AM I THE ONLY ONE . . . who has ever wished he had a way to store and utilize all those little helpful household hints he’s received over the years?

It’s been years since my sweetie and I first met and I’m sure I’ve forgotten a lot more than I remember about those early days of our relationship. One of the things I do remember, however is that we were constantly having moments when we were both thinking the same thing at the same time. I might say something and she’d say, I was just about to say that, or I was just thinking the same thing. Lots of times we’d both start to talk at the same time and it would be about the same thing. I’m sure lots of other couples have those same things occur, but it just seemed like it happened a lot, for us. We started to call those moments GEMA’s. That’s our abbreviation for GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE.

Over the years, we’ve continued to have those GEMA moments and it still surprises us how often it happens. One evening, during those early years one of us brought up the fact that we had been saving all sorts of little household hints that we had been clipping out of the newspaper or magazine articles. GEMA!!!! Me too, came the response.

As we discussed it, we found that we both had a file, (mine was a manila folder, hers was a shoebox) with dozens of those little tips randomly stored in it. As we continued to discuss it, we both complained about the fact that saving them was almost useless, because you could never find the hint you were looking for when you wanted it. That, plus the fact that most of the time you couldn’t even remember that you had a tip that would be useful for whatever your need might be at that particular moment, frustrated the both of us. At that point, one of us asked, “Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a book or a computer program that would allow you to access exactly the hint or tip that you wanted, when you wanted it?” That question led us to the conclusion that we should do something about it.

After lengthy discussions, we decided to attempt to categorize them and alphabetize them so that we’d be able to find any tip on a moments notice. After working on that for a few weeks, we come to realize that there are lots more tips and hints out there, if you take the time to look for them. So, we did.

After we’d spent a lot of hours researching, categorizing, alphabetizing and typing them into our computers, we found that we had around 1700 of them and we finally had them set up in a useful format. We then decided that we had something that others might find useful too. Of course, by that time, each of us had already written several books, so we turned them into our first collaborative effort and published a book titled THE HINTS BOOK ALMANAC. Shortly after we published that book, Sweetie discovered more hints stashed away somewhere in her files. A lot more. And we started thinking that there might be even more of them out there someplace. Eventually we came up with roughly 1000 more of them that we hadn’t included in that first book. More categorizing, alphabetizing and typing ensued, eventually leading to our second hints book publication, titled: THE HINTS BOOK ALMANAC II

EDITOR’S NOTE: Please consider checking out the Amazon pages of the authors of this site, by going to the addresses’ shown below. Kindle versions of their books are available at only 99 cents.

http://www.amazon.com/author/richard-lee-king/
Amazon.com: Donna Hale Chandler: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle

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