Lots of people have wood burning stoves for heat in my neighborhood; on really cold days you can smell them throughout my neighborhood. There was one attached to our fireplace when we first looked at this house, but the owner took it with him. Which was fine, because the smell of burning wood really bothers my allergies.

I suspect the cats would not be so keen on pneumatic tube transport.

They have their own methods of instantaneous transportation if my mom's cat is anything to judge by.

I suspect the cats would not be so keen on pneumatic tube transport.

They don't like being stuffed into the little carriers. It always makes trips though the bank drive-through awkward.

Maybe cats' fear of vacuums has to do with some unfortunate early cat-pneumatic-tube experiments. We may have forgotten, but they haven't.

Some of those cat ... shelves (I don't know what else to call them) that wind all over the house would be sort of cool.

Both my Georgia grandfather and my Aunts in Georgia had hand operated water pumps in the kitchen sink. I wanted to use it and give it a pump and expected water to come gushing out like turning on a tap. My cousins mocked me and then showed me how you had to pump up the water.

About half our houses in England had fireplaces, and in England no source of heat is ornamental--it's way warmer than Detroit or Montreal, but the only place I've sat down on a toilet seat and melted the rime with my morning piss.

I didn't sit on the seat long, but a) heating the bathroom isn't optional and b) extra not optional when the toilet is in a separate room from the sink and tub.

We also had a fair incidence of burst water pipes. And never in Canada or the midwest.

The Pneumatic Tube system of New York.

On at least one occasion the tubes carried not just mail, but a live cat. “The postal workers seemed as fascinated by the nearly magical tube system as everyone else and, at least once, even routed a luckless cat through the city’s tubes.‘He was a little dizzy, but he made it." - Joseph H. Cohen, historian for the New York City Post Office.

We had a downtown dept store in my hometown that used pneumatic tubes for their cash system. None of the salespeople had cash registers but pnuematic tubes that they would send the money to the main office and they would send the change back through the tubes. It was open until the 1990s, believe it or not.

I think it was the Service Merchandise in the mall built in the 1980s that has pneumatic tubes as well. I can't remember if it was for cash or the order slips.