I confess. . . .

I'm a big Martha Stewart fan.

My favorite image of Martha Stewart?

It's the American Express Card commercial where she pokes fun at herself. She's sitting on the bottom of a drained pool, counseling us on how to use all our cutup, no-longer-needed other credit cards. Martha suggests re-tiling the bottom of a swimming pool with them, as she carefully places credit card fragments into an Olympic-pool sized mosaic-reproduction of the Venus de Milo.

There is nothing Martha Stewart can't find a second use for. Some of her tips are ridiculous, but she does harken us back to a time when frugal families handed-down, recycled, repaired, and re-heated instead of throwing away. Many of us here this morning grew up on a waste not/want not mentality. Our current everything-is-dispo…