Shoeless
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Posts posted by Shoeless
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Hmm, doesn't look like Novavax is available anywhere near me.
Is Novavax that much better than Moderna or Pfizer to warrant an hour+ trip to a bigger city for it? I've had all Moderna previously. The guys in my house have all done Pfizer.
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26 minutes ago, Clemsondana said:
I recently read an article that said that many teens get over 200 notifications a day and are interrupted constantly. When I talked to my students, some go tech-free for hours at a time while others say that they are interrupted every few minutes. I think there is a lot that we don't understand about how many factors are affecting kids, no matter what their school setting is. I'm coming to think that extracurriculars have the huge benefit of causing kids go go hours at a time without electronics. I ponder on this stuff a lot because it varies so much between the different environments that I am in. At church we have kids who struggle to get through a 15 minute lesson without a phone.
Interesting. My teen still does not have his own phone, so we haven't had to deal with this.
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4 minutes ago, Clemsondana said:
But, I'm flummoxed by people paying for classes and then their kids not doing enough to pass. It's always happened, usually when the kids have anxiety or something like that, but now there is more 'no oversight' so that parents seem unaware of the fact that their kids are doing nothing unless I contact them.
Do you think this is pandemic related or did it start before the pandemic?
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1 minute ago, Terabith said:
For what it’s worth, my husband says he would have said no. We’re already traveling for totality again in April. We lived in San Antonio for five years and both of our kids were born there, and we’ve never been back and I would love to return.
You'll have to let me know if you're available for a meetup in April 🙂
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The only thing we made the sellers of our house remove was a hot tub on the back patio. We weren't going to use it and didn't want to deal with having it hauled away.
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You're not a jerk.
Your niece needs supportive family around her. Your family simply isn't able to give the kind of support she needs. That's not mean or jerky; it's just how it is.
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10 hours ago, elegantlion said:
QR code menus
I hate QR codes. If I have to scan a QR code to interact with your business, then I'm just not going to interact with your business at all.
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1 hour ago, Spryte said:
What do you all think? Would someone want them? Or would that be junk?
Not junk! That stuff sounds cool!
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2 hours ago, Heartstrings said:
As s mom with average high school kids, I usually hang out with the “doing nothing in particular” group. The “pushing” group usually isn’t very welcoming and their kids are super busy which makes hanging out impossible. There are usually a lot of us that look like we aren’t doing much, but are actually doing “normal” or “average”, we just keep kind of quiet about it.
I know that when I was bit more of a “pusher” I thought the less rigorous folks were guilty of educational neglect, but over many years of seeing the actual outcomes, none of those kids was actually being neglected. They were just more low key than I was, and their kids have all gone off to college with no problems. My outsiders perspective just wrong, their parents were loving, involved parents who did well by their children. Not “Harvard” level but well enough for an easy transition to the local college, with no remedial courses needed, which is Good Enough and better than most public school kids.
Oh, I'm all about the Good Enough. There was a podcast called The Good Enough Homeschool that I really liked, lol! My own kid is HIGHLY unlikely to attend any top 100 school because we're not interested in the hoop-jumping it takes to get into those places. Kiddo and I had long talks about what life would look like if we tried for tippy-top schools vs state schools vs cc vs trade schools. He immediately ruled out anything hyper-competitive and we all breathed a sigh of relief.
The "nothing in particular" bunch I mentioned has no plans for local college, community college, trade school. nothing. There are 3 families I'm thinking of specifically where the kids were educated until about 6th/8th-ish grade, and that was that. The parents felt that their own high school experience was pointless and don't think that learning, say, biology or chemistry or art has any relevance to "real life". The kids can read decently, navigate social media very well, and know enough math to make change quickly. I'm sure their parents love them. I am not sure this is a sufficient education, but I'm also not sure these families would necessarily be more engaged if the kids were in school, either.
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2 hours ago, Terabith said:
I'm so sad that we missed this. It's only 30% and completely overcast and raining here, but I have my eclipse glasses and know where they are for April.
But honestly, I am really regretting not flying to San Antonio for this.
I love eclipses.
Aw, I wish you had flown here, too! You could have watched from my house.
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1 hour ago, Terabith said:
Honestly, I see this in public schools too. My 2e kid floored everyone by refusing to do AP English, because she saw the stress levels of all of her peers doing all AP classes and read the course description which included tons of group work and the fact that nobody liked the AP lit teacher. So she's taking only AP science and social studies classes, which is very confusing and weird. At public school, you are either in five AP classes every year from tenth grade on and participating in eleven different time consuming extracurricular activities and never having time to sleep or you are in regular classes and high or asleep all the time.
Yeah, we know some of these families, too. Everyone seems stressed and exhausted.
Our local district let's some 9th graders take AP classes. They don't offer enough for everyone to do 5 APs every year, but they do have on campus DE. It just seems like a lot at a young age.
And before anyone jumps on me, I KNOW there are highly motivated kids and this is their normal and don't hold them back blah blah blah. I just more aware of the gap between extremes.
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22 hours ago, Clemsondana said:
What I'm seeing is that there are more kids at the extremes. When I teach, I have more grades of 97+ and more failing grades, with almost no B/C students.
Anecdotally, this matches what I see in fb homeschool groups. There are the people doing nothing in particular with their kids on one side, and the people pushing their kids through tons of AP and DE on the other side. I've been wondering where all the "average" high school kids went.
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The only thing our sellers left behind were some paint cans and some notes from a fly-by-night "How to Make Millions in Real Estate" course. They grudgingly left the water softer behind after trying to sell it to us separately for cash. They wanted to do the same with the appliances, sell them separately for cash but keep using them until the day they moved out. We told them no; either they convey and are covered under warranty, or they don't convey and you can haul them out before closing.
I don't know whether they were super cheap or having money problems, (see: notes on making money in real estate). They had to have one last propane delivery before the house sold and raised the asking price by $100 to reflect the cost of the propane. Seriously?
As long as trash wasn't left behind, I would be kind of excited to look through any "treasures". I would love to buy a house with an attic full of old junk!
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Woohoo! Saw the ring of fire! I wish I had the right filter for a camera to take a pic!
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Yep, watching right now. My house is right on the border for 100%.
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7 hours ago, BeachGal said:
The areas of Chicago that I think could experience violence would be the West Rogers Park neighborhood, and the suburbs of Skokie, Highland Park and Glencoe, possibly not Friday but maybe Saturday when many Jews are going to service. I hope not, though.
Yeah, I was thinking about that area. There's a holocaust museum in Skokie, too.
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Those little disposable Keurig coffee pods and all the products they've spawned to store them, (little drawers, racks, organizers)
Lunchables
Shopper loyalty cards. Just charge me whatever the price of the thing is without making me sign up with my email, phone number, address, blood type, retinal scan, etc.
Fees. Convenience fees, swipe fees, booking fees, processing fees, handling fees, fee fi fo fum fees. Again, just charge however much it costs and stop nickel and diming me. I think it makes businesses look petty and cheap when they slap on fees that could be rolled into the product cost.
Middle aged women being called "Karen" for being firm, but still polite, when trying to resolve a problem with a business.
Snobbery
ETA: Oh, and those little faux-news boxes that are on formerly reputable news sites. I think they're called chumbox ads. They say things like "Top Gut Doctors Are Begging Americans To Throw Out This Vegetable!" with a picture of several peeled bananas or yams. The photos always look vaguely gross or suggestive. I hate them and think that journalism started going downhill when news outlets put them on their sites. I think a lot of people assume they must be valid, real "news" if it's on a major news website.
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3 minutes ago, Catwoman said:
We don't install anything ourselves. 😂 I'm sure the plumbers charged a lot for the labor costs, so that probably accounts for at least some of the price difference. I know our hot water heater isn't a smart one -- we don't need all of the extra features, either. We have a lot of smart home features in our houses, but I never really touch the hot water heater, so paying extra for an app I'll never use seemed like overkill.
Yeah, that's probably where the price difference comes in. My DH definitely did at least $2000 worth of swearing removing the old water heater and putting in the new one!
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16 minutes ago, Catwoman said:
We just had ours replaced and it cost well over $3000. I thought that was normal because we paid close to that much for the last one, too.
I wonder if prices are different depending on where you live, or maybe we bought a much larger one than you did or a different brand or something. I know ours is huge, but I don't think it's anything fancy, though. I definitely would have been much happier paying $600!
Did you pay to have someone install it or do it yourself? DH installed ours. It was the cheapest model available because the other options were "smart" and had apps and all kinds of features we do not need.
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17 minutes ago, KSera said:
This makes me curious if you’ve ever bought a previously lived in house before. Maybe my standards should have been higher, but a small area of dart holes on one wall is so minor in the realm of what has been normal for us in buying a house someone else has lived in. There is all kinds of cosmetic damage and that seems normal to us.
This!
There were eleventy-billion nail holes in our walls from all the little things the previous owner hung up. I would not have considered negotiating for what is $15 in supplies and an hour, at most, of my time.
Unless this is a wall that has fist sized holes or has been gouged out by damage, I would slap some spackle on it and be done.
Also, what kind of water heater y'all got that costs $2500?! We just replaced ours and thought $600 was outrageous.
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5 hours ago, Not_a_Number said:
If I stop being snarky (although I genuinely think weapons are a good idea if one is serious about this!), I think the greatest asset one would have in the event of a societal collapse is the ability to adjust to circumstances.
Most catastrophes are relatively slow moving. What you want is to be the person who finds allies/leaves before things are dire/otherwise adapts.
People are TERRIBLE at adapting. I saw people going to birthday parties and to work when the pandemic started in NYC, when everything was already abundantly clear even if you weren't following the international news (which I stupidly was not.) You can always get a serious leg up by not just moving forward like an automaton.
ETA: You see this very well during world wars and other catastrophes, too. People don't evacuate until it's too late. They don't want to leave their lives behind.
One thing that stunned me during the pandemic was how quickly some people I knew fell apart. Like, 2-3 weeks into lockdown, they were in a mental health crisis. And this was when we were all still under the delusion that this was a temporary blip and life would return to "normal" relatively soon.
I had my own low point where I completely fell apart; I don't remember how long it took to get there. A few months? A year? Time felt really squishy then, so I really don't know. But I know it wasn't only 2 weeks.
I am not saying any of the above in a snarky, "Clearly, I am better than those weaklings!" kind of way. The last few years have pushed everyone to their breaking point. I wish I could have a do-over for so many interactions where I utterly lost my 💩. And if you're a person that felt like they were on the receiving end of my meltdown, I am very much sorry.
Seeing people unravel in only a few weeks was very sobering.
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45 minutes ago, Eos said:
In my apocalypse visions, my daughter with type 1 diabetes runs out of insulin and dies in a coma. I never get much farther than that.
How do you even begin to prep for something like that? There's no way.
I'll die very slowly over a period of months without my meds. DH will die a bit faster, probably.
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4 minutes ago, catz said:
Anyone else just planning on volunteering as tribute during the zombie apocolypse? Just me? Zero desire to try guessing what is going to be valuable currency if the world blows up.
We buy in bulk and could always piece together 1-2 months of food if we had to. I actually just rolled a bunch of stuff from early covid out to food shelves. But I really don't think too hard about this stuff. I will say we order coffee in 5 pounds bags! ☕ 10 lbs are on the way right now! #priorities
I'm not even going to try to optimize. I'm just going to keep doing what I do: grow and store what makes sense for my family without turning into a greedy jerk.
I can't get caught up in whataboutism , (what about the poor? What about the elderly? What about people who depend on meds to live? What about wildfires? What about guns? What about contaminated water? What about contaminated soil? What about the power grid? Growing food is too hard, what about that? What about ciggies and booze? What about...), because then I become paralyzed from anxiety and do nothing.
Do what makes sense for you. Share resources with friends, neighbors, family when you can.
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John Oliver on homeschooling
in The Chat Board
Posted
I understood what you meant about 5 AP classes each year.
The kids are basically taking a college course load starting at 14, plus volunteering, plus sports, plus scouts, plus this, plus that.
I don't think my kid will end up taking any AP exams. The local district doesn't offer a lot of choices and it's a haul to the nearest private that will allow him to sit. Between cost and hoops to jump through, we're better off with DE or CLEP when he's ready. He's working through some college level texts now, but at his own pace without the stress of a big, expensive exam hanging over him.