Well, sure. But the state isn't doing anything. The law says, no joke, that if the students are physically with the teacher, that is instruction. So if a teacher supervises the movie, it is instructional. A few years ago when we had a really tough winter and schools had to make up snow days, they did it by instructional minutes and beginning in late April, they extended the school day by 15 minutes each day. The young kids were sent outside to play, and teachers stood out on the sidewalk. No academics. That was instructional minutes, and by the tenth of June, they had "made up" the lost days. The middle and high schoolers were released to the gym and the teachers mingled. Kids read, did homework, talked, in a couple of cases started a fight or two that had to be broken up, and the baseball coach came and got his players and just to them out to practice early. No planned instruction. Michigan is in chaos, and it isn't like this district can hire teachers or staff. Any newly qualified teachers from last year's graduating class went to school districts with better pay and with covid protocols. We have a massive teacher shortage, and the pay for just about anything else is higher so people have enough employment options that it was easy to flee the district. They wanted me to substitute. Ha ha!!!! $90.00 a day 7:30-4:00 on campus seven hours of instruction and planning on putting me in high school math and science. Well, I love to teach and have subbed in the past. They love me. I get the job done and students respond well. BUT, when I can work at Taco Bell for more money an hour than subbing without the heavy responsibility of teaching, why would I? Now the Pandemic? Hell no. It is hazardous, and the school board doesn't give a crap. I weep for the students though.

Our elementary school has been sitting in the gym all year. When the school board announced about 11 days prior to the start of school that there wouod.be no mask mandate, no covid protocols of any kind, every single teacher, bus driver, aide, parapro, administrative assistant with enough years to retire early quit. Another 30% of the staff simply said screw this, I can find another job that is less dangerous for the same money. They began the year with more than half the staff and faculty gone, and up in the high school, they have no math teacher. Yes, you read that right. They gave the biology teacher, physics and chemistry, and an English teacher biology and life science, and promoted the physics chemistry teacher to math, chucked Pre-Calc and AP Calc, got some parents to sign their kids up for college algebra online, and basically it is nothing but straight up chaos. The young kids get taken out of the gym in groups for ten minutes of math instruction, ten minutes of reading, ten minutes of L.A. with the remaining faculty. The rest of the time they sit and doodle while watching movies. Some of the stuff they are showing should be getting them in major trouble with the law. Schools cane just show Frozen to the entire school without getting a license and paying royalties. Sigh. But I also think no on gives a crap these days. This is what the parents, and they got it.

This country should have prioritized special needs instruction in person, and kept remote for the students who can manage it. And the adults, ie the policmakers, should have prioritized school over the fan economy so mask mandates enforced since the shut down, rolling minor shutdowns to put down outbreaks, rigorous testing, etc. They didn't care about children at all.

Exactly, and at the high school level, they really can handle being give textbooks, literature books, reading assignments, writing assignments. Encourage some independence. They don't be babysat in trade school or college, so let's practice some future study skills this year. I feel like every high schooler should have been given a set of Great Courses DVDs for each subject plus the school's textbooks for the class and a stack of great literature with a list of required writing pertaining to those books and a syllabus with deadlines, and including a set of good writing examples, then told, "Hey everybody, show us what you can do!!" because that would have been a gazillion times better than the effed up mess they have now.

I don't have any book recommendations. But so wanted to say I hear you and get it! I never wanted to be a stay at home mom. A very sick six year old who needed to be isolated for two years, my music performance job not providing health insurance so it was the practical choice for me to give up my position to homeschool, the kids getting ahead of their peers and none of the local schools wanting them or even able to provide anything for them necessitating more homeschooling, year after year of my career going no where because I couldn't pursue it while dh kept rising up the ladder of success. Ya. I feel it in my soul. And then when the last one went to college, I nailed a job I loved as a community fine arts program director and music teacher. It was not the dream of a performance career, but it was a great second choice, and I was loving it. Then the pandemic. Donations tanked. The foundation opted not to go forward with any of the covid fairly safe options I put forward. The program was ended, and I was left go. The foundation then gave away the endowment to other charitable organizations, and closed out the board of trustees. There is no hope of getting it back. Schools have been letting their music teachers go, community theater groups in the greater region have dried up. I.have.no.hope.of.having.a.career. I am 53. That was my last chance and covid took it from me. I have some wonderful references from the trustees and my co-workers. But so what! I 100% get how you feel. I have four wonderful kids and close relationships with them. I now have two grandsons. I am trying to swallow hard, shove the emotions into a black hole, and make myself happy with that. Many hugs to you!!!

I know how you feel. I am almost 54, still going. My ovaries are so damn stupid!!!

I am relieved for you two. We were able to return both of our guys - in opposite directions - to their respective campuses. Mark left at 6 am with one of them, I left at 8 am, and we managed to make it home an hour before the freezing rain began. We each had easy drives (having delayed all week for blizzards and snow squalls/white out conditions), but squeaked in between weather grossness. Now we are.hunkered down again today. Winds are 30+, wind chill dropping, roads all icy and won't melt with salt because the temp is too low, not enough sun today. Michigan winter is fraying my nerves. Mark's retirement and our move to our northern Alabama mountain house can't come soon enough!

People, as a general lot, are horribly selfish. You run into people who are not, who.have risen above the Darwinian, me, myself, and I mindset. But this pandemic has shown that easily half of the humans in our country are pretty darn sociopathic in their level of toddler like selfishness. OP, I would do ten days for someone with a positive test, and for you, test at day 8 with a PCR, and if negative, probably feel okay to end quarantine but always mask inside anywhere but your own home because the public is not anyone's friend at this point.

I would hang a plant, and then weekly get a small bouquet of flowers from the grocery or florist, and have a vase of flowers on the table. Flowers always make a room feel "dressed up" and warm.

I need that kick in the butt. I have not sewn for two years because my Sons Quilters Dream is 21 years old, and it isn't worth repairing. But, I want similar or even more functionality, wider distance between presser foot and inside, and everything out there looks so complicated. Then I finally picked out a machine (didn't know the notice tag, just looking at comparison charts of function and dimensions), and then priced it. It was Bernina that cost almost $8000!!! 😱 I have not looked since then. I want to sew, but am just in this ambivalent, no man's land. Every once in a while I walk past Cinderella (what I call my Elna) and lovingly caress it.

It sounds like you have found a real gem! If your children are being taught to take the hard look in order to reject or accept faith as truly their very own, that is awesome sauce!

I didn't read the article. But I do agree. He hasn't been sentenced yet, and she will have to be interviewed for the reports the judge receives and reads before the sentencing. Then he will likely be sent out of state. So that makes logistics of anything difficult. They have seven kids, he has only "lost custody" by virtue of being incarcerated so that has complications. Visits are by zoom right now and all those kids are minors so until the court makes some determinations and guidelines, he is probably entitled to communication with his children. She has so many mind boggling life complications at the moment.

Bakker also got in trouble in New York State at the beginning of the pandemic for hawking a cure. Sigh. Always grifting!

I am so glad to hear your mom is in good spirits!

Glad others recommended Jockey. I started buying Jockey two years ago and am a happy camper.

Michigan averaged 20,000+ cases on Thursday and today. Total was over 40,000. If I said my frustration was high, I would be making a vast under statement.

The Michigan update, 40,692 new cases since Wednesday for a two day average of 20,346. Smashed the daily record by leaps and bounds. Sigh.

By the time they roll it out, omicron will have peaked, and we will be on to something else. They need to look at the data and see if they can mathematically predict what type of variant would be next and do some research on how to fight it. This is ripping through so fast that as the saying goes, the horse has left the barn!

I know, it is such a balancing act! For what it is worth, I think omicron is just going to rip through and peak, be at low numbers again by spring break. After that, being spring and not too hot in most states, I think people resort to more outside, more fresh air the sports will be outdoor sports again, the concert season winding down, wedding season not in full swing yet. So I have some hope that case loads will drop and hospitals will not be in overwhelm mode, K12 will still be in session so people won't yet be crowding amusement parks, cruises, etc. and it all adds up to being much lower transmission rates thus more likely to be safe to fly. Ideally, we would have been headed to Denmark with the three musketeers, but finances for such an expensive trip were too much to take on with the expenses of buying the house. So we scaled down to a road trip. Our hope is that in a couple of years we can work out a two week period coordinated for everyone to go. Dh has four weeks paid vacation now plus generous holidays. But, the boys in grad school and working are the wild cards. Really hoping that possibly summer time when they may not be doing much T.A. work will work out for two, and that ds the budding electrical engineer will have two weeks paid vacation plus either holidays or sick time by then. Who knows though! And this thing may just keep mutating and getting worse before it gets better so it becomes a balancing act of how long do we put life on hold? I am trying to think of it as a dance. We sideline during the crazy hip-hop numbers we can't do (high rates, healthcare system groaning, school crisis), and save our energy for slow "dances" while taking reasonable precautions to hopefully not contribute to new hip-hop and isolating after travel in order to not take it to our grandson. I have to say though, some days I think I am going to find the least problematic Caribbean island, and go spend six months laying on the beach!! 😀

😢

I get it! We never travel with dd anymore. She is thirty, married, two kids, and when he does have vacation, they try to take the little camping and fishing. We travel to see them. Our others are 24, 23, and 21. We still have "college breaks, for the two who are in grad school, and our undergraduate senior. But they are all done this spring, and in the fall, two move away to full time grad school programs with T.A.work and research so that ends having much time off, and the youngest has job offers all over the place, but being a newbie, limited vacation and holidays. So that is why we hope to do this spring trip out west. We let them pick where they want to go, and hopefully we can have one last road trip with all three of them. They have been " the three musketeers" their whole lives, so seeing it break up and likely to never be anywhere close to the same is hard! Really hard.

Here is where I am NOT traveling but should be. Kalamazoo. This past Monday we were supposed to take middle ds back to Kzoo where he has a museum job and is still taking a few extra anthropology classes from WMU. We delayed to Wednesday because - bad snowstorm. Then Wednesday, bam another really bad snowstorm with high winds. Okay, Thursday we will go Thursday, except when we got up, there were semis jack knifed on I -94 in multiple spots AND a police officer's car was hit by a pick up truck when he couldn't stop on the ice. Said officer was injured and made a statement that most of the drivers he saw were seriously over driving to conditions. Okay. So not going. Checked accuweather and weather.com. Both said the storm would be done by 7 am Friday. Figure we can wait to leave until noon, puts me in Kzoo at 3:30 if driving goes okay, and back home at 7-8 pm if I don't stick around at all. Get up today. Nope. Storm stalled over Kalamazoo county. Now predicted not to end until 4 pm. Traffic cams for 194 in the twenty miles east of Kalamazoo show currently 9 different accidents and a many miles long traffic jam. Sigh. Not going anywhere right now. Classes start Monday morning. Tomorrow night Kzoo is supposed to get freezing rain. So the hope is that either it clears out and the roads are treated this afternoon, and we leave here at 2 or 3 pm putting us there sometime between 6-9 pm depending on conditions, and then I turn around and drive home late in order to avoid a hotel again (he has roommates and only a love seat and overstuffed chair so staying with them would not work well) - if you recall, I spent three nights in hotels in Marquette getting his brother for Christmas break because of a huge blizzard - or incur yet again, another hotel expense. Or, we leave at 8 am tomorrow, get there by noon, unload, and then I take off to make it north of the I 94 corridor before the freezing rain hits. People, I am seriously tired of Michigan from November - April. Just tired of it. There is a reason the retirement house is NOT here!!! 😜

So true!!!!

It would depend on the winds. If there are high winds, happens here on the great lakes all the time, there are whiteouts and snow squalls. These cause horrible traffic accidents due to lack of visibility. Happens frequently.

No, I have -4 wind chill tomorrow and that is good enough for me. 😂