Depending on the ages of your own children and the ages of the children whose birthday parties they are likely to attend in the next few months, choose from the items that are on sale.  The list at Target and WalMart includes items such as Lego, Barbie, GI Joe, Play Doh, and even the classic games Monopoly and Battleship. 

All the upcoming school book fairs are another great opportunity to stock up as well – and support your local school at the same time.

And don’t forget the wrapping paper.

Do you have a great family picture to use on your holiday greeting – or at least picture of the dog?  We have used services like Snapfish and Shutterfly in the past and we’ve been thrilled with them.  We just make sure we have a good family picture by the end of October.  We can upload it to the photo website and then choose from dozens of different designs for our holiday card.  Then we choose our text for the inside of the card.  Some services even allow you to insert different text into each card – and even better, some will even mail them out for you. Of course, you’ll pay for the convenience of having your cards mailed – as well as paying the postage – but during the crazy month of December, it’s usually worth it.

This year we’ll be using photostamps for the cards that we mail out ourselves.  Every year we realize that there are folks that we should have added to our Christmas card list and somehow forgot during the year.  I’ll use a holiday picture of the kids to have some Photostamps made up so I can use them on the cards that we send from home. 

Try it out – I bet you’ll have fun creating your own cards and stamps.  And, you’ll be amazed at how easy it is.

We’ve started cleaning it all up and hoping for a better growing season in 2010.  We’ve had a couple of cold nights and there has been frost nearby so it’s time to get the vacationing houseplants back inside.  We have a couple of good-sized ficus trees that spend the summer outside on the deck.  I repotted them this year and it has been pretty wet this last week so they are really heavy.  Even getting them on a dolly is quite a chore. 

A friend recommended a contraption called a PotLifter.  It has straps with handles for the lifters to hold onto.  At the bottom of the contraption is another set of straps that go around the pot (or rock or can or what have you) and they snug up around whatever you need to lift.  The great thing about this is that you really don’t have to bend down to lift the heavy pot or worry about the pot getting off balance when you lift because one person stands up faster than the other. 

We’ve found lots of uses for these just in the short time that we’ve had them.  Of course, it does mean that two people will be lifting and moving your heavy object.  But, in many cases, that’s still easier than getting out the wheelbarrow or getting the object into and out of the wheelbarrow.  I can see a balled/burlapped Christmas tree being a whole lot easier to move with this.

If you have lots of fall cleanup ahead of you – I recommend you check it out.  It is called a PotLifter.  I have seen it in the Gardener’s Supply catalog (and I assume it is on their website) and I purchased mine from Lee Valley.  Go check it out!

Plus, how many times have you had to mail something and you don’t get to the post office in time? Not a big problem if you have stamps on hand, but you have an issue if you don’t have any postage on hand. Our post office opens late and closes early so I frequently miss the regular hours. With the stamps.com service, I don’t even have to keep stamps on hand. I can print out postage any time, day or night.

So, even though there is a monthly fee for using Stamps.com, the convenience of skipping the trip to the post office or finding enough 2 cent stamps to match up with all of my 42 cent stamps or whatever the current postage rate is, more than makes up for the monthly fee.

As for the greener part – the postal service comes to your home nearly every day.  Do your part to save the environment and skip the trip to the post office.  Hand your outgoing mail right to your postal carrier when he or she is in your neighborhood.  You can even schedule a USPS pickup if you’re mailing Priority or Express Mail packages.  You can even save money on packaging – you can go to the Postal Service website and order Priority Mail boxes – which are free.

Check it out. They even have a risk free trial.

While leafing through the magazine, I found an add for VegetableGardener.com.  What a find!  This website/blog has a number of articles from the Kitchen Gardener magazine archives as well as new content.  It has lots of how-to information as well as inspiration.  Be sure to check it out!

Vegetable Gardener

We set up the Aerogarden with the kit of seeds which is included – an herb garden.  Everything worked completely according to plan.  By the way – there is a small amount of growing medium (soil) in the little seed pods.  Each of my herbs, basil, dill, thyme, chives, and oregano, sprouted just when the directions said they would.  Here’s a pic after 3 1/2 weeks.  They are all doing well.  We have had to use some dill, basil and chives just to keep them from growing into the lights. 

Aerogarden at 4 weeks

I use fresh herbs in my cooking quite a bit.  This is so much better than running to the grocery store and picking up some anemic looking bunches of herbs.   The kids are really interested in the daily growth.  They have even checked out the seed catalogs so that they can pick out the plants they want to grow outside – interest sparked by the aerogarden.  My older son is even looking into growing larger plants hydroponically and aeroponically for a school project just based on the interest sparked by the aerogarden.

I  am looking forward to growing tomatoes in the aerogarden.  One of the toughest things about a New England winter is the absence of decent tomatoes.  A Tomato kit is just one of the many different kits available for the aerogarden.  And – you can even get a kit to plant your own seeds or purchase a mix-and-match kit directly from aerogarden where you can choose which seeds you want in your kit.

Adobe, the maker of Acrobat, Photoshop, and many other design tools, offers two different education programs.  For some time now, they have had an education progrma for students grades K-12 and teachers.  This program gives significant discounts on individual products as well as their large CS4 packages.  I suppose if you have a seriously bright kindergartener, you might want to set him up with Dreamweaver and have him start building websites.  But kids even a little older would appreciate some of the other products – like InDesign for school projects.  Illustrator and Photoshop are lots of fun to play with – and they have so many features, your third grader might discover half of them by the time he’s in high school.

The new addition for Adobe’s Education store is their Higher Education program.  Now, a student enrolled in a school that grants degrees requiring at least 2 years of study is eligible to purchase products from the Education store at an even greater discount.   Even if you take only one creative photography class, or one class involving design or development for the internet, you’ll love having Photoshop or Illustrator or Dreamweaver.   This also includes Acrobat which I personally think would make anyone’s life easier (see my previous post).

The Ultimate Steal – Microsoft Office Student Discount

Adobe Education Store

Check with your college or university bookstore regarding Apple’s student program.

In another case, a friend opened an email that supposedly contained a coupon for use on Black Friday.   The email might have actually contained a coupon, but once you visit the link in the email, your computer is bombarded with spyware as well as a pop-up engine.  The more he shopped online and visited more sites, the more pop-ups appeared.

These two computers required more work than any of the others to get them cleaned off and running properly again.  They were also the only two computers out of the bunch that were not running full blown anti-virus and security programs.

As time goes on and internet users become more savvy, hackers become more creative in methods to deliver malware to your computer.  It is not enough to just “be careful” (and yes, I do still hear that) and not open suspicious emails or visit websites that explicitly state that they are using malware to support their sites.  It is really necessary to have a method to defend your computer from these threats.  Really – think about how important your computer is to you.  Are you willing to lose all of your data? Your email?  Your pictures?  And even if you have them all backed-up, do you really have the time to restore everything?  Are you even sure that you know how to restore everything?

And – I know that there are altruists out there.  I know that there are those people who write software for the good of the world.  I also know that they are very few and far between.  Think long and hard before installing freeware or shareware on your computer.  Especially freeware or shareware anti-virus programs.

Every year, I get a little closer – sort of – to organizing the Christmas decorations.  Of course, every year I buy more so I am not sure that I am really improving the percentage of items that stored away safely.  Last year, I did finally carefully label each and every box that had Christmas items.  At least there shouldn’t have been anything needlessly damaged over the summer when someone dragged out boxes because it was believed that they were filled with pool toys or other summer goodies.  The giant labels that said Christmas lights or Christmas wreaths should have prevented that.

However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the items were packed as well as they should have been inside those labeled boxes.  This year I will spend my time shopping after Christmas looking for the best storage pieces I can find.  I suppose many of them will be marked down even before Christmas.  Jo-Ann Fabrics has a number of holiday storage items like the Storage Solutions Wreath Box and the Snapwear Snap n Stack Ornament storage with 3 layers.  If you are on the mailing list for Joann’s, you get coupons in the mail that can be used on these storage pieces now.  Maybe with a Wreath Box, my wreath will look the same when I dig it out as it did when I put it away.

Organize.com has an ornament storage piece that is an upright set of drawers and they even have storage for Christmas trees.  Of course, Organize.com has lots of cool storage ideas.

Here is a link to the holiday storage items at Joann.com – Free Shipping at Joann.com on orders of $35 or more (Code: NOVFSA35)

Be Organized…Shop Organize.com

Be sure to check out Thames and Kosmos kits, Erector sets, and so many other cool things.

Last year, my son received a Power House kit from Thames and Kosmos. This kit is absolutely wonderful. It teaches uses for alternative energies on a small scale that is interesting and easy for kids to understand. Do you know a 10 year old who would get a kick out of cooking rice or a potato in the sun or air conditioning a house in his own? The kit includes a book which explains each of the projects and provides excellent instructions. The book integrates each of the projects into a story about of group of young people building a life on an island which does not have electric service. Highly recommended. I am sure we’ll see more Thames & Kosmos kits under the tree this year.