I never went home for Thanksgiving, nor did I have roommates who invited me home with them. (24+ hour drive each way, too poor for plane, bus would have been too slow to get me home and back, no train service.) Dorms were open but deserted, dining halls were closed. One year some administrative person arranged for those of us on campus to eat with local alumni, one year I was in an apartment so it was just a normal week, and the other years I got together with friends in the same situation. It was lonely but fine.

That's what my mom uses on her cookies, and they freeze just fine. Condensation is less of an issue if you keep the box sealed until it's reached room temperature, but we always ate them still-frozen.

Where did you find History of the World in audiobook format? I can only find one of the books (medieval) on the Peace Hill Press website. (And 18 CDs for 22 hours! The book I'm listening to at the moment is 19 hours plus bonus material on two CDs.)

I don't know that I'd try and retroactively declare PS 9th grade as 8th grade. Repeating a grade in high school isn't uncommon when going from PS to boarding school, so ought to be permissible when switching to HS. She had two years as a 9th grader.

DD11, currently a 7th grader in PS, is a voracious reader but a reluctant academic writer. I'm trying to identify an online course that will help her improve her writing skills, at her request. Organization is a relative weakness for her; she has a hard time knowing how to get the information in her head onto paper, and her writing tends to be disorganized. She has decent mechanics when given the specific task of identifying and correcting grammatical and punctuation errors. She cannot summarize at all - if you give her three sentences and ask her to summarize them, she will still be talking five minutes later. Her creative writing done for pleasure tends to be much more coherent and well-organized, so I think there's also an element of performance anxiety that interferes with academic writing. Up until now, her school writing has been graded primarily on content, and she's bright enough that her teachers have attributed any obvious weakness to lack of effort, rather than lack of skill. DD generally picks things up fast enough that she ignores big chunks of direct instruction, so I have some sympathy for the "lack of effort" perspective. But middle school teachers expect organization and coherence and proofreading, and it's getting to be too much to fake. DD is painfully aware of her difficulty with writing for school, so much so that she's even willing to let me help. But she and I are not compatible like that; we butt heads and no one enjoys a single moment and it takes 3 hours to edit 30 short sentences for grammar / punctuation / clarity and at the end each of us is ready to beat the other with sticks. She has taken two online courses before (MCT's Grammar Island and a Minecraft class involving modifying some snippets of Java) and enjoyed both content and format. I'd like to find an online course that: - improves the quality and quantity of her written output - has lots of instructor feedback - does not require more than 2-3 hours a week for a slow-to-average student during the school year, if a school year program - is flexible enough to accommodate multi-week breaks, if a summer program - does not result in a final grade or any sort of official transcript / credit; assignment grades and/or a final narrative evaluation are acceptable - is 100% secular, where "the Bible covered as just another piece of literature" would not be secular enough Cost is unlikely to be an issue. DD has talent search scores high enough to qualify for most of the usual suspects, but talent search is not meant for remediation, and IMHO what she needs is rigorous bright-kid remediation. A self-paced program with suggested pacing would be a good match for her scheduling constraints. My best guess is that interaction with other kids in the class would be negative-to-neutral, even though she generally enjoys that interaction, because she is so self-conscious of bring unable to do things that seem to come easily to everyone else. Thanks!

As an adult, I scratched myself on a rusty nail. (Nail hadn't been exposed to soil, not a puncture wound, so a low-risk situation.) It had been more than 10 years since my last tetanus booster. I called the health department (they have a vaccine clinic) and they held the office open until I could get there so I could get a booster that same day.

Also, the recipient never pays tax on the receipt of a gift. Gift tax is an entirely different thing, and wouldn't affect your basis unless and to the extent that the person who gave you the stock paid gift tax.

Your basis is the donor's basis, in most cases. It absolutely is not the value at the time you received it. Basis is presumed to be zero in the absence of any other evidence. "The lowest split-adjusted price the stock has ever traded at" is probably a reasonable number to use, although it may be an over-estimate if the donor received the stock in a merger.

(double post)

One of the popular flavors of ice cream near me uses wheat flour in the plain chocolate flavor. Ask the parents what brands they're okay with. My DD is hard to feed (combination of allergies and anxiety and pickiness), and her friends' parents know she's hard to feed and don't worry if she chooses not to eat. I often drop her off with a full tummy and some snacks in her bag, and pick her up ravenous (and with a bag of uneaten snacks that just weren't right, even though she picked them herself and eats those items regularly; she's hard even for me to feed).

OMG, so much girl puberty at our house. Feeding (not currently eating? probably hungry!) helps take the edge off. But even fed, she's just wound up so tight.

Direct flight, sure, no issue. You get a gate pass and watch her get on the plane, and then she gets off and follows the signs to baggage claim at the other end. My DD will be 12 this summer, and I'm looking forward to not having to pay the unaccompanied minor fee anymore! She's never changed planes without a parent (because Southwest won't let UMs change planes), and wants me to fly with her, but pretending I'm not with her, for the first flight she does with a change.

There's nothing to do and nowhere to go in our neighborhood; even biking in a loop would mean using a high speed road with no shoulder and obstructed visibility. No similar-aged kids who play outside. So my DD was home alone long before she felt like exploring the streets. She stayed alone for short periods starting about 8. I'd be fine with her spending the entire day unsupervised now (age 11), but my in-laws live with us, so she's rarely alone for more than two or three hours at a time.

I once knew a girl who insisted that the o in yogurt was pronounced like the o in jog, rather than the o in yoyo. Yah-gurt.

Howard Zinn's A Young People's History of the United States.