Number 1. If we were still Christians, the answer would be no because if only 1 out of 5 people is masked despite the recommendations, then that whole "do unto others" thing and "love your neighbor" means exactly zilch to them. 2. Probably not. We really enjoy outside dining anyway. But in Michigan, from May - October, this is very doable. It means not eating indoors at restaurants during the winter unless positivity rates drop. I would do it at 1-5%. After that, it dings my nope risk assessment radar. 3. My whole immediate family is vaxed, and we still do not do indoor public without a mask. I still use curbside pick up. And this past winter of no sore throats, no influenza, no colds, no laryngitis has convinced me that grocery shopping with a mask on in winter is here to stay for me. My mother in law does not appear to have formed any immunity despite the shot. She chose JnJ, but when boosters come out, her doctor is going to get her a Pfizer and see if she shows any signs of immune response. She has a lot of health problems and is 85. While I can't protect her from everything and have to balance having a life of some kind with her health, I am not looking to deliberately shove her into the grave either. So crowded indoor places are.going to be mask situations for us for a very long time. Michigan is beginning its "everyone came home from cabins/camping/beaches/woods and going indoors life again with kids starting schools, most rural districts having no covid precautions whatsoever. It is about to get scary again.

My parents in a nutshell, and Mark's dad as well. But his mom was a good saver who balanced the present and the future well. She taught the kids. Both boys adopted her philosophy, his sister not at all. As a result, she is 62 and has no savings and is panicking. I adopted Dh's ideals, but left it to him to execute because I was afraid with my upbringing, I would be terrible at it. He has done so well for us. His brother does well too, and it is a good thing sister in law let him take the lead because she grew up wealthy and money was burned in her family, just epic. She didn't know what the word "budget" met when they married. It could have been a disaster.

I would make him cook up a cauldron of applesauce. He won't make that mistake again! 😁

I can do you one better. I have a 21 year old college student with this mentality. When he was home for the summer, I waited for him to go fishing with his dad, and made some stuff disappear. I know, I know. Bad mom, he is a grown adult. But in my defense he had a T.A. position this semester, and has some presentations to give on his senior project as well, and my brain was exploding from the thought that he might really not pay attention to his clothing, and show up for work or presentation in his high school Minecraft shirt with three holes, and so faded it is practically unrecognizable along with the cargo pants with the bizarrely badly shredded pant cuffs and ripped pocket. It was making me nuts thinking about it. So I did it for my own mental health! That's okay, right???? 😁

Yes. You have it mild. Basically irritated passageways, congestion. I have "would gouge my eyes out, and claw my nose off to get relief, been known to produce hives, lips tingle, sneeze 18-30 times in a row, sometimes migraine inducing congestion" allergies. But seasonal stuff here is not offered allergy shots. Sigh. If Ragweed became extinct, I would party so hard!

I really miss Allegra. It worked miracles for me for 20 years. Then one day I took it and had anaphylaxis! I was lucky that I was near the hospital doing errands. Zyrtec doesn't work, Claritin doesn't work. I hate how sleepy I get on Sudafed. So I barely survive and straight up Benadryl. Ugh! I want my Alleged back! Katie, I hope this regiment works well for you. I have never tried the nasal spray. Maybe I should.

Roosters and drakes are the most violent rapists on the planet! I believe that making soup of them is a gift to female birds everywhere!

Behr has a neat tool where you can choose several colors then choose a similar room from their drop down menu and see it with that color on the walls and basic furniture. That helped me narrow down colors before even going to the store.

Yellow is in, but I am not a fan. We painted our new kitchen a soft creamy color. It has maple cabinets and a terra cotta tile floor that I am not really fond of but it looks better with the cream walls than the dark, olivy beige that the previous owners had. I think it is going to look really good when we can afford new counter tops. They are currently navy blue which is definitely not my thing for a kitchen. DD and I have a collection of antique blue canning jars out on the counters storing all kinds of pretty things in them. It looks nice. Our living room was painted Helium Blue (Behr ).

I am so sorry about this. It has to hurt so much, and make you very worried on top of frustrated!

Yes it sure does.

I am so very, very sorry.

This! This! This! We have people move out here all the time from Detroit/burbs and just winge all day about being in an agricultural area! My favorite though 😠😠😠 were the folks who called 911 because there were deer behind their house. Sigh. They bought 20 acres on the edge of a huge stand of woods. What the heck did they expect?

Bill, please convey my deepest sympathy to your wife. She is a hero to be working in these conditions with special needs children, and I fear, will spend a good deal of the year trying to comfort her students. I cannot imagine.

Thank you, I appreciate the condolences! We are Olay now. It took a few years, but she is 31, and left us when she was 16 to go back to my brother's horrible home because she refused to stay in our structured one where we severely limited any triggers for her. She wanted to be wild. There was nothing we could do. But, she is 31 now. So I have to admit that apart from the concern for how her behavior hurts our grand nieces, we now do not have the emotional stress. It is like watching a disaster that is not near you. You have sympathy for the innocent bystanders, and want to know where to anonymously donate, you meditate, breath deep, and move on. The pain is gone. But MAN was it hard in those first few years. For the most part, everyone is so used to the boundaries and not being a close-knit extended family. However, sometimes there is a twinge of sadness for my mom. She is 77 and would love to have a Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Easter with the whole family, take pictures, she all her great-grandkids. But she also understands it should not happen.

And the hopped up pick up trucks gunning around half the night and squealing tires. We have so much of that here!

You and me both. There is simply a limit to how chipper we can be when this is a raging nightmare that is going on 18 months.

We have a niece whose life is a train wreck, and has three children. Thankfully the fathers of these children were able to get custody, and she has limited visitation. We are very kind, very generous with the grand nieces, Christmas and Birthday presents, Easter baskets, and give something each Christmas to their single dads who are doing a reasonably good job raising them while dealing with niece's dysfunction and wild behavior. However, we do not keep much of a relationship with these men because we also cannot invite niece to have a foothold of any kind in our lives. She can be dangerously out of control. Due to the toxic nature of my brother's marriage, we no longer have extended family get togethers. This helps since he and his very malignant, narcissistic wife of course invite their daughter, and WOW, it just gets disturbing to deal with the three-day dynamic, add the one nephew who is an alcoholic to that mix, and it is a disaster. My own grown children put their foot down with my mom and said DO NOT invite any of them over when we are visiting or we will leave. It has taken firm boundaries, very rock solid boundaries to keep these people at bay. But we have managed. After being taken advantage of one too many times, we learned the hard truth that the only people who can help such dysfunctional, unhealthy people are professionals...social workers, therapists, medical doctors, legal counselors, etc. people who can be objective, and not be personally infiltrated by all of the legal, emotional, and mental issues. I have twice had groceries delivered to my niece, but it was done anonymously. I paid for them, but had a third party deliver them, and we also anonymously put money on her heating bill last year because the company allows donations to individual accounts. This way we do something practical, and yet in no way get sucked into her life. Believe me, this used to be very hard. We foster patented her as a teen. But we had to let go. So just think through this in a very pragmatic way, establish the boundaries, rehearse what to say to other family members who ask, and remember that NO (without explanation or apology) is a full sentence.

Oy! I do think it is hard to tell exactly how it was transmitted. Here we see beach parties go on, and a tourist bus will pull up and 50 people spill out. That's just a covid outbreak waiting to happen. I think some of spread that looks like outdoor spread could be linked to transportation but also the shared bathroom spaces. When our state park day use areas have several hundred people during the day, those bathrooms are simply going to be swamped with covid droplets, and no one masks anymore making it exponentially worse. But it is also impossible to discount that the actually infection could have been from the actual outdoor activity. Back in summer 2020, there was an outbreak from a sandbar party at Torch Lake, and public restrooms was not the issue...multiple boats anchored out there bringing in all of those people was likely....pontoon boats that held 12-16 people and those don't have cabins that people spend time in. The whole point is being above deck. The party lasted many hours, and though the portapots on the boats might have been a contributing factor, from the pictures one can see this huge glob of humans practically shoulder to shoulder crammed onto that sandbar. At that time, Michigan was still only seeing cases of the Alpha strain which is exponentially less transmissible than Delta. My guess is we are going to see an explosion of cases in several days linked to all the Labor Day parties. We launched our sailboat this weekend, just Mark and I alone on the water. The boys went hiking, no groups. Mostly we just look at groups of people as nothing more than ticking time bombs. In my county, less then 43% of eligible 12 year olds through adults are vaccinated. No masks. No social distancing. School is five days face on with no contact tracing, and they will not be informing parents of covid numbers nor student exposures. There are literally exactly ZERO precautions being taken, and no virtual school option being offered. It is prudent to assume that everyone around you is a super spreading covid petri dish.

😂😂😂😂😂

I am intrigued. 🚀🚀🚀 Zooms off to find some....

Try national forests. We have a gorgeous one on the west side of the state here with a wonderful open air seating amphitheatre. It would be perfect, and it is easily 10 degrees cooler or more due to the intense shade plus the soft breezes off the lake and river are refreshing. Book readings, poetry, one act plays, demonstrations... They have hosted a lot. Some of our state parks as well...a few of the park rangers have gotten pretty into outside the box programming. In full shade, outdoors might be okay. I wonder about a progressive event where folks go in small, masked groups from one bookstore/restaurant/pub to another and the reader is very distanced from the small pod of people. So on a Sunday afternoon or whatever, maybe 100 people would come through, but only in groups of 8-10, staggered arrivals, and masks required. Of course that only works if proprietors are willing to have standards and enforce them. I realize that might not be remotely possible. Many won't try. I don't know. Just spit balling for you because I really feel horrible for everyone in the arts. We have been so screwed by the way this pandemic has been handled, and the way half the nation has acted. My community fine arts program director is gone. Finished. The foundation is tired of fighting the nutters for it, the large church that hosted events went "covid is a hoax", donations dried up. And the kids suffer because the children's community choir, the children's art and theater day camp, the summer teen musical theater program, the family movies on the lawn, the ballroom dancing for kids, the community art gallery showings, the student art shows....all gone, every one of them. In particular, the piano performance portion of my career is beyond finished. I am done dealing with venues. D.o.n.e.

I am so sorry. I hope you will be okay! If we were a civilized, humanitarian country, there would be robust and decent safety nets so our people do not have these kinds of horrific worries. Sadly, we have prioritized greed over people.I wish you all the best! This is important to consider, and often hits women harder than men. If dh and I split,I would be just okay maybe not comfortable. We would definitely have to sell the Alabama home.because neither of us would be able to afford it after splitting assets. Hopefully it would appreciate enough to help offset the issue. But still....I would need to get a little cottage in a neighborhood with a lot of kids and be the piano teacher around the corner who was still giving lessons when she looked like Methuselah. I am very concerned about the cost of housing and how little subsidized senior housing is available.

Oy! Bad boys, bad bad boys!

No one should jump on you. I went back to work for a while when the last one was finishing his senior through to recently, covid killed my job, so we would be able to keep up with retirement savings and also help our adult children pay for college. We have paid off two medical bills for our eldest whose husband until recently had poor insurance leaving them with high deductibles and a precarious financial position. It happens. We do the best we can. No one should be judgmental. Everyone's situation is different.