Pattico, I vote to keep it up and use it for seasonal displays. It sure made a great backdrop for the photos. Send updated pics.Thanks for sharing. I have some old weathered picket fencing that I use for my flower bed. I have more and I think I am going to copy your idea.LOL Pat P

Cat Mom, I really liked the display too. The chef did about 3 minutes on SubZero and almost nothing on the gas ranges, but everything was there for fondling, measuring, getting the feel of size/looks. HPX, I'm with you on the ovens. They were really great. Plllog, I'm still figuring out the other attendees too! There were maybe 20 of us and I spoke in some depth to six people (I got nosy and was all "so when do you break ground on your renovation? What are you in the market for? Did anything you saw here tonight change your mind?") So sweeping generalizations from small sample size follow. The crowd skewed older - mid-50s and up, with four of us I'd peg for younger than that. I wouldn't recognize a designer outfit if it smacked me in the head, but based on the jewelry, handbags and plastic surgery I saw, this was an upper-middle-income-plus crowd. Of the six I spoke with, three people (one couple, one woman) were buying appliances for their second homes. One couple was proudly buying an entire Wolf/SZ suite of appliances, everything from microwave to outdoor grill, and the guy got a little testy when I asked what other brands he was looking at, as in "what else has this kind of name recognition?" And many of the participants treated this as a cooking class. Besides the from-scratch-cookies amazement and the salmon thing, they were quizzing the chef on the best pans to buy and how many minutes per pound to cook a Thanksgiving turkey. I got the impression that most people were looking at their purchases as status first, cooking capability a distant second. The ovens would be nice for the caterer to use, but the interest level dropped off significantly as the chef went into detail on the differences between bake, roast and convection bake. These were casual cooks at best.

Update: heat is still on, which is good because it has been a pretty cold week. We met with the salesperson, who was the owner/founder's daughter. She was impressive with her knowledge of different systems. She even told us something we didn't know in that we once had a furnance in one of our hall closets. Then she said she'd go out to the car to get her coveralls and go under the crawlspace to evaluate our ductwork. I've never even been under there, LOL. So, she got us some very reasonable estimates on name brands and we will go with the one system. There are two rebates on the one, one from the manufactururer and one from the electric company, but the mfr rebate does not start until the 15th, though that's only next week. They will also credit us for the part they installed last weekend. I talked to my brother who works in commercial heating and cooling supply and he said this was a good system and a fair price. We've received good service from this company, so I feel confident going with them.

Last night I finally finished Paul Murray Kendall's famous biography Richard the Third. It was a fascinating, sympathetic biography of a controversial figure. I found myself agreeing with Kendall's hypothesis that Richard was defeated at Bosworth, not as the result of some sort of poetic justice, but rather due to the betrayal of self-serving nobles, who in turn found just as much to grumble about during the reign of Henry VII. I found it poignant how hard Richard III worked to cultivate and favor the very people who meant him the most harm. Fundamentally, Richard seemed to have an inability to maneuver and pirouette through the politics of court life. Kendall finds countless examples of traitors whose were left off easy by Richard, only to redouble their efforts to conspire against the King. Kendall raises many interesting points, but often lacks the objectivity needed in the biography of such a complex subject. In an afterword regarding whether Richard was responsible for the murder of the "Princes in the Tower", Kendall argues that the boys may have met death at the behest of other figures at court, most likely the Duke of Buckingham. Though ultimately unsolvable (mostly due to the Tudor historians who apparently destroyed countless records portraying Richard in a positive light), I still feel that he had the most to gain from the murder of his nephews.