Fake plastic wishbones? Around Thanksgiving time last year, I read a post by blogger Rejin from Urban Botany blasting People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) for promoting plastic Lucky Break Wishbones. She wrote: Hasn't PETA ever heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? They claim these wishbones and their packages are recyclable, but let's face it: 99.99% of them are going to end up in a landfill, or in the ocean, where they will probably be swallowed by sea turtles [And I would add baby albatross chicks] who will choke and die.... Animals, PETA, animals! Do you hear me? Apparently PETA did not because the organization promoted the wishbones again this year. Products like these are what blogger Linda Anderson from Citizen Green would call "stupid plastic crap."

The holidays are upon us. Christmas is less than two months away, and retailers are already decking the malls of boughs of holly.

'Tis the season for those of us whose children tromp off to school two or three or five times a week to start thinking about the dreaded holiday teacher gifts. Why dreaded? Do we not appreciate our teachers? I know I can't speak for every parent, but I feel pretty confident speaking for most of us when I say it's really, really difficult to come up just the right teacher gift.

Halloween is just around the corner. This year, October 31st falls on a Saturday, so there are sure to be even more events to celebrate this spooky holiday. Dressing up is probably the most fun part of the Halloween for me (even though I love candy, I’ve bypassed the trick-or-treating age range by a decade).

E-books, man. They're infiltrating schools. Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Conn., got rid of the 20,000 books in its school library, trading up to flatscreens, Kindles and computers only. And now that Google has paired with On Demand Books (the company that invented a book vending machine), schools could potentially serve up printed e-books in the public domain like cotton candy.

Erin Scottberg, Lemondrop.com, for Lemondrop's Cheap Week Part of living on less is making your money go farther, and lowering your bills and keeping a basic budget can both help. Luckily, much like sending greeting cards, remembering birthdays and spelling basic words, the Internet can do it for you. Or at least that's what some sites promise. But could they help me, a girl who's ready to swipe her credit card the second her wallet's empty, actually stay on track? I tried some out to test.

Last year during the holiday giving season, the recession was really gloomy news for nonprofits.   Colleagues Allison Fine and Marnie Web started something called the Givelist.  It was a crowd sourced list of ways that one could support causes that don't necessarily require writing a check. 

I just returned from dropping off enrollment forms at my daughter's kindergarten. For the second time since early enrollment in May. Apparently, they're afraid we might have moved in two months and thus shouldn't be eligible to attend my girl's public school. And this leads me into my rant about schools in this country.

I grew up in one house before moving through two dorms, one sorority house, seven apartments and two houses. I know someday my parents will move or move on, and I'll be forced to help with the downsizing efforts. I'm not looking forward to it, mostly because you can accumulate quite a bit of junk in 35 years, but also because I remember the bittersweet memories that flooded me the last time I walked through my grandparents' house after they died. I can't decide if it would be harder to help my parents move while they were living or after they'd died. They might protest less if it happened later.

I have four children, which has been a lot of birthday parties to throw (and attend) over the last several years.  In the interest of keeping a reasonable budget, not to mention my sanity, I've had to come up with my own set of time-and-money-saving tips over the years.

Budgeting, saving, and managing your money are high on everyone's list of priorities right now. There are many online tools and resources that will help you track and manage your money, even help you save. I'll review four of these sites.

What would you do if you knew you would fail? Many of you might have just read that and mentally added in a word and given my question an entirely different meaning. The well-worn aphorism is "What would you do if you knew you could not fail?" Instead I am asking what you would do if you knew that you would fail, if you knew that your road map to success was a road to nowhere, if you knew that your dreams would not come true? What then?