Jewels

Morning, all! TPM Sister #102

Best wishes for a successful and uneventful surgery! Heal quickly! TPM Sister #102

Happy, happy birthday! I hope it's great! Get in some good jumps. TPM Sister #102

Hiya! Hoping everyone's having a great 4th!

It's nice to see someone in Hollywood live a long, full life and then die of "natural causes." Hardly anyone in the entertainment industry seems to accomplish that these days! TPM Sister #102

If you'd like bigger things for the kitchen, Bed, Bath & Beyond gift cards are a good idea. That way, no one person or group of people have to come up with the total cost of the item. But, good luck! I hope you get exactly what you want. TPM Sister #102

I just got married and we had the same dilemma. Amazon.com now allows you to register for ANYTHING, which means you can list things you'd actually really like and not just what one store has, in order to complete a registry. The other thing we did was ask people to give us gift cards to restaurants that they especially like. It didn't need to be a fancy place; just something they enjoyed. The idea is to have some gift cards for date nights, so we could justify going out to eat while we're paying for the wedding. We've REALLY appreciated those! TPM Sister #102

What a great milestone! May you have many, many more together! TPM Sister #102

Hey, HAPPY BIRTHDAY! I hope it's great! TPM Sister #102

Happy, happy birthday! I hope it brings something special your way. TPM Sister #102

LOL! Thanks, EVERYONE, for the concern about my safety. There ARE guns in the house. The issue was not that we didn't have guns available to us. As my husband has said more than once, you just don't grab a gun when you think you're just going in the other room to close a window. The whole thing took place in under a minute and was a complete surprise. The point about safety is not taken lightly, of course. I understand what you're saying about being prepared and do not disagree with it. It would have been different, I think, if either of us had realized it was a person IN OUR HOME. Once you're there and in the middle of it, though, when the intruder has already seen you before you realize what's going on, I think you make different decisions. But yes, being prepared is important! TPM Sister #102

you'd kill a person over trivial property I won't speak for ChileR, but as for me: I would not kill merely over property, but I would kill to protect my family, or even my own sorry ass. This was a nighttime burglary of an occupied residence (assuming the intruder was lying, which I think is a reasonable presumption). In most US jurisdictions - and the OP can verify or correct this, as she's an attorney, too - burglary of an occupied structure, especially a residence, especially at night, is considered by law to be a crime of danger to persons, warranting enhanced penalties (compared to burglary of an unoccupied structure). So for me, a crime of danger to the persons in my home constitutes a physical attack against the persons in my home, warranting the use of deadly force in response. In Colorado, we have what's commonly known as the "Make My Day" law that allows homeowners to use deadly force once someone actually enters the home if they have entered for an illegal purpose. It's controversial enough that I'm not going to say more than that because this isn't intended to be a thread for SC. Suffice it to say that once the intruder was over our threshhold, we had tremendous latitude in terms of what we legally could have done in response to his presence in our home. The REAL point is that there was no need. Our end goal was to get the guy to leave without anyone being hurt, and that's what we accomplished. I'd like to see the man caught, of course, but there are plenty of legal consequences that I'd be satisfied with before seeing anyone injured or killed. TPM Sister #102

I know, that's the odd part. The police have some theories about that, including the concept that if it's unclear how someone got in, you also might not miss any stolen items right away. Either that, or he's a neat freak! TPM Sister #102

I don't think the house stands out in any particular way. It's a nice part of town, but nothing like gated-community nice. We're not even on the corner. Who knows what the trigger was? TPM Sister #102

Well, I have a dog . . . but she's a 14-year-old deaf chihuahua. As for the guns, we have some but I don't want to send this to SC. We're okay, thankfully, and we live in a good neighborhood. We asked the police if there had been robberies in our neighborhood lately, and they said no. I'm hoping this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience! TPM Sister #102

It could very easily have escalated. I'm glad it didn't go that way! I'll be sleeping with one eye open for a while. TPM Sister #102

We had a break-in about 4:30 this morning . . . while we were home! My husband heard what he thought were the blinds blowing in the breeze, and went into his office to shut the window. As it turns out, it wasn't the breeze. The window had been totally closed. However, when he walked into his office, a man was standing there at the window, trying to put the screen back in. We got lucky. If the intruder was armed, he didn't try to use anything. In fact, he tried to convince my husband that he had been "invited" and that he just wanted to come inside to get his friend. Seriously? You crawl in windows of the homes you're invited to . . . at 4:30 a.m.??! Anyway, I heard my husband telling him to get out of the house and had 911 on the line before the guy crawled back out of the window and left. We're all fine and we have new locks on the windows tonight. The police think they got some great fingerprints on him, too. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this is the last we'll see of him! TPM Sister #102

Have a WONDERFUL birthday! I hope it's a great beginning to a positive new year.

THE CUP IS HOME!!! Thanks to the Red Wing fans who are good sports about it.

Thanks, everyone. Yes, it's concrete and it's in Colorado, so we can get some hard weather in the winter now and then. I really appreciate the input. I vote for the replacement plan that doesn't have four digits. TPM Sister #102

I seem to recall that the first cosmonaut was a dog, and the first astrononaut was a chimpanzee. There's a thread somewhere about cats in the tunnel . . . . TPM Sister #102

Very nice! I like it when it feels invisible like that! TPM Sister #102

Mom's driveway needs to be repaired because it's flaking off in the corner and crumbling a bit underneath. Is it possible to repair something like that, or will she have to re-do the whole section? I'm not sure how expensive those kinds of repairs are. (My husband says we can't buy that "spackle" type repair material to fix it because the area is too big. I'm guessing it's maybe . . . 18" across?) If she were to totally replace the driveway since it's aging, how much would that run (ballpark)? Anybody know? TPM Sister #102

My husband is a Mac guy, through and through. I have a Dell and things like this are just too tempting! Well, they would be a lot MORE tempting if I had a wad of cash in my bank account. . . . TPM Sister #102

I can't speak to the rest of the country, but I'll agree that Colorado has been out of whack this spring. Mom's house was hit by lightning a couple of weeks ago. She was in the family room and a bolt of lightning hit the chimney. She saw a massive ball of white light IN THE HOUSE and then found out that it blew bricks off the chimney, took out the garage door opener (which yanked and ruined the door itself), the sprinkler system, the phones AND the phone wiring (along with the internet). . . . She's got a lot of putting back together to do. But, if you ever wondered about the value of surge protectors, the three new tvs were plugged into new surge protectors and all came through just fine. TPM Sister #102