was never that easy for them. Jobs came and went, health issues came. They never gave up and their zest for life never died. They went on trips and they never quit figuring out ways to have fun.

Fred died a few years ago...I think it was cancer.

This past year Diana put up a helluva fight against lung cancer. The cancer spread. I saw her last fall while she was staying with Mom and John. Diana was not shy about showing Eric and I how her head had been stapled together after doctors had gone in to remove what they could of the spreading cancer.

Diana will rest with her love, Fred. tomorrow.

I asked Danni for a favorite song of Diana's. Of all the songs, this is the one that popped into her head first:





Goodbye Diana. We mourn, but thought of you will always put smiles on our faces.

:)

Disposability...so ungreen!

We bought our last microwave nearly two years ago. A GE "Spacesaver"...considered a mid-sized microwave I discovered from my research today.

A nice microwave with lots of special buttons, including Jodie's favorite "popcorn" button. We really loved it...it did everything we needed a microwave to do...until a couple days ago. It would turn on, the fan and light and carousel ran...but no heat!

I did some Googling. It could be a fuse or a diode, but more likely it was a control something another. $92 for the part and whatever for labor...for a microwave that cost $119.

I was perplexed. A good microwave that served us well for nearly two years. It would most likely cost more to fix than replace. It seems so ungreen to replace rather than repair, but we did not want to deal with the inconvenience of taking it to a repair shop and risk paying more to get fixed.

We went to Fred Meyer. Two Sharp Carousel microwaves caught our eye. One was $99 and had a single special sensor "popcorn" button. Jodie would have been happy with that one. The other was $30 more with several sensor buttons. One was mid-sized and one was large. We went for the large one.

Now we have a broken mid-sized microwave to dump. Helping the economy, while thumbing our nose to planet Earth.

So ungreen!