I know a lot of people are very into "spring cleaning," but winter is my time to spruce up inside my home. I don't think of myself as a hoarder, but I do find it difficult to make the time to go through all of the accumulating stuff when it is beautiful outside, and so it sits, waiting to be ruled upon. At last, the cold temperatures, not to mention our daughter's wedding next year, inspired me to call for a dumpster.

While spring officially started well over a month ago, I feel like it started today. It was my first day of digging in the dirt. I've been eyeing my garden for weeks, aching to get out there to prepare the beds for planting. After much anticipation... today was the day.

This morning, I arose to a series of alarms -- three fire trucks, two ambulances,three police cars. The commotion, it turns out, was right next door where a small fire was wreaking big havoc. The first evidence of the fire was smoke coming out of the light fixtures in the kitchen so my neighbor, thinking it was an electrical fire, turned off the lights and checked her oven, although she knew nothing was cooking at the time. "Donna and Sam" finally figured out the source of the fire when they opened the bathroom door and saw their towels aflame. That's when Donna remembered that earlier, she had lit a match in the bathroom. A spark must have flown onto one of the towels, because she had flushed the match. As Donna tried to put out the fire on the towels, the arm of her nightgown caught fire. She was luckily able to put that out by patting at the flame with another towel.