An elderly carpenter was ready to retire. He told his employer of his plans to leave the house building business and live a more leisurely life with his wife, enjoying his extended family. He would miss the pay check, but he needed to retire.

    The employer was sorry to see his good worker go and asked if he could build just one more house as a personal favor. The carpenter said yes, but in time it was easy to see that his heart was not in his work. He used shoddy materials to build the house. It was an unfortunate way to end his career.

    When the carpenter finished his work and the employer came to inspect the house, he handed the front-door key to the carpenter. “This is your house,” he said, “my gift to you.”

    What a shock! What a shame! If he had only known he was building his own house, he would have done it all so differently. Now he had to live in a home he hadn't built very well.

    It is the same with us. We build our lives in a distracted way, reacting rather than acting, willing to put up with less than the best. At important points, we don't give the job our best effort. Then with a shock we look at the situation we have created and find that we are now living in the house we have built. If we had realized that, we would have done it differently.

    Think of yourself as the carpenter. Think about your house. Each day you hammer a nail, place a board, or erect a wall, build wisely. It is the only life you ever build. Even if you live it for only one day more, that day deserves to be lived graciously and with dignity. The plague (牌匾) on the wall says, “Life is a do-it-yourself project.”

    Who could say it more clearly? Your life today is the result of your attitudes and choices in the past. Your life tomorrow will be the result of your attitudes and the choices you make today.

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    E-mail has been widely used since its invention for its convenience, efficiency, and high speed. However, it is wise to remember how easily this wonderful technology can be misused, sometimes unintentionally, but can result in serious consequences.

    Now let's look at the case of the Illinois man who left the snow-filled streets of Chicago for a vacation in Florida. His wife was on a business trip and was planning to meet him there the next day. When he reached his hotel , he decided to send his wife a quick E-mail. Unable to find the note with his wife's E-mail address, he did his best to type from his memory. Unfortunately, he missed one letter and his E-mail was directed to an elderly lady whose husband had passed away (去世) only the day before. When the sad widow checked her E-mail, she took one look at the screen, let out a sharp cry, and fell to the floor in a dead faint (昏迷 ). At the sound , her family rushed into the room and saw this note on the screen:

    MY DEAREST WIFE： JUST GOT CHECKED IN. EVERYTHING PREPARED FOR YOUR ARRIVAL TOMORROW.

    P.S. SURE IS HOT DOWN HERE

    On the day the tornado hit, there was no indication that severe weather was on its way—the sky was blue and the sun bad been out. The first alert my husband,Jimmy,67,and I,65,got came around 9 p.m., from some scrolling text on the TV Jimmy was watching. He ran upstairs to find me in our third-floor bedroom, and we changed the channel from the presidential primary debate I had been watching to our local Pensacola, Florida, station.

    No sooner had we found coverage of the tornado than it was on top of us. It was the loudest thing I have ever heard. The bones of the house shook, and the power went out. The wind began to roar through the house, most likely through blown-out windows and the door to our garage. We had three flights of steps to navigate to get to the relative safety of the first floor, because the cupboard down there is underneath a brick staircase.

    I didn't know how or if we would make it down the steps. It felt as if there were no floor underneath me as the wind lifted me off my feet. I tried to move forward, but this intense pressure held me in place.

    As we reached the last flight of steps, our front door blew out. Pieces of glass that looked like crushed ice flew everywhere. Suddenly, a three-foot-long tree branch crashed into the door frame. It flew over our heads, missing us by inches. Had we been one step up, it would have hit us.

    By the time I reached the cupboard, the tornado had been over us for about a minute. Jimmy pushed me down to the cupboard floor, but he couldn't get inside himself because of the wind. I held Jimmy's arm and tried to bring Jimmy with it. My knees were full of glass, but at that moment, I felt no pain. If I had let go, Jimmy would have flown right out the back of the house and into the bay.

    All of a sudden, Jimmy lifted off his feet like people in tornadoes do in the movies. I thought he was gone. And then everything stopped. He landed on his feet. In those first quiet moments, I couldn't believe it was over, Jimmy said he'd go outside to check. "No,"I said. "Don't leave me. Don't leave me."

    Our neighbor says the storm lasted four minutes. In that time, four of the twelve town houses in our unit were completely destroyed. Of the houses left standing, ours suffered the most damage. Amazingly, none of us were severely injured.

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    When Luke went to university he thought he would be on a new journey in life and getting his own place. In the UK, it's common to fly the nest at a fairly young age. Many choose a flat-share; others make plans to get on the property ladder.

    But the current economic situation forced Luke back to his mum's house at the age of 27. And he's not alone: a quarter of young adults in the UK now live with their parents. The Office for National Statistics said more than 3.3 million adults between the ages of 20 and 34 were living with their parents in 2013.

    Lack of jobs and the high cost of renting accommodation made Luke change his plans. He's upset. "There's something very difficult about being an adult living in an environment where you're still a child," he says. "It limits me socially; sometimes I feel it limits me professionally."

    Indeed, many young people have no choice but to stay at "the hotel of Mum and Dad".

    Krissy had to return home after a year away and now lives in rather terrible conditions, sharing the family's three-bedroom house with her sisters. She says they end up getting on each other's nerves when it's time to use the bathroom in the morning.

    Of course, living with your parents is not unusual in some countries. Economic conditions, culture, or family traditions mean many young people stay at home until they get married. Even then, it can be too expensive to rent or buy a house and the married couples continue to live at one of their parents' homes.

    But some parents seem to enjoy having their kids back at home. Janice's daughters are part of what's being called "the boomerang generation". She says, "I get to share their lives with them, and I've got to know them all as adults. We have the sort of conversations that good friends do."

    So for some it's a win-win situation — spending time with your families, and saving money.

    Public transport is declining in the rich world. To those who have to squeeze onto the number 25 bus in London, or the A train in New York, the change might not be noticeable. But public transport is becoming less busy in those places, and passenger numbers are flat or falling in almost every American city. That is despite healthy growth in urban populations and employment.

    Although transport agencies blame their unpopularity on things like road works and broken signals, it seems more likely that they are being outcompeted. App-based taxi services like Uber and Lyft are more comfortable and convenient than trains or buses. Cycling is nicer than it was, and rental bikes are more widely available. Cars are cheap to buy, thanks to cut-rate loans, and ever cheaper to run. Online shopping, home working and office-sharing mean more people can avoid travelling altogether.

    The competition is only likely to grow. More than one laboratory is developing new transport technologies and applications. Silicon Valley invented Uber and, more recently, apps that let people rent electric scooters(滑板车) and then abandon them on the pavement. China created sharing-bicycles and battery-powered "e-bikes", both of which are spreading.

    Transport agencies should accept the upstarts, and copy them. Cities tend either to ignore app-based services or to try to push them off the streets. That is understandable, given the rules-are-for-losers attitude of firms like Uber. But it is an error.

    It is doubtful that most people make hard distinctions between public and private transport. They just want to get somewhere, and there is a cost in time, money and comfort. An ideal system would let them move across a city for a single payment, transferring from trains to taxis to bicycles as needed. Building a platform to allow that is hard, and requires much sweet-talking of traditional networks as well as technology firms. It is probably the secret to keeping cities moving.

    A 4-year-old boy was given the chance to celebrate his favorite holiday early this year after a neighborhood in Illinois heard that he would miss the chance to trick or treat because of a vital Surgery (手术).Sonny Mead, who put on a Superman costume for the special day, hit more than 20 hours along his special trick-or-treat route and was even treated to a ride in a fire truck.

    “He thinks today is Halloween,” Jackie Mead, the boy's mom, told Fox 2 Now on Wednesday. “We let him pick his costume, and up until today he was going to be Spider-Man, and then he decided that he wanted to be Superman because he wants superpowers.”

    Sonny was diagnosed with craniosynostosis (颅缝早闭), which causes the skull bones to fuse prematurely, affecting brain growth. Sonny had pieces of his skull removed to give his brain more room to grow in 2015, and the bone was supposed to grow back but never did.

    So on Friday, doctors will use a 3-D printer and bone from a dead body to rebuild Sonny's skull. His recovery is expected to take between two and six months, meaning he'll not be able to trick or treat when Oct.31 comes.

    But once Amanda Richert heard that her friends son would miss out on the trick-or-treating fun, Goshen Meadows citizens, in Edwardsville, Illinois united in a group to make sure he had a chance for the trick-or-treat fun. Sonny's mother said their reaction was overwhelming.