Since we’re planning dinner, we really need to have a good ballpark on how many people to expect. Will we use the dining room table or take food into the living room? Do I need to feed 6 people or 8 or 12? Will this dish suit everyone who is coming over, after all, some friends have allergies, some are vegetarians.

In other words, we need to know who’s coming and who’s not coming. We need those RSVPs, but those seem so very very difficult to drag out of people sometime. I know folks get busy. Sometimes they forget. Sometimes they want to, but aren’t sure it will work out. And that’s all okay. Please just let me know what’s going on. And it is okay to forget on occasion; I do too.

I know that I try to reply immediately when I get invitations. What I put off, I often forget. I try especially hard to give an immediate or prompt RSVP when I am invited by an individual or family. Business invitations are another matter entirely — I feel a lot less obligation to RSVP when someone is trying to sell me something.

I wonder sometimes if the bad response rate is something I am/we are doing. I use eVite because it makes it easier to track responses and for guests to see what other guests have been invited. I don’t know if it is eVite in particular, but this seems to be an invitation to getting ignored instead of an invitation to a party — ouch. That hurts!

Would emailing people directly be a better strategy? Maybe an initial invitation email and then a follow up with the eVite? It seems to me sometimes that the only way to make sure people reply is to call everyone individually, but that’s clearly too much to do all or even most of the time.

What can I do to increase the response rate on invitations? Does anyone have any suggestions or answers?

I want to find some larger pieces, logs, to put in my garden. Unfortunately, the big pieces are harder to find, and they are very very heavy.

Petrified wood is created by a process called perimineralization. The wood falls into water or mud containing a lot of minerals. It rots slowly; usually only leaves and branches disappear. The rest of the wood is replaced by the minerals, retaining the structure of the wood, sometimes all the way down to the cellular level. You can almost always identify wood grain in petrified wood. In some pieces, you may also be able to see tree rings, bark, or even the cellular structure.

When Veteran’s Park in College Station was built, several large pieces of petrified wood were uncovered.

Wood grain or bark visible in petrified wood in Veteran's Park.

Some of my collection of petrified wood.

Sitting on a tall piece of petrified wood in Veteran's Park.

When I was little, my mother told me that when Santa visited, all my toys came to life and had a party. On Christmas morning, even the ones we took to bed with us would be all arranged in the living room, around the fireplace and Christmas tree, as if frozen the moment Santa left.

My grandmother had 8 children, and so with all the children and grandchildren, cousins, nieces, nephews, spouses, it was quite a crowd. Family holiday parties were held in a school, and of necessity were pot-luck. Grandma and others worked on making ham or ham and cheese buns for the entire group. Warmed and wrapped in tinfoil. Mom made baked beans. I probably remember the cookies best. That and running around the school halls and gymnasium with my cousins.

My grandmother made 7 layer bars (or were they 6 layer bars?), my all-time favorite Christmas cookie. I sometimes make them for myself now.

I don’t have her recipe, but the internet is the repository of all such knowledge. These would be five-layer bars, unless we count the butter or margarine added to the graham cracker crumbs as one layer. Some recipes call for the addition of butterscotch morsels, which I detest. Peanut butter morsels, on the other hand, are awesome. I use either pecans or walnuts or both. With the peanut butter chips and two types of nuts; I think that counts as 7 layers.

Thank you, I’ll take the invasive pat-down. That, at least, makes it clear to everyone that my privacy is being invaded.

I am polite and cooperative with the TSA agents, but inside I fume; this is ridiculous. We spent $8.1 billion on TSA in 2011. What has it accomplished aside from long lines and invasion of privacy?

There’s a difference between security and security theater. Reinforcing the doors between cockpit and cabin: that was security. Making everyone go through a body scanner, that is security theater. It is easy to bypass the body scanner. It is hard to get through the locked cockpit to cabin door.

Most people go through the scanners without a second thought. Even I haven’t done much to protest aside from my insistence on the alternative pat-down. Will writing to our representatives in Congress and the Senate and our president help? I fear TSA has too much momentum behind it.

The money spent on TSA could be spent in many better ways. To help the poor and unemployed. To fix and replace aging infrastructure. To promote alternative forms of transportation that would lessen our dependence on fossil fuels and drive funds away from sources that fund terrorists.

For more information, take a look at Smoke Screening and Loaded Gun Slips Past TSA Screeners.