It’s more than a month into the new year. The good news is that you have been sticking to your exercise goals. The bad news is that winter weather provides many excuses to skip exercise.

I’ve been worried about what happens if/when Newt Gingrich has to pack it in, admit defeat and head back to his life as a lobbyist/intellectual/moon entrepreneur/devoted Tiffany customer.

If you are a squash lover, then by all means keep in mind Buckingham, a delightful, small, compact yellow zucchini. This is the perfect complement to the new, small urban-style garden I have been talking about in my last few columns.

D ear Tom and Ray | My 88-year-old mother has a 2005 Buick LaCrosse with 15,000 miles on it. It only gets driven to the grocery store, hair salon and church. But that has been the case for all six years she’s owned it. Now, in the past three months, three new batteries have gone stone-cold dead after four to six weeks! The Buick service department says the problem is “She doesn’t drive it enough!” Heck! For nearly six years, she “didn’t drive it enough,” and it used the same battery! I can’t get them to tell me why it apparently is sucking the life out of the batteries now. Any ideas? – Gary

Today’s homes are filled with components that weren’t so common years ago. They make your home more efficient and less work. You can’t ignore them entirely, though. So, as you plan your chores and projects for the coming year, here are some to keep in mind.

Having already read one of O.C. Strunk’s novels, “The Geriatric Murders,” I felt like I had a pretty good idea of what I would get out of another one of his books, “The Forerun Winter.”

Yesterday, over my morning coffee, I read in my paper that parents in New York City are all atwitter because tuitions at most private schools are just about to creep up past the $40,000 mark.

It is a well-known fact that I can’t leave the farm for more than an hour and a half. Even if it’s a special day out – a birthday lunch, a drink with friends, a movie – I find myself getting fidgety and checking my cellphone (because no one wears a watch anymore to see the time), anxious to get back.

Hey y’all, it’s Paula Deen.

You might think that the world has had enough of wizards, witches, spells and magical places. With seven Harry Potter books and eight movies, plus a Harry Potter world down in Florida, we’ve been inundated with all things magical to the point where, after the last movie left theaters, the real world was ready to move on from magic.

An alert reader recently wrote me about a product called Forever Lazy. Having read of my love affair with the Snuggie, she predicted that I would be unable to resist the charms of this year’s premium loungewear or as the TV commercial says: “lazywear.”