I delivered pizza for Papa John's in two different cities/states during/the year after college. So this was more than 10 years ago now...back then I considered $2 a good solid tip. I very often got $1 or less or nothing, particularly in the poorer of the two cities I worked in. I still never came home with less than $8-10/hr though (and it could be a lot more on busy nights), which made it very good money for what it was, in my mind. As an aside, I was more up to date on current events the years I delivered pizza than ever before or since, because I spent much of my time listening to NPR while I drove. There's no doubt in my mind that the average waiter/waitress has a much more physically demanding job than the average pizza delivery person...but I will say that I did my fair share of prep work/cleaning/etc. in between deliveries on slower nights. It's also really terrible on your car, so you have to take that long term cost into account when you think about salary comparisons. We usually go pick up our pizza now when we order it, but I usually tip $4-5 when I have it delivered.

Some places butcher older calves instead of full grown cows.

Mine were all different. The first two were both screaming in protest every time we ate in front of them by the time they were 5 months old, so they started solids earlier. My third couldn't have cared less. He had the occasional few bites of banana or whatever starting around 6 or 6 1/2 months, but he didn't really start eating regular meals until more like 9 or 10 months.

DS9 used to be able to tell you the title of any Magic Treehouse book (well, up through the first 40 or so, at least) if you gave him the number, and vice versa. It was a little spooky, actually.

We have a star, but I don't really like it. I mean, I want a star; I like having a star, but I don't like MY star.

I usually wrap everything separately. I don't wrap stocking stuff. Sometimes I'll do a stack of books together, if I have a bunch that I've picked up at the thrift store. The only thing I can think of that I'm wrapping together this year is two paperback books for DS9, because they're both part of the same series.

I don't think I can vote (because if I did I'd probably vote for Elf. Or It's a Wonderful Life, sentimentally)...but you know one movie that I always forget is sort of a Christmas movie is The American President. I loves me some Aaron Sorkin. I'm going to put it on my Netflix queue now.

I voted some years yes, some years no....I guess it's probably no more than yes. But I can't really remember. this year I don't have any toddlers who will rip into them if I put them out early, but I do have assorted dogs and cats, and just generalized anxiety, I guess, so they're not out right now anyway. but I hate to see a tree with nothing under it all month...this year my compromise is this: we read a different Christmas book every night during Advent. I've doled them out in different ways over the years, but this year I went and bought a whole bunch of gift bags at the dollar store, numbered them, and put the books in. So all those bags are under the tree, and as the bags get emptied they can be used for other gifts. I probably will put the real presents out a few days before Christmas, though.

I'm using SOTW 1 for a K, 2nd, and 4th grader. My 4th grader did 1 and 2 a few years ago, too, but I don't think he remembers much of it. We'll go through all the volumes (or that's the plan now, anyway), finishing when he's in 7th, but I'll be adding in lots of supplemental material for him.

The 18th is a 4.

9 out of 10 is bad. Touring plans rates every day's crowds on a scale from 1 (least crowded) to 10. DH is a teacher, and he has President's week off, so I really wish it were a good time to go. But it's not. Avoid it if you can!

From the forward to Lord of the Rings: And there are plenty of Christians who object to Lord of the Rings, too, fwiw. My stepmother was horrified when my brother hung up a LOTR poster in his room when he was in high school. As her own kids have gotten older, she's mellowed considerably about such things. I was worried when my kids brought up Harry Potter in front of her, but she didn't bat an eye (although her own younger kids haven't read it). I think the Christian imagery in HP is at least as overt as anything in LOTR. And that's my contribution to this thread, as a Christian, but not a conservative one, who has no problems with Harry Potter, and who remembered reading that Tolkien quotation years ago and was inspired to dig it back up.

We're about halfway through our planned school year (DH is a teacher, and we follow his schedule, so we have an extra 2 weeks built in since he starts earlier and ends later than the students). We're pretty much on track for everything. It makes me happy :)

There were 17 green eggs (we have two easter eggers) and 1 brown. It's funny that both easter eggers decided they needed to find a new place to nest.

I'm not sure I have a gentlest kid! :lol:

Oh no, Val--that sounds awful! Roosters have spurs, and hens don't, so a mean hen can't cause nearly as much damage as a mean rooster...but it's still no fun to be pecked. The kids were very excited about the stick idea. They're out there with her now. I told them no hitting her, only using it to keep her away, and it's a really thin stick. No one's come in crying yet... In somewhat related news, I just found 18 eggs in a pile in the kids' old little tikes playhouse. oops. That explains why we've been finding so few eggs in the nesting boxes recently.

I'm kind of surprised by some of the responses here. I'm usually on the more dog friendly side of threads like this. I have three dogs, and they go out at 6 or 6:30 in the morning, and we live on an acre lot, but I would never dream of leaving them out there barking for longer than it took me to get to the door and let them in. My husband's usually the one who lets them out in the morning, since he gets up first. Occasionally he falls asleep on the couch while they're out and I need to call down to wake him up when the dogs start barking. I feel really guilty when they bark for more than a few seconds. I dunno...maybe I have a different perspective because I don't have especially yappy dogs...if they're barking it's usually because they want to come back in. But, honestly, I would find it really annoying to have a dog barking right outside my house for 15 straight minutes even it were in the middle of the day...for one thing, it would drive MY dogs crazy. If it were in the middle of the day, I'd just suck it up, but at 5 or 6 in the morning? I'm super non-confrontational, but I'm pretty sure even I would say something. I don't think it's too much to ask for the neighbor to wait 3 minutes longer to get in the shower so she can let the dog back in when it starts barking.

I was babysitting regularly at 12 (I know that people like to say "things were different then," but that's exactly what people said when I was a kid, too. Crime rates have actually gone down since then); I would definitely leave a relatively responsible 12 year old home alone for the amount of time you're talking about. I let my 9 year old stay home now if I'm going for a walk around the neighborhood or running a very short errand (30 minutes or less).

They're in a run at night, but they have free range in the fenced backyard for most of the day.

yeah, I know--sigh. I was glad to see the other one go, but I actually like this one a lot, or I did until this started up. big stick. and/or food bribes. We'll see what we can do.

No, this isn't curious/anticipatory pecking--that's why I went out there to watch her with them--she runs straight at them and pecks them hard in the leg, then chases after them if they run away. I think she at the bottom of the flock (she was a sort of rescue chicken, so she came all by herself into an established flock), so she's jockeying for position with the smallest non-birds she can find.

Answers that don't involve cooking her and eating her, please :) We had to sell one of our pullets a couple of months ago because she was being so mean to the kids...running at them and pecking them, sometimes hard enough to draw blood. Now we have another one! She's an Easter Egger; we've had her for a few months now, and she's maybe 8 months old. But the meanness just started in the past couple of weeks. It's only with the kids...she chases them and pecks them--hard. I almost didn't believe them at first, because she doesn't do anything like it with me. But I've gone out there with them a few times now to observe, and, yep, she's being nasty. I'd rather not get rid of her, too (although I'm sure I can, no problem--she's young, and she's a decent layer). Is there any hope of reforming her?

Frontline started being useless for our dogs a couple of years ago...we do comfortis for the dogs and advantage for the cats now.

:iagree: I'm not usually one to bother with sugary things that aren't chocolate, but I LOVE those maple leaf cookies.

Well, according to Wikipedia ;), you can give one universal definition of structuralism and then apply it to different disciplines: So for literature this is going to have to do with arguing that all literature fits into an existing, archetypal system, and you look at all texts as they relate to each other and to that system. Again, Wikipedia: IME, this kind of analysis is, in practice, often very limiting. It becomes about trying to fit texts into a box, and, when they don't seem to fit, you invent ever more elaborate and opaque arguments for why they really DO fit, and if only other people understood the box like YOU do, they'd see it as clearly as you do. Err, well, that's my take on it. And structuralism has plenty of other, far more eloquent, critics in literary theory as well. So that's what I'm getting at...is structuralism something that is universally accepted in linguistics (is it, in fact, something that is necessarily accepted as soon as you accept linguistics as a field of study) or does it have its proponents and detractors as it does in literary theory? I have no clue if this is completely tangential or not, but I keep thinking of it...a few months back I read a book by Daniel Everett called Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle. He's a linguist who's spent many years studying the language of the Piraha people. His conclusions about this language have made him unpopular with Noam Chomsky fans. I guess one of the primary points of contention is that Chomsky maintains that one of the rules of universal grammar is that all language is recursive, and Everett argues that Pirahan is not recursive. I spent a few hours poking around online and reading some of the back and forth between Everett and some other linguists, and I came away with a not very good impression of the other linguists. It seemed to me that they were so dedicated to the "facts" they had reached about universal grammar, that they would make any argument, no matter how circular, to preserve it. They came up with definitions of "recursive" so broad that they were meaningless. They suggested that Everett was racist for suggesting that the language of the Piraha did not fit into the definition of human language that Chomsky had come up with. So I guess after reading that, I come at the scientific findings of linguistics with some skepticism. It's not science if you can't imagine any argument that will prove you wrong, and that's what seemed to be going on here. But I readily admit that it's not fair of me to judge the entire field of linguistics based on this one exchange.