Welcome back to OUR WORLD, Charlene! Glad you finally got back in! AUTODIDACT Both Charlene and I have tried to email you, and the comcast address isnt working for either of us. Please PM one of us with a different address to try or enable PMing on GW so se can contact you that waybut I suspect Charlene would rather send her address directly to an email address, rather than running it thru the GW system. LAURA 42 AND PHLOXY MARY, we still need email addresses for you so we can send you the address and directions. Please PM Charlene or reply to the email I sent you via GW. Charlene, if youre able to contact any of the last 3 above, let me know, and if I do, Ill let you know. The weather reports now are for mid 60's to 70, depending on whos doing the forecasting, but still only a slight chance for rain, so still sounding pretty good! See you all Saturday, Skybird

Time to move this down. Ann

As far as I can tell, the vast majority of "robber sues homeowner and wins" stories seem to be urban myths. I did study one case in law school where a homeowner was successfully sued, but in that case, he had set up a gun on some sort of automatic trigger connected to the front door of an unoccupied cabin. The court said that this was going too far, taking the chance of killing someone to protect property, rather than life. The basic rule on self-defense is that you have to try to run away rather than use force, if you can do it safely. That basic rule does *not* hold true in your own home. There is no "duty to retreat" in your own home. The other basic rule on self-defense is that you can use only enough force to repel the attack. However, what amount of force is reasonable depends on your duty to retreat. Since you have no duty to retreat inside your home, you can use more force than you would outside your home. As to whether you can use wasp spray as a weapon, I don't know the answer. My best guess would be that if you used it during an attack on the street, the courts would treat it as any other dangerous weapon. If you used it in your home (or car, at least in some states), even if you planned to use it as a weapon, I doubt there would be an issue. The law varies by state. If you want to see what your state thinks about these matters, look up the "castle doctrine," as in "my home is my castle." As a practical matter, I think most people are okay using whatever force they need to protect themselves inside their own homes. And that's even more so for women. Where I could see it getting dicey is if some teenaged kid broke into a house for drug money, having no weapon and thinking the house was unoccupied, tried to run away when he saw someone was home, and the man of the house grabbed him and beat the living s*^t out of the kid. Even then, I'll bet most police officers would tell the kid that he shouldn't have been in the house in the first place. As to whether the man of the house could then be sued, well, of course he could. Some of the castle laws protect people from being sued in these situations, but for the most part, anyone can sue anyone. Can't necessarily win, but can start the suit.

With the way people are, all you have to do is send an email to a few people and tell them that the thing is filled with gold, tell them to send the email to everyone they know and there will be thousands of people out there with catcher's mitts and would elbow you out of the way to have it land on them. And methinks several are in this forum! :)