If you had measured a JD at Home Depot, don't know if they sell the same model, you'd likely have seen the same poor interface you got a Sears. That's part of why buying from a dealer cost more, you get better/knowledgeable interfaces. In my case I don't want any help or home repair, albeit I'd not object to a warranty repair, never had one on 40+ years of yard maintenance,the last 20 with over 3 acres of mowing, plus all the other stuff... I am about 95% Sears/Craftsman, and that included my wood shop and auto tools too. While I was disappointed in Sears dropping its extensive catalog business (guess that's been more than 20 years, some of the young types on this forum didn't have any experience with that), and was again disappointed when K-Mart (of all the companies) bought Sears. My last tractor purchase was a DYT4000 in 2005, and while it has a much more flexible frame than my still in use 1993 GT6000, it is a great lawn mower. About to replace my 20 year old Sears self propelled lawn mower with a Walmart Yardman with a Honda GVC160 engine, so that'll be a break with Sears on may years of using their lawn mowers. Sears, like all other business, have to win customers every day, but I am a lost when I read complaints about Sears in the Past...I've been and continue to be happy with their products, and couldn't care less if the salesman knows anything beyond filling out the purchase order.

Agreed the understory looks good in PA for the most part. What makes no sense to me is why the salt spray damage is SO MUCH worse in that stretch of PA than anywhere else? Could it be the method the PA DOT applies the salt? There was some frost damage in OH for sure...There have been two freeze events this May there, interspersed between an otherwise quite warm May. There were a few singed leaves on my dad's Japanese Maple that were probably due to frost, but the shoots themselves were intact and few leaves had more than a little damage. I saw some oaks with "crinkly" looking older leaves that might have been frosted. The only major frost damage I could see conclusively were on the Ailanthus trees that sprout up everywhere...a clump of them at a low site near my father's house were completely zapped. Not that anyone would care if some Ailanthus were killed. The cornfields looked fine even 2 days after the freeze on May 25. Things like tomatoes and peppers, etc were toast in much of the Akron area though.

Good thing is, the ink hasn't leaked sliding and blinking obnoxious advertisements onto the floor, yet :)

Oh, geesh. That's an easy answer. My parents had a wood-burning insert in their fireplace when I was growing up. What a pain in the arse! Getting truckloads of wood, splitting it, stacking it, all the bugs and spiders in the woodpile...then hauling it inside. Yucko. And the worst part was, there was no good way to control the heat - so the living room ended up being like 90 degrees when the dang thing was burning. A pellet stove? 10 times easier. Go to the store, buy a couple tons of 40 pound, easy to carry and easy to stack bags of pellets, and you have enough for the entire year. They stack neatly and easily in the garage. Much easier. No mess in the house. Just bring a bag in, dump it into the stove, and throw the plastic bag away. Turn on the thermostat for the pellet stove - it lights automatically, and it turns itself on and off automatically at whatever temperature that I set the thermostat on. It's great! Yes, pellet stoves are more expensive that wood stoves, and since they have more mechanical parts in them, they naturally have issues that a plain old woodstove or fireplace would not have. But for the ease of operation, cleanliness, and temperature control that you have with a pellet stove, they are the only choice in my opinion.