I'm staying in a hostel this week in London, England. I'm off there for a few days with a friend and I suggested we stay in the hostel. In my experience, hostels associated with Hosteling International (formerly International Youth Hosteling Association) are great places to stay. You can identify these hostels by the symbol of a triangle containing a tree and a hut. They are not hotels and do not have all the comforts associated with hotels, but they are affordable, generally clean (not antiseptically so, but not bad) and friendly, and centrally located. I haven't stayed in a hostel in many years, but the one I have booked in London (and this is new, you can book accommodations ahead) is one I have stayed in before (1971 and 1973) and it has been renovated since. It is close to St. Paul's Cathedral and within the Square Mile of London. My girlfriend and I will probably not have a room to ourselves, but we are prepared for that. It is only for 3 nights and the total cost for the stay for the two of us (including breakfast) is less than 170 US dollars. That's a darned good price for accommodations in London. If you are interested in checking out the HI site, the link is below. Jane Here is a link that might be useful: Hosteling International

Sue, the Etap hotel is a few steps below a motel 6...quite a few steps in fact. LOL! The rooms were tiny, which were expected but the floor was really grungy and the toilet/shower area were a one piece porta potty plastic unit that had been put into a corner of the room. It was very small and the floor area by the toilet got soaked when you showered. The shower stall area was barely big enough to turn around in. Now I wish I had taken a picture! Patti, I think the house I used to live in was torn down and a new one put in it's place, there were a lot of new homes there. The town was very small, just one street with one tiny restaurant and a coffin maker. That was it...not even a post office. Stacy, yeah, I think I should've learned after our trip out west. Some of it was fun but for the most part they weren't interested in a lot of it. I've downloaded my pictures and will start posting them. Wish I had taken more videos, they are pretty funny because they are so BAD! LOL!

I'm just thrilled beyond speech to know the human brain's impulse control centers are fully formed when people are 23. That solves that problem. Now for this business of making kids enforce the laws. How stupid is that? Holding a cashier responsible and making THEM a criminal because someone attempts to buy something the "bleeding hearts" don't want them to have. Why not hold the ones BUYING them, or attempting to buy them responsible? Seems funny, MADD and all the others don't care about the ones trying to buy them, only the ones trying to earn a living. Sad situation indeed. They're just poor little children? That's the next claim. So hold the parents liable and let the parents sit in jail for their kids actions. Sounds good to me. Maybe some discipline will come back into the fold. And they only have to worry about it until the "bad" kids are 23 anyway, right?

I had an LG refrigerator in my last house. It worked great and I never had any issues with it. I did replace the seal around the bottom freezer door once. It was about 9 years old when we sold it with our house. I would have taken it with my if it would have fit into the design of the new kitchen. I purchased a new LG for this house and we've been using it for a few weeks. It's a large, counter depth model with a water and ice dispenser in the door. I wasn't interested in the water/ice dispenser as I knew it would take up already valuable space in the refrigerator, but my family really wanted it. It certainly doesn't hold as much as my old model and I haven't been able to keep it as organized as I did the older model. But, I believe these are standard issues with all counter depth models. I didn't even consider a GE as the quality of these refrigerators has really gone down hill since GE has been trying to sold the appliance business.