Well guys, We still live in the house we bought to in 2014 in order to move Donna's aging mom who was (at that time) showing symptoms of dementia. The dementia progressively took its toll on her mind, and then in October of 2016, she was diagnosed with stage 4 bladder cancer. She lived until early February 2017 and died here at home with us, as she wished and she had made us promise not to let her die in a hospital or nursing home. She died surrounded by family and a hospice nurse was present. I only relate this story because Donna's mom's health situation was the reason we bought a house big enough for all of us to live in, under one roof.........and the subsequential multiple projects and renovations.........were the reasons I dropped off of the forum. As soon as we moved into the house, I had a long list of things that HAD to be done, and a long list of lesser things we WANTED to do......so my time on the forum just could not be justified.....I simply had too much to do. The first things to be done were to come up with safety measures to help prevent an elderly woman with dementia from injury by being proactive about preventing her from "escaping" the house. I had to equip all exit doors with a deadbolt lock keyed inside and out (all keyed alike) and we had to come up with a nearby "hiding place" close to each lock location for spare keys in case of emergency. This house has a full basement with stairs, and we did not want her mom to have access to the stairs, so I included the same deadbolt on that door too. The sliding door to the second floor deck was a challenge in that it had a key lock on the outside ONLY with just a paddle lock lever on the inside. I had to come up with a way to make that door lockable with a key from the inside. My solution was to remove the lock assembly from the door and "reverse" location of the paddle lever plate and the key tumbler plate, so that the key tumbler would be on the inside. I stripped out the guts relating to the paddle lever and covered the hole where the paddle shaft came through with a small brass plate.....heavily epoxied in place from the backside (inside the door). All you can see from outside is a small hole blanked off with brass. The deck is on the second story on the backside of the house with stairs leading down the the pool, which is enclosed inside a fence, so we never use the sliding door as a "key entry" point anyhow. Then there is the attic storage space epic adventure. The attic space when we bought the house, was almost non-existent. There was a total of 4 sheets of 4' X 8' plywood (128 sq. ft.) on the joists at the top of an extremely rickety pull down wooden stairs. Stairs were the first to go. Replaced with a sturdy aluminum pull down folding stairs. Then I hauled 22 4' X 8' sheets of 3/4 OSB into the attic space.(each sheet was cut in half lengthwise to fit through attic stairs opening). We now have about 800 sq. ft. of usable attic storage space. I built 2 inverted trusses (strong backs) to attach to the joists on the sections spanning the 12' kitchen and the 18' den. These trusses ensure that the load imposed by the extra OSB and stored material are ultimately borne by the load bearing walls at the hallway, den, and both walls of the kitchen. The addition of the trusses assures that the ceiling joists do not assume a sway back shape over time resulting in cracked ceiling gypsum board. I assembled the trusses in the attic and fabricated them to have about 1/2" "preload bow" on the 18' truss and 3/8" preload bow on the 12' truss. This was to ensure that the trusses were actually carrying some load right from the start. After I got the trusses built and fastened onto each joist they served with metal strapping, I built a 30' long, 2 tier shelf system into the truss structures. Shelves are 24" wide and the bottom shelf is 20" off the floor, while the second shelf is 46" off the floor, so you have the attic floor under the shelves, and the 2 shelves themselves for storage, That yields 180 sq. ft. of space, plus the remaining 720 or so sq. ft. of attic at various head space. The tallest overhead clearance is about 6'2" at the rafter collar ties (and I added collar ties so that every rafter has a tie, instead of every third rafter as the house was built). There were 4 rafters that had "split" open due to improper orientation by the rough carpenters. They had placed rafters with knots situated on the lower chord of the rafter (tension side), which is a no-no. These rafters had to be jacked back into place and reinforcement panels of 3/4" plywood "scabbed" onto each side, glued and screwed. The original scheme had the ventilation exhaust fans from both bathrooms simply dumping into the attic space, another no-no. I extended the exhaust hoses over to the gable area of the house and busted through the brick and installed 2 bona fide exhaust hoods with insect screens. On the longest hose, which was a 4" hose....I built a booster fan box in the middle of that run and wired it so that it turns on when the original fan turns on. I felt that a 16' run of 4" hose would probably need all the fan power it could get to keep from simply "stalling out". The other hose was 6" and only 8' long, so I felt it was adequate with no additional help needed. I could go on and on about other projects, but these were some of my most major undertakings, Now, about my employment. I no longer work as a forklift mechanic in the shop. In midsummer 2015, I took over running the parts department when our longstanding partsman retired. This was challenging in that it put me to the task of acquiring and dispensing the parts instead of installing them on vehicles. It has also been challenging in that I was the first partsman in our history to actually have the capability of searching the Volvo and Daimler websites to look up parts. It was in the summer of 2015 that the company finally got onboard with software to enable this. Prior to that advent, our method of ordering parts involve looking the parts up in hard copy paper parts manuals, or talking to a vendor/dealer on the phone and trying to describe what you wanted, it was sometimes a crap shoot whether you would get the right parts or not. The outgoing partsman never had to use the computer to look up and order parts, and when it was introduced, he refused to do it saying that his time was too short to need it, so he told me to get all the training and he would just watch. LOL He and I worked side by side for 3 months while he showed me most of the ropes before he retired in October 2015. That is a summary of what I have been up to. I know this was completely off topic, but since the request was posed here, I felt OK in responding here.

Unfortunately I have no idea what their plan was. I felt bad because my communication was clearly not getting through, which is why it took so long to get even those basics across. This suddenly reminds me of a story I heard years ago, probably an urban legend, but here it is. A newly arrived immigrant family goes to the grocery store and ends up buying a can of crisco, fully expecting it to contain fried chicken parts as pictured on the label! I don't know if they realized the turkeys were plentiful because of thanksgiving or if they just thought that this was a regularly stocked item. I figured at the time that they were trying to get into the American spirit of things but looking back, I wouldn't be surprised if they'd only been in the country a few days and had no idea about Thanksgiving! I just have to keep telling myself that if they were brave enough to buy it, then they would be able to figure out if it was done after three hours or not.

I can understand the gavavemom's concern about the price of faucets. For the cost of a quality faucet you can buy a pretty good dishwasher or two microwaves, sometimes even a refrigerator. Why are the things so expensive? They're actually not. You can buy a good quality basic faucet that will give many years of excellent service from any number of sources -- and I mean a brass faucet with a good valve for under $50.00. In fact, I just did a search on my usual faucet e-tail sites and found name brand centerset lavatory faucets for under $30.00. The problem with these faucets is that, for the most part, they are not at all stylish. They look like the faucet in your mother's or grandmothers (as the case may be) 1970's bathroom. When you pay $600.00 for a faucet, you are paying about $50.00 for the faucet and $550.00 for the style. Most likely it will not work any better or last any longer than the basic $50.00 faucet. It's very much like buying cabinet hardware. A basic cabinet door or drawer pull or knob cost less than $1.00 -- in fact I have seen them for as little as 29¢ How, then can someone spend $25.00 and more on a cabinet pull? Easy, they're paying the extra for the style. As long as you insist that your faucet have style, you are going to pay more for it. You are paying for short production runs and the cost of designing, prototyping, testing and certifying the faucet -- which can easily exceed $100,000. Spreading this start-up cost across a small number of faucets means that quite a lot is added to the cost of each faucet. Not to mention that the manufacturer's markup on designer faucets is much higher -- they have to make their money from fewer items sold. Plus, as the originator of this thread shows, we don't fix things any more. If it leaks or stops working perfectly, we throw it out and get another one. This makes the lifetime costs of owning faucets much higher. And, it is really dumb because most faucets can be easily fixed. In almost all cases the problem is nothing more than a silicon seal. My grandfather built a bathroom into his Victorian house in 1912 as a Christmas present to his new bride. In 2012 when the city tore it down to build a new library, every faucet in the room was still working perfectly. On the hot water side of the lavatory, the nickel finish was entirely gone and the brass beneath completely exposed -- but it still worked because it had been carefully maintained for 100 years, by my grandfather, my father, and me. If it needed a new washer, it got one. If the riser leaked, it got a new one. It was certainly not a stylish faucet (well, actually, today it is stylish once again), but it worked, and my Grandfather, Irish to his bones, would not replace anything that still worked. It was a Kohler, by the way. Anyway, so long as you require a faucet be stylish, you are going to pay for the style. The more style, the more you are going to pay. If you want the major league bragging rights of owning a Philipp Starck-Designed Axor (Hansgrohe) faucet, you will pay a major league price. Or, for 1/10th the price, you can own a Delta or Moen that will last nearly forever. You are the buyer, and the choice is yours. So, what's it going to be?

I agree with a couple of prior posters. The real value of the 13 indictments is the detailed information on what the Russians did and how they did it. If the Trump administration is smart, they'll use those indictments as a resource for developing some procedures which will prevent or at least inhibit Russian meddling with our elections in the future. I also think we need to hit Russia with a cyber attack of some kind so it will think twice before meddling in our elections again and we also need to keep the existing Russian sanctions in place and implement the Russian sanctions that the Congress recently enacted because it is clear that Putin is desperate to have those sanctions lifted and he wouldn't be that desperate unless the sanctions were having an impact.