Mark says yes, to both the math and comp sci! Poor guy! 😂😂😂😂😂

Dawn, will you get to see it today? I hope it will work!

Same. Actually, since I would hate having a crowd on my b.d. and he knows it, I would not be there. He can deal with the embarrassment. If I were in the mood to feed a crowd , ha ha ha, I would have a baked potato bar with several toppings, fresh fruit mix, and a veggie try. Smores around the fire.

This added info makes me change my mind. They hired you. Then they brought in your basic "make this make more money and we don't care how you do it" style CEO/manager. That person has no care or concern for the quality of care nor the potential of losing enough employees to cause the company to go bust. He/she very likely has a lovely golden parachute written into their contract so they will get paid their egregious salary just like so many corporations regardless of whether or not the company remains solvent. You will probably have to endure the I told you so people for a while. It stinks. But, eventually they will get over it. If money is truly not an issue, nor is getting another job, then I change my answer and say, it is probably wise not to stay even if you do like your co-workers.

This is wise. Pay off everything that you can so whatever job you take in January, you can choose one that works well for your family even if it is less money. Increase emergency savings, that kind of thing. I feel like this much bait and switch means they really did not have things thought out properly when they began the company, and are now absolutely scrambling to make it work. That doesn't bode well. But if you stick it our for a few more months, at least the summer, then maybe, just maybe they will fix things and give back some of your benefits if you tell them this is unacceptable. I just wouldn't hang my hat on that because Carol is likely right about the direction they are heading.

I want to make that chickpea potato spread! Thanks for posting it.

Yesterday (Wednesday) B: Coffee crazy and boiled eggs L: Salads, very large, including snow peas from the garden 😧pan widget This thing will not let me delete that frown face. I don't even know why it is there! Dinner: black bean burgers, gf homemade mac n cheese, and steamed broccoli from the garden.

I don't blame you for wanting a larger dining room. Your beautiful family is crammed in there! Are you thinking about moving soon?

I would LOVE to celebrate the summer solstice in Ireland! In my head, I have these very romantic notions. 😁

This is a valid point. If you live where zoning laws are lax AND there are no HOA's, neighbors can big a big issue. The best thing is fences and tree lines. If you can be fairly well surrounded by trees, it doesn't matter so much what the neighbors are doing. We aren't all that well liked because most of our neighbors are retired and want their perfectly manicured lawn, and want everyone else to have them. But, those are really not healthy for the environment, and in our heavily agricultural area, super bad for attracting and providing habitat for pollinators. The zoning laws are pretty much exclusively pro agriculture and wilding areas/buffers. So we have one corner of our one acre, that is just wild. We stopped mowing it, tossed wildflower seed, and let whatever comes up, come up. Currently it has wildflowers, weeds, and some small trees in it. We have several raised bed gardens going, and then a wild area under a huge blue spruce tree that we refuse to mow/edge. There is an old flower bed in the front that we let go to milkweed pods and other "weeds" that are butterfly attractions. And we do not mow until all the dandelions are spent which means we push the envelope right to the edge of the tallest we can let our lawn get, and the ordinance on "lawns" is so loose, we could probably get away with longer anyway since our town is unincorporated so technically not a town, technically not a residential area except that it is a tiny town of 200 people and a bunch of houses. And I don't really care what the neighbors think or if they get mad. Climate change is real. Pollinators are endangered. We have a major agricultural crisis that isn't going to get better any time soon, and people need to get ON BOARD with mitigating the effects. So ya. We are the kinds of neighbors a lot of people would not like having next door. We are quiet. We don't party. Heck, we almost never entertain anymore. There is no blight. But if I can figure out a way to out this entire yard to raised beds, and clover or something, there won't be a lawn left, and the lawn mower will go away! Definitely, something to think about. And some folks around here also allow their paint, siding, etc. get pretty bad because they don't want to fix up the exterior and have higher property taxes if they are staying put and not worried about resale value. So that is a thing too.

Ouch! Bummer!

Dawn, the only other option I see, and this would be a rare option since these types of things rarely happen, is buying a chunk of land that the zoning board then allows you to subdivide the property, sell him a piece on paper, and then fund the construction of a small house that meets the minimum zoning board requirements. Of course it means if it isn't on city water and sewer, you have to fund a well and septic since you cannot tie into your own which is of course pricey, but I am not sure you can work around that in your state.

This. Zoning is gong to be a thing, a very big thing. It is likely more feasible to have an efficiency apartment above a garage than a free standing tiny home. One reason for this is so many zoning boards are cracking down on having these cutie, patootie cabins with all the amenities on private land that already has a main home because everyone turns them into short term vacation rentals. In our area, people were doing that, advertising on social media, not signing up for ABB or other service, and taking cash under the table so they could hide the income and not pay taxes. Though our rural zoning has always been pretty much, "do what you want with your own land so long as it isn't an egregious thing to look at", they have now zoned big time against it such that I cannot have a bathroom in any out building unless I am zoned agricultural, and then a barn can have one for employees. So we could have a cabin/tiny house with electric but no plumbing indoors. A composting toilet would be doable. Dawn, if you really want the tiny house instead of a low key living space over the garage, you may have to move further out, commute, and pay tuition to have A in a good school. Unfortunately, living outside of town or rural near a town no longer comes with a 1950's, " It's my land and I will do what I want" option anymore except where parcels are much further out, and zoning boards do not care. This usually means quite low population areas.

This. I don't think this would be a story at all, splashed across CNN headlines, top story, yada yada were it not for billionaire and CEO on board, and yes, their families have the power to force rescue attempts to happen that would never occur for you or I or anyone else on board. This is costing an unbelievable amount of money and our lives would not be considered worth it.

Location is everything. Normally, I would say wait for the right house. But, the thing is, you have so many limitations such as commuting distance and the need to put up a tiny house for your son and that takes so many properties out of contention that what are the chances of the just right place actually coming on the market and in a price tag you can afford? Maybe it is out there, but by the time it is for sale, you might end up eating your$1500 a month savings in order to get it, and especially where the schools are that good. Here, the best school district for 100 miles, has an average sale time of 24 hrs before they are under contract, and some of the highest building prices in the state. In our district, 45 minutes further out in rural la la land, it takes 3-6 months for a good home to sell, and acreage that is zoned for residential and not prime agriculture, is only $6000-10,000 an acre. So it is a big, big difference. I don't think there is a chance in hell of 2-5 acres plus house plus lake/pond, plus zoning to allow a tiny house even within the good school district. Just not happening. So if you find something that you can make work, and do not mind putting on am addition, having all the cosmetic work done, then I think you probably need to just adjust to not letting perfect become the enemy of good.

We rely on our middle son for Scandinavian language. In high school, he decided to study Icelandic. Hmmmm....how on earth is a homeschool mom going to pull off Icelandic? There wasn't a single college or university in Michigan that offered it. A long bit of searching on Google netted a couple of professors in England who were Icelandic, and willing to tutor him at a price we could just barely manage. He had lessons for two years before we went to Iceland which was kind of his language test in our eyes. He was great. But since everyone also spoke English for the most part, he had to actually request shopkeepers and tourist guides, the concierge, airport personnel, etc. use Icelandic with us. It was wonderful. Everyone is so friendly in Iceland! I would peg his reading and writing level at roughly 4th/5th grade though. It is so hard to get much beyond that in Icelandic studying from afar and no one to pracrice with. He took on Danish for his last two years of high school, and though his college did not offer it, found a couple of native born Danes here for college and they formed a trio of good friends. They are back home now, and he still spends time every week conversing with them through facebook, and also has some formal study he is doing as well. He will eventually take the Danish language exam in the hopes of going to grad school in Copenhagen. During this time, he also met a Norwegian couple living near campus, and he is passable, conversationally, in Norwegian but I do not think he reads and writes it much. He had mastered translating runes. It is fascinating to me. I kept one of his notebooks from college with short stories he had written in runes. When Mark retires, our goal is to take all of our kids to Denmark to meet their now distant relatives, and see the country. P will have his hands full as a guide and translator for 11 people because spouses/life partners and grandkids are going too. I can hardly wait! It is four years until he will consider retiring, and could be six if the early retirement package at his company doesn't include continuing insurance with them.

I do not remember a single mosquito. Hmmmmmmmm

Then I think you should go with exactly that. Mass and religious ed at your discretion. He isn't likely to sign anything you propose because he wants to make you miserable. He is going to make you spend an unholy amount of money on attorney fees simply because he can. And if the judge gets worn down by this, it will not be YOU that he doesn't take seriously. It will be him. He can also dismiss his complaints with prejudice (this happened to my brother) which mean he can never make that complaint again and have anything done about it. You will not have to answer it. His lawyer won't even submit it. But you have to steel yourself between now and then for the attacks. No language in any document will stop him because the system legalizes harassment. So get the language you want to begin with and then go from there. Mass. I would leave it at mass, opportunity to attend mass. You don't want to force confirmation classes on your kids because it was in the custody agreement. He is going to fight. But he is going to fight no matter what. There just is no way to stop someone like him from doing that. You cannot reason with irrational people.

Iceland. Go to Iceland. It is very much worth the trip!

We are doing this over Labor Day weekend. The week before we are going to take a bunch of stuff that is very usable but we are not using and will not put in the Alabama house out to the road. Then we are going to start filling a dumpster. We got stuck with roughly 600+ trifold science back boards with all manner of pictures, charts, reports, etc. on them because if the students do not claim them during a three hour window at the end of the 4H fair, the superintendent of youth sciences (us) has to take them home. They didn't fit in our fire ring, and they didn't fit in our trash cans without a lot of work. Since we can only put two cans out to the road a week, it was not easy to get rid of them. They accumulated since a lot of the parents don't want their kids to bring the boards home because then they have to deal with it. This meant that the bulk of the boards, and we would judge easily 150 science projects per year, ended up being hauled home in stacks in our mini van. I am done having a basement filled with science boards. We also have some broken chairs no one is going to want to repair, some books that got wet in the basement, etc. We are getting the 1/2 size dumpster and filling it. I also have a goal for the rest of the summer of taking two boxes per week to Goodwill. I still have college textbooks, AP syllabi, homeschool stuff, music I am never going to teach again, found a box of camp clothes from when the kids were young, etc. It just needs to go. Dawn, I think that even if it is the small business size dumpster, it might be very handy to get one for w few days. I doubt the HOA can say anything. They have to allow those when contractors are working. For all they know, you are remodeling.

I think that "I am better than everyone else because I am rich therefore nothing bad will happen to me" is spot on. I think the Kennedy clan is kind of a prime example. Death by bumper boats on the ocean. Death by midnight football on skis on a slope with a lot of trees. Death by flying into a storm with a broken controls foot and not certified for instrument piloting. I really do not know where the idea that privilege is a safety net that prevents the universal laws of physics from applying to one's body came from. I too was shocked at just how RubeGoldburg that sub is.

I feel this too. People in my region tend to be on the low side of Vitamin D, and also have a lot of S.A.D. We don't get enough sunlight. the winter solstice is welcome.because it means we finally will start getting some sunlight again, and the spring equinox is a very happy time. I enjoy the month of June, and the solstice is a reminder that a still craving more sun body is going to get less and less. There garden is going to get less and less. It is sad. So we like to at least do something to acknowledge our end of glorious spring. Except this year it was a cold ridiculous spring. Not so glorious. 😥

That is pretty ironic!

I noted that. Like okay, five people are missing underwater. It is getting a hell of a lot more coverage than far, far worse disasters and mayhem. It really doe show the rich, white man bias. We are supposed to be super concerned because billionaire and CEO are in that tin can? Disgusting. Reprehensible. Meanwhile the ship wreck is nothing but a media yawn. Makes my head and heart hurt!

I am in 4b. Road trip!!!! 😀