Winter Means It’s Time To Review Fire Safety Rules
Since winter is prime time for house fires, safety issues should be reviewed frequently with the younger members of your household.
Tour the house with your children and show them where the smoke alarms are located and make sure they recognize the sound of a smoke alarm.
Keep flashlights in every room.
Identify two escape routes from your house, push the smoke alarm’s test button and have a fire drill, practicing the two routes with your children.
Run fire drills with family members blindfolded; most fires happen at night, and often the home is filled with smoke.
Practice crawling through the home.
Arrange a meeting place for the family outside the house so everyone can be accounted for in the event of a fire.
Furniture with a fowl flavor
Attention, birders - a new collection of Ducks Unlimited furniture will be available this winter in most major furniture stores. No longer will you have to be limited to hanging duck prints on the wall. Now the waterfowl have inspired designs on furniture, rugs, tiles and other decorative accessories.
Fold it up, it’s a couch
Increasingly, futons - traditional Japanese sleeping mattresses - are moving out of bedrooms into living spaces. For a free brochure on futon furnishings and tips for buying futons, frames and covers, send a self-addressed, stamped business-sized envelope to: Futon Association International, Dept. AR, P.O. Box 6548, Chico, CA 95927.
Burn smartly
Not all woods are equal, at least when it comes to burning them. Some hardwoods, for example, such as oak, ash and birch, make good firewood; quaking aspen does not. Hemlock sends sparks flying, as does larch; fir is long-burning.
For a list of local National Arborist Association members who can answer questions about the varieties of wood, call (800) 733-2622.
And, for the record: a cord is a stacked wood pile of uncut or unsplit logs that measures 4 feet by 4 feet by 8 feet.
Thinking gardens
If this is the winter you’re thinking about joining a garden club, here’s the info for the Inland Empire Gardeners of Spokane: The group meets the first Thursday of each month at the Northeast Community Center, 4001 N. Cook (the next meeting is Dec. 5 at 7:30 p.m.). Or visit its home page at http://www.ior.com/(tilde)tshore/garden.htm. The group has a monthly newsletter, The Growing News.
It’s not too early to think about garden catalogs. If you want your mailbox crowded with flower and vegetable catalogs, just send for the Garden Catalog Guide ($2) from the Mailorder Gardening Association, P.O. Box 2129, Columbia, MD 21045. The 36-page booklet contains a list of association catalogs, $35 worth of special purchase incentives and plenty of helpful information about reading seed catalogs and shopping for plants by mail.
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