I did like the Far West books, but we've read all of her too. Have you read McKillip, the Riddlemaster of Hed ones? I feel like those were pretty clean and essentially positive books but it's been so long.

THAT WAS MY FAVORITE TOO! Yes, we just went through them about 4 months ago, I bought all of them on a whim and we read right through them. They are much freer of his crazier social ideas. Citizen of the Galaxy was great, almost epic if he'd just gone a bit farther and really it was close enough that we loved it. I did not like Farmer in the Sky, by the way, although it was good enough and we all read it, because of the part in the middle where the mom is just fine with sending her 10 year old (or so) daughter back to live on Earth while they all stay on whatever planet they're on. Like, now I either hate this character or I just don't believe anything you say, Heinlein.

Oh no, not just a 12 year old 🙂 I have a DS11, DD14, and I, and we all pretty much read everything any one of us reads, because we're desperate constant readers and there aren't enough books. Our minimum standard is basically stuff written for 11 year olds, though, and we go all the way up through adult. We liked Dianna Wynne Jones and read just about all of it a few years ago.

Ooh so these are like Hallmark Channel movies but books? And she's written like 40 of them? Yay 🙂

Yay! This is a great rec, my DS11 is going to love these and they look clean as all get out. And a non-orphan! I get that it's hard to find ways to get parents out of the way so kids can have legitimate adventures, but boy am I getting tired of literal orphans.

UK Le Guin is my favorite author, thus we've read everything she's ever written (well, I'm saving some of it for when the kids are older). And then we've read it again. And again 🙂

We've read all of Susan Cooper, whom I love, and I thought all of L'Engle but I'll check again. Those Boggart books are indeed lovely, and she wrote a good one about a kid on Nelson's ship (yes, the Nelson) which was very readable. I didn't know Lloyd Alexander wrote anything outside of that one series! I'll look that up, the kids loved the Prydain books. I will look up The Good and the Beautiful's list. We've also read just about all of Rosemary Sutcliffe, who is marvellous. I could read those all day. They're kind of depressing but not terrible.

Yes, in Wuhan they're burning bodies that died of pneumonia, without counting them in the virus totals (because they were never tested); there are neither enough hospital beds nor enough test kits to either address or even count the number of people who have the virus and are dying of it. I'm hopeful that that means that it can be controlled, at least this spring and summer, outside of Wuhan, in places where it hasn't gotten so out of control that people with the virus can't be isolated or treated and end up spreading it farther, making the situation ever worse, because the health infrastructure can't handle it. In the US and even outside of Wuhan in China it seems like people with the virus are mostly being found, isolated, and treated. Inside Wuhan it's a nightmare, but I don't know what else can realistically be done. They built a hospital in 7 days. It's just not enough.

Ooh good I will look these up! I did read The False Prince and sequels, and I remember liking them. I can't think now of any reason they'd be objectionable (although my memory of these things often skips over things you'd think it would be impossible to forget! Imagine my horror upon rereading Anne McCaffery before giving them (haha NOT) to my DD12 a few years ago! All I remembered was the dragons. And Heinlein, be still my heart! I got Moon is a Harsh Mistress, started rereading it before DD had a chance to, and promptly pitched it in the trash. Wow did he have some weird social ideas!) I have to say that while we are 100% not religious, some of the only modern authors I've found to be both clean and, how do you say it, supportive of traditional family structures, are often Mormons. It's funny because the books are usually not overtly religious at all. Wooster and Jeeves I've never read. That looks like a winner, I'll try a few. Luckily there's no shortage of reading material there 🙂

We take one of those fancy brands of elderberry extract on a very regular basis during the fall/winter/spring, we're pretty decently hygenic, and we never get the flu shot. We haven't gotten the flu since 2010, and before that not as long as I can remember. The difference this year, imo, is that the kids are in school AND there has been a local outbreak of Flu B, which I am told the shot didn't cover that well this year. So I guess most years we've either been not in school or covered by relatively decent herd immunity when the shot works and most kids get it. This year both things failed us and we all got sick. Never again! If possible. I definitely won't skip the flu shot again, even though it didn't cover this year. I balked at the cost, but even at a whole family cost of $700 or so that's only 1 day's lost work, and we lost something like 5-8 days of work, minimum. Plus it was so miserable.

I don't know how the scam works, but I find that spidey sense scam alarms are pretty accurate, generally. They're our subconscious intelligence's way of taking into account all the soft signals we get, even through written communication, about what is legit and what is not. Those signals are not illegitimate; they're real.

We have a lot of restrictions on reading, and we read constantly. We've officially read through everything I can think of, and that is a lot. I am out of ideas. There are still classics to be read, and recently we've been on a classics kick, but I'm just so tired of them for right now. They're so depressing and heavy. We read through Austen last month and that was a nice break, but other than that it's been Hemingway (ugh), Dickens (not as ugh but not the cheeriest - and yet he's the cheeriest one we're reading!), Vonnegut (double ugh), Catch-22, you get the drift. I don't want to read Kafka or Dostoyevsky or War and Peace right now. What I'd like is to read a bunch of Anne of Green Gables, but of course we've read through those and also the Emilys. Got any ideas? For the most part older books are safer, modern ones have too many pitfalls for me to want to sort through. Unless you can give me a modern author whose whole works are quite clean and conservative. Historical fiction or even very approachable straight history are just fine. Scifi is okay but we've read pretty much all of the older stuff and the newer is iffy of course. I guess what I'd really like is an author or two I've never heard of, or have forgotten about, who wrote lots of readable but not too depressing books before about the 70s. Reading level, anything above say the first Harry Potter is fine. We're not picky (really!)

My older kids (11 and 8 years old) and I definitely had it harder than the younger kids, and the next worse was the 6 year old. The three youngest (5, 3, 1.5) all did okayish, although it was still multiple days of 103 and coughing and a fair amount of sleeping. Anecdotally also, the secretary at 8yo's school said that like my kids, the kids she's known of having it in the school (where it is widespread, ugh) have spent a day puking at the very tail end of the illness. 8yo was out for a week and a day, then went back Tuesday and they called me at 10am to say she was puking and I needed to pick her up and she couldn't come back until Thurs. Even on Thurs, she basically went to school, came home, and slept until the next day, with about 2 hours awake later in the evening. Same on Friday, still waiting for her to wake up this morning (she went to bed at 7pm last night!). I'm sorry your oldest has had such a long illness. I also wondered at one point if I was ever going to get better.

Did anyone get the flu this year? Esp the B strain? We all got it, and it was the most miserably sick I've been in a decade or more. I don't even remember being this sick. I'm 9 days out now and still exhausted. Right after the fever cleared (after 5 days!) I spent 2 days in a continual panic attack, then slept for 16 hours a day for a couple of days. I'm just now able to do things like eat (before today I think I ate a total of 200 calories over the course of a week) and read while making sense of the words and sit up for more than half an hour. The kids all weathered it okay, although it took 2 weeks for them to be back to normalish (still sleeping massive amounts per night)

I have read that an interesting comparison is to take Chinese numbers for infection and death rates, then subtract Wuhan/ Hubei, the idea being that the virus is not and cannot be controlled there, because it spread too far too fast and got past the capabilities of the infrastructure both for treatment (they're not admitting all sick people to hospitals, or able to treat them adequately as you can see by videos of people sick in the hallways of hospitals, reporting that they couldn't get admitted to hospital, etc.) and for identification (evidently they now, as of today, have 8k tests available/day, but not enough people to read them, and were woefully short on tests before). So anyway, if you take out Wuhan, it is an interesting perspective on how the rest of China is handling the infection (rate of spread is holding steady/decreasing, even with greater availability of tests in other regions, and deaths are much lower, presumably as treatment is more readily available and more cases are being seen in the first place). I found it a reassuring idea. On the other hand, a preliminary report came out that says via statistical analysis, the R0 for this virus is 4.08, truly end of the world level. I'm hoping that turns out to be innaccurate because numbers out of China are inaccurate, though.

Yeah, I wouldn't say that people adopting children from other countries/cultures are necessarily indicative of the population as a whole...

Am I the only person who doesn't take photos without (my) people in them? I never take photos of just a landscape or just art or whatever; photography is not my favorite art form and I can get touristy photos, done much better, for not very much money and/or free all over the internet. It's only meaningful to me years later if one of my family is in it, and certainly the only photos of say my grandmother's or my mom's that are interesting to me are ones with people in them. But I also don't have a smartphone and take the digital camera out like once every two or three years, so we don't do a ton of photography of any sort. When we go on vacation we buy each kid and ourselves a disposable film camera to do with as they like. Then we get those developed.

Possums don't bother me much as they're pretty non-confrontational (they just want you to go away and leave them to eat the cat food) and don't spread rabies or lyme or whatever. Raccoons on the other hand, while cuter, are much more vicious and can be rabid.

I don't mind talking about stereotypes, or taking them seriously, or judging other peoples or cultures, or talking about the factual bases for differences in behavior between different groups of people. What I mind, I guess, is the idea that you can only "punch up" - perhaps that comes from a perspective of being largely in the majority/ruling class, but it is what it is. What I find dismaying is the idea that we can make fun of Americans, or talk about their failings, their stereotypical behavior and how we've seen examples of it in our own experience, etc., but it is morally wrong to do the same for other groups (to the point of I wouldn't be welcome on these boards if I applied this standard to various minority groups, and a thread about it would go very differently than this one has). To some degree you can talk about the good/exceptional/successful stereotypes or generalizations about other cultures (Mexicans immigrants in America are family-oriented, Asian immigrants are hardworking, etc.) but not about the negative aspects of other cultures, races, religious groups (unless they are majority or popularly despised), and so on.

I agree with you that political correctness isn't a virtue, but I doubt most people would apply this standard to other groups or situations. If a black person posted an OP saying hey, what are some of the ways black people in America come across negatively and how can I change that in myself, I'd be hard pressed to believe that the thread would be full of people saying, well, in my experience you're all lazy, loud, violent, low IQ, degenerate, etc. I just can't see the thread going that way, even if the opinion was asked for.

It would be the compassionate thing, but it would set a precedent that I can understand the rest of the senior community not wanting to set, and in some cases if an HOA doesn't enforce its laws then it loses the right to enforce them. The simple truth is that the grandparents wanted to live in a community without teenagers, kids, babies, families - until they needed to take care of their kid.

Presumably the grandparents bought a house in this community because they didn't want to live around kids. Now that they do want to live around kids (that is, their own grandkid), they shoul move to a community that allows kids. Generally I think community segregation like this is silly but if they signed onto it in the first place and are only complaining now because they realize there is a value in a non-age-segregated community, the burden is on them to move somewhere where people share the same beliefs.

well the idea is that the syndrome suggests that it's not culturally cool to be exceptional or express the ways in which you're exceptional, while in America in many places there's no such cultural pressure, if anything the opposite

Maybe there is some cultural clash in the idea of "tall poppy syndrome," which I hadn't heard of outside of NZ and overseas posters here.

well the TV thing is a weird argument, if you're saying that the American public is responsible for TV representations of Americans because they wouldn't make these shows if people didn't watch them but then you're saying that people overseas watch these shows and get accurate/inaccurate views of americans - are they not also collectively responsible for the media their country imports (because they wouldn't import it if no one wanted to watch it)?