i'm not a literary person, but from what I can tell is that the style overall, reminds me of screenplay writing, e.g.: "Gathering up papers and his favorite plaid thermos, he tied them into a kerchief and fastened the satchel to the end of a stout length of devils walking stick. He stooped a final time to clear the doorway of his former lair. Tired, but resolute, he crossed the clearing, pausing briefly against an over pruned Shishigashira to catch his breath." What I mean is that the writing style is very descriptive in terms of both actions and local, and less informative psychologically in terms of the character. Psychological states of the character, I guess, are inferred through these very discriptive, or highly visual/cinematic passages - as in a screenplay. This last passage for instance can be viewed in terms of cinema as a shot. Where sometimes visual clues such as location and character gestures play a larger role in the telling of the story, rather than the actual character dialogue or narration: "Behind him, in the eerie calm of sunset, a single unobserved green leaf made no sound as it slowly drifted to settle neatly on a background of uncharacteristically red moss beneath the maple, signaling a natural, albeit most curious end to a tenured era." ...it's cinematic.

Reading the user guide for the Electrolux, it looks like it doesn't have shut-off timers on the burners (the timer is just a beeper). Competitor's models have individual shut-off timers for each burner as well as a beeper; that strikes me as useful. For example, when we are cooking Basmati rice on our gas cooktop, we let it simmer for 15 minutes then turn off the burner; with a shut-off timer on an induction cooktop, we could have the burner shut off automatically and avoid any risk of boiling dry and burning. If one believes the user guide, the restrictions on pan sizes are pretty tight on the Electrolux; however, I suspect that reality is different. When we tested the Bosch 800-series cooktop, it was noticeably more lenient on pan sizes than its manual said (pans that were smaller than the stated minimum sizes worked OK). I am dubious about the crosses instead of circles. Without trying it, I don't know whether that's really an issue. You could easily simulate that part by drawing crosses on a piece of paper and seeing how easy it is to get a pan centered. On the plus side, I like the look of the controls on the Electrolux - individual instant-set controls is about the best set-up I have seen, assuming that the instant-set part is not too fiddly (you still have +/- controls to tweak with if you don't hit the exact setting using the instant "dial"). The Electrolux has the largest number of power levels that I have seen on any induction unit - around 25! I don't know whether that is a plus or not; the Bosch has around 19, and that seemed to be plenty during our simple tests, but I don't have enough experience of these things to know whether even more levels might be useful in real-life cooking. FWIW, Wolf's induction cooktop only has around 9 levels. This post was edited by PeterH2 on Sun, Feb 17, 13 at 21:40

Haahahahaa! Karen this is SO funny. I'm bursting into laughter reading these posts again, and remembering writing and reading them at the time. Well done! And my favourite part about Martha Stewart dropping in with her dish towel parachute!!! WAY too funny!

I looked at what may be your house numbers on Amazon and it appears that they are designed to be permanently installed and the wall would be significantly damaged were pulled out. I think the problem is to solve the light problem. Any outdoor lighting should follow dark sky guidelines to reduce light pollution by meeting the five principles of outdoor lighting. Clearly the existing fixture does not as light shines upward and outward, is too bright, and is of a high color temperature (i.e., the light is too blue). I would exchange the fixture for something like one of these Access Lighting Matira (other than the two-light model) fixtures. As shown in the specs, the light cylinder is pulled away from the wall. Hopefully this -- and the reduction in brightness -- would result in fewer shadows cast by the house numbers. After the changes are made, check visibility from the street. To improve the contrast between the numbers and wall, consider painting the numbers.