lifestyle

Duct tape.

It holds the batteries in when you lose the cover on the back of the remote. It seals leaky hoses. It patches torn tents.

It also helped a woman in Dade City, Fla., find her calling.

It all started six years ago when a Google search for crafts showed a bored Grace Grover how to make wallets and fake flowers out of the silver sticky stuff.

DEAR DR. FOURNIER: Someone asked for advice to give a young person leaving the nest. It can be found in Shakespeare's "Hamlet," Act I, Scene iii. Lord Polonius' son, Laertes is going to France, but this applies even for a move across town:

Yet here, Laertes! aboard, aboard, for shame!

The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,

The coming year will be a year of change.

Regardless of what occurs in the coming months, 2009 will be a new era in America. A change unlike any in history, a change for the better, will sweep the nation. In another decade, children will be unaware that life in our country was ever any different.

I speak, of course, of the transition to digital television.

Lots of people are pinching pennies these days, and all of us are being careful not to count our eggs before they hatch. Join the ranks of the fiscally responsible while still swinging with the fashion forward by using a few tricks of the trade to stretch (and enhance) your wardrobe without stretching your dollar too thin.

On a fine October day, one month before the coming election, I stood in a park watching my son help a young woman fill out a form.

It was only a moment, enough to lock the image in memory. Then I got busy asking folks if they were registered to vote.

BUSHNELL, Fla. -- In an economic recession such as the one Florida is experiencing, it helps to be good at a lot of things, just in case. Vince Denimarck's job skills include drafting, design, carpentry, wiring, plumbing, laying tile, hanging paper and roofing. He knows how to build stone fences and is proud of his Italian cooking.

DEAR DR. FOURNIER: I am a patent agent and noticed early on that my creative clients tended to fit a profile: ADD, dyslexia, tending to be ambidextrous or left-handed, and sleep-disordered. So I studied up on these labels to find a correlation and realized that I was the poster child for all of the above.

I think it's easy to make things more complicated than they need to be. Here are some basic rules of the relationship road that will help keep you headed in the right direction.

1. Successful relationships take work. They don't happen in a vacuum. They occur when the couples in them take the risk of sharing what it is that's going on in their hearts and heads.

The financial situation is frightful and the outlook is far from delightful. So if you haven't anyplace to go, consider the life of the hobo.

Q. We want to register for our wedding but don't want the same cookie-cutter linens and china that most people give as presents. How can we get what we really want without just shopping ourselves?

A. Multiple registries are your best bet if you don't want your entire home set up in the same pattern (kidding, sort of).