I googled 'icook cookware' and wanted to see what all the hullaballoo was about. Here are my impressions: 1. While they are all made of stainless steel (and by the way, there's no special alloy called 'surgical' stainless--sounds like hype to me) they don't say what this special 'Optitemp' base is. Stainless is a lousy conductor of heat, so pots made of stainless have to incorporate a bottom disc of some other metal--usually aluminum--to improve the heat conduction. My impression: if they ain't telling you what it is, they don't want you to know. Reputable manufacturers will boast about their copper bottoms or aluminum bottoms. Why doesn't icook tell you what theirs is? 2. 'Vitalok' lid sounds like a marketing gimmick. You can find good cookware items in many price ranges that have snug lids. If it locks tightly enough to hold pressure in, it would need safety features like a pressure cooker; since it doesn't have such features, if the pressure builds up it will knock the lid ajar. I fail to see what this 'Vitalok' is other than a snug lid. 3. Seems WAY overpriced. The price I saw quoted for a 21 piece set was just under $1000. Trust me, if you want to spend a grand on cookware, you can do a helluva lot better than that. You can get a nice starter set of Wolfgang Puck stainless at Sam's club for around a TENTH of that, if you really want a matching set (which, as we have said before in other threads, is often a false economy). I don't know how good the Wolfgang Puck set is, but I would wager anything that icook isn't ten times as good as the Puck stuff. (Do a search of this forum; some people have purchased Puck sets and left comments. Sam's carries other lines as well.) 4. It reeks of gimmicky marketing. Multilevel schemes always make me suspicious--not of the quality of the goods or even of the honesty of those people trying to get you to buy them--but the claims made for these products are not consistent with claims made by other cookware companies. For instance, a 'Vitalok' lid holds in a third more nutrients--that reeks of hype and bogus-ness. (Bogosity?) Here's an idea. Find out the total amount of money this Amway rep wants for this set of cookware. Say it's $900, whatever. Post a new thread, saying, "Hey, all you cookware mavens out there: my cookware budget is $900. How would YOU spend that to outfit your kitchen? And what would you do if you had HALF that amount to spend?" You'd be inundated with suggestions by helpful charming people like me who have no financial interest in selling cookware, and I'd bet you dollars to donuts that you'd get a fine set of tools to accomplish whatever it is you want to accomplish in the kitchen. It would help us to help you if you let us know what type of cooking you do or are interested in doing. If you do a lot of frying, roasting, slow cooking, braising, whatever. And how many people do you cook for, usually? If, on the other hand, what you mostly do is open cans and heat them up (don't be ashamed, we all did that at one time) then you really should just get the cheapest mass market cookware there is, because that would do just fine--the thousand bucks or so for the icook set would be about ten times what you needed to spend. Again, I restate my bias: a set is almost always a bad buy since there are items you won't use. (And my suspicion is that a set from a multilevel marketer is an even worse buy.) You're better off defining what you want to do and then buying a good item that does that task well. If you do this exercise (i.e., asking people how would they spend "X" amount of dollars) you'll get lots of suggestions. But even if you decide to get that pricey set, at least you'd have made the decision with eyes open, seeing what all is out there.

Thanks everyone for all your help. Just to clarify, it isn't a weedwacker. I mow the lawn and do the trimming, and I'm very ginger around the trees. Plus, the tree was fine in the fall last year. The damage appeared only when the snow melted this spring, along with a bunch of dead grass around the trunk, which I neglected to mention originally. As for doing what Ken said, I appreciate the idea, but the tree flourished for years with grass at the base. Something definitely got to it over the winter. Is there any trimming I should do to dead branches? I was told today by someone at a nursery that I could do a "skin graft." Is that a thing? It seems like the concensus is to just leave it alone and let the air at it. One last question in addition to the ones above: there seems to be a large split up the trunk (see attached photo). Is this normal, or part of the tree healing? Sorry for the photo being sideways. I'm not really sure why it's doing that.

We are in N. CA about 90 min north of Sacramento. We have 1 good (but small) appliance shop in town. We will go to Sac or the bay area for decent appliance shops. Thanks for the feedback, folks. After reading I think part of my thought process was that, over the years, I have had incredibly good luck with appliances. I think I've had maybe 2 or 3 services calls for all appliances I've owned in the last 20 years...perhaps I am blinded by that track record. We had both single and double electric ovens on the list. However, it does look like a range-top with single oven, convection microwave, and a warming drawer will meet our needs. If we did double oven, the microwave would be a standard micro and we would eliminate the warming drawer. As far as how we used our oven, we both cook and bake, but much more of the former. We have just a single oven now and we make it work, but my issue is usually with the semi-frequent 2nd dish that needs cooking and also warming up plates (it's a thing for me). As far as induction, I'll take a look again, but the one time I messed with it, I wasn't a fan. as far as the fridge, the idea of a built it is more about "we're dumping XXX$ into this thing, we want to switch from a full size bottom freezer/french door fridge to a side by side counter depth, so let's get the xtra room". Thanks again for the feedback.

Oh, I’m definitely not doing whitwashing then if it looks like the 90’s- we are trying to take that out of the house. Thank you! ( I would show pictures of our room, but we are finishing our floors in our living room, so everything is in here right now...) not much room for you to see. No our ceilings are popcorned, that’s next to go. We have a fireplace, and a large floor to ceiling window opposite of it. I’ve have found probably every picture out there with paneling, and a lot of them are beautiful. I think if it was a room were weren’t in everyday I could win this battle, but it’s our bedroom. That leaves us to painting then (he does live here too...haha...) I actually think paneling looks stunning when painted navy. I may even let the knots show through and not make it perfect with that color...hmmm?