In response to rmol64, and anyone else who may be interested, we ended up purchasing the Whirlpool 9600 Steam Washer and Dryer pair. Here was the thought process: 1. After shopping around, and talking with a few friends, I decided to stick go with the FL Washer. The benefits seem great, and will definately be heads-and-shoulders better than our 20-year-old-Kenmores. I think the "smell" issue can be dealt with effectively by keeping the door open, and cleaning as directed by all the mfgrs. Also, I convinced myself that the FL washers would fit fine in our "pass through" laundry room. 2. Based upon recommendations from friends, on-line reviews, and opinions on this forum and others, I narrowed the choice down to Whirlpool, LG, and Bosch. I was disappointed that there was no clear "leader" in the quality/reliability perspective department. There are plenty of people who have these brands and love them, and there are plenty of horror stories from owners and service people for these brands too. 3. We ended up choosing the Whirlpool 9600's over the others for a couple of reasons... The Bosch units had less capacity. Both salesman we spoke to said that the LGs are somewhat less stable in some homes, particularly on the 2nd floor (or higher), which is a concern to me, since I don't think our house construction is super great. I was able to see a live demo of Whirlpool, and they were very quite and stable. Supposedly, the Whirlpool suspension is better than the LG, from what the salespeople told us. Lastly, I know that Whirlpool has good support in our area, and I'm not sure about LG. I've heard so much about problems with LG's service and support, I didn't want to have to worry about it, since service calls seem to be a way of life anymore with these sorts of appliances. 4. Even though we like the storage and positioning aspects of the pedistals, we decided to not get them. This was because several people were in agreement that the pedistals can tend to make the units a bit more unstable, noisy, and virbrate the house. I'd hate to spend the extra $$$ only to find out that our laundry room floor acts like a drum tuned to just the right resonnant frequency of the washer/dryer and have dancing appliances in my house! That would just be my luck! We did decide to get the extended warranty, which is something I almost never get. It just seems that washer/drier problems will crop up, so what the heck. So that's the story of what we decided. We havn't received the units yet, because our laundry room needs to be repaired before the appliances can get installed. :-)

I saw a photo in the paper of all these big cardboard boxes of clothing sitting on the beach and people sorting through them for items. Clothing was tossed here and there and strewn upon the ground. Got me thinking how big of a task it would be to organize something that this. How many of the actual clothing donated ends up in the hands of those needing it? How appropriate the clothing items in the boxes really are, ect. It would be so disappointing to be responsible for a clothing drive and then see it laying in the wet sand. Makes me want to load up a truck and drive there, go door to door trying to distribute it that way.

Making up a phone number when creating your email account is not a good idea since they use that number to contact you should there be an attack on your account or if you lost your info and they needed to resend it to you, they would be sending it to a phone number you can not reach to get that info and it could be someones actual phone number and they would be the one that got your critical information. You can instead give an alternate email address that is real where they can send you that information. I had that very thing happen recently with my gmail account, I accessed my account from an unknown, to them, device from a different state and it sent out an alert wanting to know if it was really me or if someone was trying to access my account. It was sent to my other email address that I provided, I was able to simply let them know it was me and it was a device I would be using. Had I provided my phone number they would have put out an automated call or text stating the same thing. There is an option to just skip that page and go on. Not everyone has a cell phone. Not everyone has texting. I believe that you can put in the phone number and request a call not text, then when you go into your account settings you can go in and remove the phone number, if it was set for text that option is not available or that is how it has been in the past for gmail. I set up a new yahoo account not long ago for one of my neighbors and was able to do so with out a cellphone because she does not have a cell phone. Yahoo has however been making so many changes and many are not for the better so it could have changed. So many people have left yahoo due to some of these changes.

Happy birthday to you too Deamn!! List your birthday over at Joann_fl's website so we can include you in the post next year!