mwheel, Joann and I have days when we cook together or for both of us, not every night, that's too scheduled, but I usually make dinner on the days she works, she gets home fairly late then, and we eat at my house and she cooks Monday and Thursday and I eat at her house. With thew time change it will be dark when dinner-time comes around, no matter what and we are used to these heavy rains (thunder and lightning not so much) When I have to go out to her place when it is dark, I plan to take my fanny-pack loaded with my phone and I have a good flashlight (have extra batteries), rain-gear when needed, it is all part of living here

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.

Oh, how tragic. My heart and prayers go out to that poor family.

"Fabio surprised me with his little tirade about not going to reward." Fabio and Chase had had a talk earlier in the day wherein Chase promised him that he'd take Fabio with him on the reward if he won. And Fabio promised that if he won, he would choose Chase to come along. Fabio and his mother live in different states and only see each other about twice a year. As Fabio said, Holly and her husband live together, so it wasn't as big a deal for them to get to go on the reward as it would have been for Fabio and his mother. And before you bring up the fact that Holly and her husband spent their 25th anniversary apart while Holly has been playing Survivor, it really wasn't much of an anniverary reward for them if they couldn't be alone together doing the horizontal mambo. "According to the spoiler boards there was a lot that went on during tribal that wasn't shown. Jane accused Sash of something that he denied. The cameras were turned off for a while while it was discussed." I doubt the cameras were turned off for any discussion during tribal council. It's a well-known fact that those tribals usually last around and hour and a half to two hours, and have been known to last even longer than that. It's just that it's always severely edited to make it seem like it's only 15 minutes or so.