This view of one of Salem's streets shows how most of the original buildings have been beautifully preserved.

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Issues

Having issues with our HVAC today. Funny how I just attended a focus group on home thermostats, and then ours starts acting up. I hope it's just being obstinate and that it doesn't mean that an imminent major repair of our system is coming up soon. I know that nobody 60 years ago had air conditioning in their homes, but I will still readily admit that I become a crybaby if I have reason to believe that mine will be taken from me....even momentarily! A self-centered and feeble attitude, of course. Ken throws his head back in laughter whenever I exclaim that I was born in the wrong decade. "I should've been born in the 20s," I say, marveling at the fashion or automobiles or music of the era. "You couldn't stand more than 24 hours in July," Ken might say, and he's probably right. Maybe, though, just maybe....if I had been born into heat and cold extremes, and gradually learned to live in a drafty home or stuffy apartment building, my resistanc...
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I'm currently smack dab in the middle of a Southern fiction work recommended to me by my fellow home group girls, entitled "The Secret Life of Bees." Upon hearing that the author, Sue Monk Kidd, has ties to Anderson (and South Carolina as a whole), I delved right in to find it at my local library, and then delved into its pages. Though I am only 110 pages into it, I have found thus far that I am hooked, helplessly hooked. Overlooking the bad language and cruelty that flashes up now and then, I am taken aback at the lush, emotion-evoking word pictures that this lady paints in her pages. I mean, the scenes seem to drip with life off of the pages and into my brain. It is an easy read....by that, I mean it doesn't require as much concentration and brain power as some other books do....but it is still a notable read due to the graphic intensity with which Kidd writes. Though I was not an abused or abandoned child, and though I never ran away from my home, I still see ...
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Not at all perfect

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