I swear this gets more dystopian by the minute!

I think the younger generations have different dreams. Many value experiences, flexibility, and mobility over ownership. I have one kid who would prefer to live for five years post college in a van camper, save money, see the country. I don't know if he will ever own a home. He is not the type who needs a lot of space, nor wants a lawn. It sounds great to people who live in areas that constantly appreciate and have hot markets. But plenty of people do not live in such areas and they have nothing but a money pit because they will never.have any decent equity. Our house which we bought for $35,000, gutted, renovated, and installed substantial upgrades is now worth a womping $50,000 IF we can find a buyer because when the housing mortgage bubble burst this area bankrupted and never recovered. It never will recover. Plenty of people ended up with such properties. On the other hand, our mountain house in Alabama will be a very good investment since it's a comfortable commuting distance to Huntsville which is growing so rapidly housing can't keep up. So it isn't a simple yes or no, and it is no longer true that home ownership is the path to intergenerational wealth. I see other paths that are equally worthy such as simple living, minimalism, and dedicated saving. I have two nephews who make less money than DH and are only in their thirties who live in efficiency apartments by choice, and have more than a million each saved because compounding interest and smart investing is a wonderful thing.

Oy! Just wow. Michigan is headed down the path. Most of the schools are starting up in the next two weeks without mask mandate, fall weather will set in, rain, cool, everyone will go inside, homecoming dances are planned, everyone is acting like nothing is going on out there, and we had 4100 new cases over the last three days. Move everyone indoors and it will be 4100 a day until schools close down and everyone goes well, "WTF? I didn't think that would happen!" Well. Duh.

Dawn, I am so glad for this update!

I wish our sons had all majored in things that would have allowed them to attend the same university! It would have saved us a ton to buy a cottage and put them up in it, then sell after the last one graduated!

OY! Dh's expires, May 2022. Everyone else has 2-9 years left on them. He needs to get it submitted. Work doesn't have anything on the burner for him, travel wise, for now, but if covid died down, I could easily see him being sent in the spring. Given some folks are not getting them in 4-6 months, that means he simply needs to get his renewal application in now!

I used Joy Hakim for 9th grade US History and supplemented with some other reading. I did use study guides, and made up my own exams and writing assignments so there was enough coverage and work to make them worthy of high school credit. My kids really liked the books and retained the information well. She has an engaging writing style.

Right. Get married, don't get married, not a big deal. Without a religious or civil mandate that it must happen, then other considerations are at play, and not everyone will arrive at the same conclusions. For middle boy, he is likely to live long term with his s.o. and it is actually better for them tax, benefits, etc. to not be legally married. For dh and I, it was the right move back in the day. But if something happened to dh, even if I ever found someone else to share my life with, marriage would be off the table. Too complicated at this stage of life. Too many wills/trusts, paperwork, retirements, inheritances, etc. that would have to be changed. The marriage license, for me, does not represent my commitment to the relationship. However, for some it does, and so everyone has to do what they think is best.

We have a 2nd home. It is for multi- generational living, and just outside a metropolitan area with a lot of job prospects for all of our adult kids. It is home for now to our daughter, Silk, and grandsons while they save for a home of their own. It has definite vacation home qualities, but its main purpose is our eventual retirement home, and a place for the grandmother's to escape the extreme winters here. Even when we get rid of our Michigan place, it won't be permanent for us for a while because we want to travel, and do a lot of vancamping. So it will be a while before it is our main home, but it may eventually have my mother there full time, and the boys coming and going if they take jobs in the area. We can only afford it because we are soon done paying for college for the boys, and our place here has been paid off for a long time.

This. And I think the religious exemption should be discontinued. Public schools are secular institutions, and they should not be violating public health code by favoring religious status. Parents who have a deeply held belief against public school health code should put their children in the relevant religious school of choice. Medical exemptions are the accommodations they should make, not religious.

This is not my photo though. I still haven't downloaded mine. But I wanted you to see one of the views he has at campus. His adviser already did his degree audit, and everything is on track. His application to graduate has to be in by 5 pm. January 14 for spring commencement on April 30. Hotel rooms in the area were already beginning to fill for commencement so I booked ours. The ceremony ends at 1 pm, and we are leaving immediately for a trip west with all three of our adult sons. They want to take one more trip together before scattering to jobs and grad schools. My mom and our dd will drive his dorm stuff back here. I am feeling a lot of pride, some relief, and then that tension of a sadness that this is it. This is the last year of having him home at breaks and in the summers. He is my buddy; we are very close, so this is hard. I have decided to distract myself for the semester by signing up for an engineering class and paying the small penalty for registering so late. I figure that the distraction will be welcome. 53 and my BA's are piano performance and music education, so all of these physics and engineering classes tend to keep me buried in books and staring at equations wondering what in the world I got myself into. Calc 1 and 2 were more than 30 years ago and a struggle for me. Thank goodness Mark has his math degree, and never forgot a single thing! He is stuck tutoring me in the evenings!

I think there needs to be several prime time specials broadcast on every single channel, informing the population that yes indeed, your nose is connected to your respiratory system! And forget AP biology for high school. I think we have to go back to rudimentary 4th grade anatomy with lots and lots of pictures and memes, maybe Samuel L Jackson narrating with F bombs in order to get the point across. High schoolers might listen to that and then go home and inform their parents. 😠

Here it would be a given. One classroom per grade all going to lunch together at the same time, no mask mandate. But, I guess the school owns going to even notify parents of any possible exposure. They are just going to pretend nothing is wrong out there. Ordinary, 😱💓💓💓, I am sorry this happened!

https://www.thv11.com/mobile/article/news/verify/yes-a-private-care-doctor-can-refuse-treatment-if-patient-isnt-vaccinated/91-614b7d30-c72f-4456-9f5a-fe52e94bf6ee My guess is more doctors will follow suit. https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/argosy-coronavirus-vaccination-requirement-threats Restaurants are doing so, and I am sure it will be unpopular. But for some of us who are eschewing indoor dining, something like this if numbers go down, might woo us back. I am seeing more and more venues posting this policy in the cities, but not up here in my rural area.

And even then it still won't be like the flu if it requires astronomical hospitalization rates in order to achieve that low number of deaths. We just don't need that same allocation of resources for influenza.

Where I live. Sorry about that. I will go edit.

I know. I have a husband and son with JnJ because at the time, all the pharmacies were out of Pfizer and Moderna so I am very much on edge!

I am sorry, Bill! Thinking good thoughts for her, hoping for you and your family nothing but the best.

We have that here in my area.

We weren't going to do "normal", but we were going to do modified normal. Not going to resume our DSO concerts at Max Fisher Hall, but yes to indoor dining at not peak times. Continuing to cultivate outdoor activities, but limiting longer get togethers to people we know are vaxed or have recently had covid and may have some immunity. I am still going to do my solo camping trip in October, and attend the outdoor activities at ds's college on parent's weekend. Seniors up for honors in their department will be featured and he is one. So masked and outside, I have decided not to miss it. We will pack food, mask for rest areas, and thus be able to have the holidays with our grandsons in Alabama. But, I have given up my piano gig job, this weekend is my last. We will not return to 4H, and just pulled the plug on mentoring the school district's rocket team because they are not going to let us require masks of the team members, and only one of the kids has said they are vaccinated. We are going to continue with the university team because we meet with ten students and one professor inside a huge laboratory with new ventilation and hepa filters, masks are required inside on this campus, and a high percentage of students and faculty are vaccinated. The students on the team all volunteered that they are vaxed. We only have to meet once per month for Sept and Oct, twice in Nov, once in Dec and Jan, twice in Feb, and if they have a successful test launch and travel to Huntsville or a regional launch site, we drive separate and stay separate. If they go to Huntsville, we won't even be in the hotel because we have the house a half hour south. But if things don't get better, the college may end participation in the competition this fall anyway. So it could still go away. But really, it is just dh and I, and our kids, the two grandmothers, and our grandsons pretty much for a long time.

This.

Exactly.

I don't have any reason to believe that future variants will be less virulent/deadly either.

Bingo!

Right. Since the frothing-do-nothing-let it-rip-crowd is so large and in charge of so many states, we may as well resign ourselves to more variants, and possibly even more dangerous than delta, until this thing runs out of hosts or maims and kills so many people that the herd is thinned enough that it peters out Black Plague style. I truly believe this is the likely scenario here. And then the question becomes is that what will happen other places or will new variants keep coming due to international travel? I haven't seen my sister, a resident of France, for three years. It really hurts to think I may never see her again unless the medical community comes up with the sure fire kill covid easy plan in my lifetime while I am healthy enough to travel.