Yes, Stinky. That is pretty much me in a nutshell. Funny, while preparing for the party, I gave my niece and daughter assignments. My SIL was playing tourist in our town and wasn't there. Jaime was chopping olives, Aimee was tearing 6 heads of lettuce and I was assembling the eggplant and reheating sauces. The twins (8 yrs old) were entertaining us by speaking German with a Brittish accent. We were busy working and laughing when SIL walked into the kitchen. This was around 1:00 and the party was slated for 3:00. We had plenty of time! SIL announces that everything must be totally done by 2:00. The mood instantly changed as Jaime and Aimee suddenly felt stressed. I said, Marlene, the food will be done when the food gets done. Dinner is on us. She said, the olives are being chopped too small. Jaime's face turned beat red. I said, "Marlene, rest assured that I checked the specs and the olives are perfect. We are used to cooking together and you are just going to have to trust us. Can you do me a favor and set up the beverages on the deck? The bags of ice are in the freezer, the beer and drinks are in the fridge. The tub is on the deck next to the garden so we can dump out the water afterwards into the garden. That will help us finish faster." When she walked out, we didn't say a word about it but we all just started cracking up and went back to our conversation and tasks at hand. But sheesh, it was as if she had a rain cloud over her head when she walked into the kitchen. She set up the beverage center flawlessly and I was grateful. SIL and I talked on the phone about the incident later and I laughed and said, that was a true 'only child' moment. She admitted it was but still thought the olives were chopped too small. I laughed. I would hate to live my life around self imposed deadlines.

I don't think the deterrent of bitter apple will be enough to prevent a cat with separation anxiety from pulling hair out. Most medications can be compounded into liquids which are sometimes easier to give than pills. Another non-pilling solution is Feliway, which is available as a spray or a plug-in for the environment. It has kitty phermones which help soothe anxious cats. May also try other herbal remedies that can be mixed with food. Here is a link that might be useful: Feliway Products

Well, maybe doing my kitchen remodel while 36 weeks pregnant isn't such a bad idea after all :) It's forcing me to make decisions and just stick with them because there literally is a deadline...I've got to get this thing finished by Memorial Day weekend. The biggest thing I'm worried about is that I won't like the granite when it comes in. I'm not good with colors so I'm hoping the style aspect of my kitchen works. I'm not too worried about the function. It's going to be so much better than my old kitchen! The last thing I need to decide on is the backsplash. But it's hard to pick that before the granite comes....and by the time the granite comes I'll be 38ish weeks pregnant and probably won't feel like shopping much for it. And there's no way I'll have time to look for it over the summer with the 4 older kids home from school and a newborn so I'm just going to have to look next week and hope something awesome turns up. So far the kids are being good sports living in a crazy episode of Hoarders (that's what my living room and dining room look like right now) but this is only the end of week 1.

What might be the moral to the story? This might be it: wait a little while if you are shocked when you read about a problem that sounds shocking to you. It probably also sounds shocking to everyone, but wait. Don't be trigger happy. Don't indulge yourself by typing out your feelings. Wait. Someone will post some kind of fact-based response within a few hours. Isn't there a Supreme Court Justice who subscribes to this theory of conservation of personal (his) initiative? He doesn't believe in "indulging himself" by vocalizing any thought processes, either. Of course, I don't recall his reserve having garnered him many plaudits for holding his curiousity or opinion in check. My initial position was paraphrased by marcolo several times. Several people have made a big ado about it. Marcolo pointed out why it is good to ask for information first. Wow. What a new idea. Ask around. Get new input. (MARCOLO! Paging Dr. Marcolo! Need Davidro-to-english translation help here, please.) Assuming I understood the point of the post, isn't that what a post on the Kitchen Forum is about? Airing personal experience, making correlations, getting opinions on similarity or dissimilarity of experience? I don't believe that posting is an automatic ticket to litigation-city. That said, while I don't disagree with David that the massive haemorrhaging of personal outrage on the KF can be a trifle wearying, the instances cited here that have apparently motivated this thread are ridiculous. For one thing: "exploding glass doors" vs "exploding glass doors that way". Yes, tempered glass explodes "that way" but to think that anyone should be expected to be blase and off-hand about the fact that their oven door blasted itself open in the course of its "normal operation" (I'll hold my opinion on self-clean in check here) is asking for the moon. It doesn't matter than tempered glass breaks a certain way - it does matter that it spontaneously imploded without a clear and discernible impact to trigger; that makes the data noteworthy and the event really should be publicized. Yes, perhaps the glass was subjected to stresses beyond normal range a while back - or even undetected anomalous events at the time of high drama: bird strike, pellets, surface scratches, edge impact - and now the smallest minor perturbation to the nominal took it beyond its elastic limit, so to speak. But if a certain product has a habit of shattering (multiple reported such outcomes) - well, the likelihood that there should be such a high correlation between purveyors of that item and 6-sigma beyond norm events that shattering glass should be an expected outcome, is statistically insignificant. More than likely then, there is indeed a manufacturing defect - either in the glass manufacture process, or planarity of the door frame into which it is inserted, its tensioning or some other assembly process. Tempered glass might shatter safely, but it doesn't have a habit of shattering so much so that anyone buying ovens or doors or whatever should expect that after the 3year/5year/7year window that they should expect to walk upto an imploded door. This is just silly. It is absolutely the right thing to do to air the fact that E'lux's oven door shattered in self-clean mode. If many E'lux ovens do that, it is likely an E'lux problem and won't be known until such complaints are aired, collected and documented. If many oven doors shatter in self-clean then either ovens will get to a point where they won't use glass in self-clean ovens or self-cleaning will be outmoded (yesssssss!). Whatever. (regardless that as far as I know, self-clean temps are well inside the tolerance regime of tempered glass). None of this happens until the user airs this. & others aren't edified until they happen upon such reports. The only factually incorrect, if that, information I ran across on the e'lux oven thread was the moral outrage about the health risks of someone walking into the glass shards. Fact is that shattered tempered glass is safer than regular shattered glass but it's no bowl of tofu, chaps. So, while I think that keeping a bit of a tamp on the emotional quotient isn't a bad idea, the motivating example has even me arguing against this thread and I certainly don't support the idea of filter's eliminating posts that exceed some imagined emotion threshold or pass someone's idea of fact-filled posts. If the last was the case, I doubt that the OP's post (top post, this thread) would have made the cut .... Hmmmm, come to think of it ....