Buehl, please do! I was just trying to save something of use. I'd been checking the GW all night, turned my back for 15 minutes to watch the Health Care vote, and whammo! all the posts were gone. I kept refreshing, thinking, "This can't be!"

This is a great thread. We're not remodeling but building a new house, and man, can I relate to a lot of these. ...you know every lighting fixture, faucet, sink, appliance by memory because you have endlessly researched each one. you freak out your own GC because you can discuss minute details about your house/kitchen from memory down to the 1/8". you have more e-mails from your GC/subs than you do from your friends. you wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat about some critical detail and then go downstairs to e-mail your GC about it right at the moment before you forget.

This is an entertaining thread. I've read all the way through, and realize that dh and I are extremely fortunate in that our tastes coincide on so many levels, and he's very agreeable after I spend hours researching agonizing over selections. What I have learned though, after we built a home 10 years ago, is that it all needs to be done at the outset. Because after the initial construction is finished he is extremely resistant to more construction mess. I had FREE labor offering to help me finish my sewing studio - no go. And the backsplash that we were going to finish after we moved in and lived with a kitchen for awhile - never happened. We sold the house 7 years later, and it was still ABB. So this house, my studio has been an integral part of the plan, AND I just found my perfect backsplash. I can't join the ABB club, or I will forever be without a backsplash. It's all just knowing your own particular dynamic. I'm agonizing right now over which sink to put into the kitchen. I've asked his opinion - he said "get whatever you want" We've gone over our plans with a fine tooth comb in the last week, and I found a few places where we could change selections or leave off, and he pretty much added everything back in.

Vee and Annpan, American writers of children's books are just as apt as English ones to anthropomorphize and dress their animal characters in human clothes. Besides Disney, there's Dr Seuss and his weird critters, Joel Chandler Harris's no-longer-PC "Uncle Remus" tales, the Sesame Street characters, and probably a lot of others. Some Americans are very fond of the English books, too. The difference I see, though, between these writers' stories and those of English writers: American readers, unlike English readers, seldom continue to favor them long past childhood. Oh, they often remember them affectionately, are likely to read them to their own children or reread them for themselves, etc., but the majority of American adults aren't going to admit that children's books are still their favorite books. Maybe it's a fear of being labeled 'childish'. I don't know. It's an interesting sociological/cultural phenomenon -- to me, that is. :-) My own personal problem with the English books: they are so unbearably pretty and precious. I hated Beatrix Potter's books! Especially Peter Rabbit. Vee, my sons loved Babar, so I gritted my teeth and read those books more than I ever wanted to. In fact I probably read more kids' books as an adult than I did as a child. The breakover age for me was about nine.