AOPS is raising all of their class prices by $20 soon, so if your kid is planning on taking something from them next semester, you might want to sign up for the class now.

I have laundry baskets of produce sitting in my living room I need to freeze/store/preserve. I have half a basket of onions from the roadside (onion trucks are always overfilled and spill onions on the country roads around here). I was going to hang them in pantyhose in my basement to last longer, but apparently you can no longer get the cheap packs of 10 pairs I used to use for Easter egg dyeing. So I need to find a permanent container to store them in that will allow airflow. I also bought 92 lbs. of apples and pears yesterday from the church orchard for $49, way cheaper than I can get them anywhere else around here. The kids were hoping for peaches to can, but the church orchard just sells the excess when they harvest more than they can process at a time, and there haven’t been any excess peaches this year. So I need to get to work on apples and pears. I also bought a bucket of honey from azure standard. We use a lot of honey here, and it will be both cheaper and higher quality to buy a year+ worth of honey at one time. I wanted to portion it out into quart jars to make it easier to warm if it crystallizes, but the store is out of quart jars.

My dd’s high school excuses students from finals if they have three or fewer absences, which I think is ridiculous. Either finals are an important part of assessing their mastery of the subject matter, or they aren’t. The kids were told that only absences for the purpose of school sports would not be counted towards this, that doctor’s appointments should only be scheduled for Fridays and they should come even if they were sick. (They have a four-day school week, but several of my kids’ doctors’ offices are closed on Fridays.) I told her we’re not doing that and get used to finals. I think the messages they are sending to these kids about priorities are all messed up.

I have heard of truancy officers, but never known of one to actually be called on anyone--including in the many hundreds of CPS cases my husband has worked on. Extensive truancy might be one point among others that leads to CPS getting involved, but not truancy alone. Maybe that is particular to my state. My two oldest are attending public school, and all I have to do to have an absence excused for them is to call the school and tell them my child will be absent and it is parent-excused. Even last year when we had a month-long trip planned already when dd decided she wanted to try school, it wasn’t a problem. I was surprised by that.

I heard a program on the radio about the Thai workers in Israel the other day. At least thirty were killed on the first day and many others were recently brought home by their government. They interviewed several, and it was pretty heartbreaking to hear their terror and indecision about going back. They said that these farmers can earn $7 to $8 per week in their home, subsistence level hand-to-mouth living. Going to work in Israel, where they earn 10 times as much per week, is a way that many use to get their families out of the cycle of poverty. The cost to get there is around $3,000, and the families will mortgage their Thai farms and go into debt to send a young man to Israel, where several years of the same work will be enough to raise their family's quality of life and opportunities for the future. So here are these young, traumatized, terrified men, many of whose families are still in what is tremendous debt for their means in order to get them started on this path, trying to decide whether to go back into danger to dig their families first out of debt and then out of poverty, or to stay home and safe but unable to help their families.

I have probably been given bags of hand-me-down kid clothes that included underwear about half a dozen times. I threw out the underwear. I was mostly joking about the toothbrushes, but even the electric toothbrushes that someone mentioned, I would not be comfortable with used. Too close to some stranger’s mouth, and I’ve seen my kids drip drool or spitty toothpaste down the handle of an electric toothbrush while brushing.

And that repeated absences result in having a warden sent to your home. As an American, this is strange to me. Is this common in other parts of the world? How do they handle situations where the family cannot afford fines, or the parents are trying their hardest but dealing with a rebellious teen? Or if parents refuse to pay? I learned about this from the parents of kids with gliomas facebook page I’m on. Apparently it’s commonly a problem for the parents of chronically ill children, especially those who have “up” days and “down” days—basically kids who seem healthy on the days they are at school, and the schools don’t see them on the days their illness shows.

Underwear. Toothbrushes. Hairbrushes. There are some items I would only buy used from someone I know and trust. Generally these are things that can have invisible damage that is hard to detect until the product fails, such as car seats. This week we are buying a friend’s above-ground pool (the kids’ big Christmas gift), and that falls under this category. I’m fine with buying used in these situations if I know the prior owner and trust that the item is still in good condition and hasn’t had any incidents that may have caused invisible damage in the past.

To clarify, she specifically said she saw many, many bodies of babies and toddlers, some of whom . . . and went on to mention some specific atrocities. A witness that the atrocities had really occurred, not specific numbers.

I did read an article by a French journalist stating that she and several other international journalists agreed to view the bodies before they were removed from that kibbutz so they could be independent witnesses of the evidence. It was horrific.

And the fresh flour retains significantly more of certain nutrients than older store-bought whole wheat flour. You can freeze freshly-milled flour until later use to keep those nutrients, too.

The twenty agreed upon trucks went through—and apparently one of them was filled with coffins instead of food or medicine. What on earth??! Is this supposed to be some kind of statement to the world about the fatalities happening in Gaza or something? I’m just flabbergasted. This tiny initial offering is allowed through to test out the system. It will hopefully precede more substantial aid in the future, but right now it’s a drop in the bucket to try to help people hold out long enough until more help can come. And 5% of the allowed space is given over to coffins?!

Hamas won free democratic elections in Palestine in 2006 before they were in control. Polling might be suspect since then, but there is no particular reason to believe that result was false.

I appreciate the article, Amira. I agree that we (the U.S. in particular and western nations in general) should be inviting in more refugees. I know that there are worries about terrorists coming in with the refugees, but we already have federal laws and screening processes in place to exclude those who espouse terrorism and to deport any aliens who support terrorism. I think we should absolutely welcome in any Palestinians who wish to come here and do not support terrorism. That’s supposed to be part of America’s ideology, give us “your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. While I completely agree that the Palestinians should not be pushed to leave, I personally think it is wrong to try to force them to stay in their war-torn land if they wish to leave. Do they have a right to stay and stand for their rights to their homeland, absolutely! But they should also have the right to leave if they wish and seek a better life for future generations elsewhere, like most of our (Americans’) ancestors chose to do.

The damage to the hospital wasn’t bad, but they’re saying that all of the hospitals are inundated with people who have evacuated their homes because they expect hospitals to be safe from bombing, and that the outer courtyard was completely packed with evacuees when the missile fell.

They announced after President Biden met with Netanyahu that 20 trucks of aid would be allowed through at Rafah, possibly as soon as Friday. This article answered some of my questions about it. “As we reported earlier, the US has said a first group of 20 lorries carrying aid supplies could cross into Gaza from Egypt tomorrow, after repairs to the road. We've just heard from Abeer Etefa from the World Food programme in Cairo, who says 20 trucks would be "a good start" but "it is nowhere near enough". She believes the initial plan is "a way to test the system".” https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-middle-east-67141589 I assume that what they are testing is whether Hamas seizes the supplies for their people. Or maybe whether they have issues with weapons being smuggled in with the supplies. Hopefully all goes smoothly and they can quickly get regular supplies going through.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67144061 "So far the findings are inconclusive. BBC Verify has shown the evidence to a number of weapons experts, some of whom say it is not consistent with what you would expect from a typical Israeli airstrike. J Andres Gannon, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University, in the US, says the explosion appears to be small, meaning that the heat generated from the impact may have been caused by leftover rocket fuel rather than an explosion from a warhead. Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) in the UK, agrees. While it is difficult to be sure at such an early stage, he says, the evidence looks like the explosion was caused by a failed rocket section hitting the car park and causing a fuel and propellant fire. Mr Gannon says it is not possible to determine from the footage whether the projectile struck its intended target. Several experts we spoke to were not willing to put forward a view on what happened." It's looking more and more like it was a misfire by Islamic Jihad.

Israel says they will allow humanitarian aid of food, water, and medical supplies into Gaza from Egypt, but they will not allow it to pass through their own territory until the hostages are returned. https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-middle-east-67141589

FWIW, I didn’t mean any kind of judgement of what Palestinians should do by that statement. I was just trying to get a better idea of what the system does and doesn’t allow, to aid me in my personal judgement of that system.

I read something that said Egypt agreed to let out foreign refugees if aid trucks were allowed in, and Israel agreed to a brief window of a few hours free of bombing in the area while it happened, foreign citizens were told when to be there and lined up at the gate, and it never opened. Personnel on Hamas’s side said they had never been given the go ahead to open at that time. I’ll have to see if I can find where I saw that again. I’ve read so many different news sources in the last few days.

Thank you.

Maybe someone here can help me answer a question. I have been trying to figure out what determines who in Israel is an Israeli Muslim Arab, with all the rights of citizenship, and who is a Palestinian without citizenship rights in Israel? There are close to 2 million Arab Israelis and almost 5 million Palestinians in the region, who mostly share the same ancestry. I did find a reference that said that in the 1947-1948 war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians chose to leave ahead of impending trouble and in a protest against the U.N.’s partition of their territory and refusal to live in the Jewish state they were trying to establish there. Is that it, that the descendants of those who chose to stay in the U.N. designated Jewish state territory became full citizens, and the descendants of those who didn’t did not? Is there more to it? Is there any way for a Palestinian who wants to live in peace and freedom with their neighbors to become an Israeli Arab, or are they forever punished for the choices of their grandparents? I know that the resolve to never acknowledge Israel as a sovereign state is pretty universal among Palestinians, but I would think that among 5 million people there must be some who would be willing.

Hamas won a majority of the votes in the 2006 Palestinian Legislative election. They did wipe out their opposition, but they were democratically elected first.

Israel is resuming supply of water to southern Gaza. https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-middle-east-67108364 Hopefully the beginning of making a safe area.

They are also saying that they don’t think the evacuation convoy bombing came from the air, with video. (Same link.)