Any chance you could talk her into reading to them over facetime, or them reading to her? My boys have been reading to MIL over the phone every weekday since March and it's been really good for all of them.

I would be so tempted to say “Mom, if I wanted to kill you I can think of much more efficient ways of going about it.” Just to point out how ridiculous that accusation is. You should probably not do that, though.

I will. We're starting school back up today, and I'll pay attention to areas where something extra might help.

Yeah well. If you ever find yourself in need of a middle school American Studies/English year focusing on African American and Native American history and combining AA and NA young adult lit with sci-fi and some intentional connections to the study of biology, hit me up. That's where I'm putting my "making it up from scratch" focus this year and I'm pretty happy with how it's turning out. For math, we're using AOPS. :)

This information is not new to me. 😛

I will almost certainly take you up on that.

Yes. But I don’t want to have to make up my own problems. That’s why I buy books. Also he is frighteningly good at “just seeing” the answer to problems I never would have imagined it possible for. And he can’t explain how he knows the answers so he makes up “rules” that lead to the right answer (sometimes completely by coincidence) for that particular problem and I have to make up problems where his rules don’t work in order to prove to him that they aren’t valid because he will argue that they should be.

Oh wow. This is my younger son too. There are so many times when I’ve had to explain “this lesson is about teaching you to set up equations. Even if you can just know the answer by looking at it I need you to set up the equation so that when you get to a problem you can’t just see the answer to you’ll know how to do it.” Unfortunately that has sometimes come out as “No! Don’t do it with thinking, do it with math.”

I have those pull-outs in my corner cupboard and in the corner cupboard of my L-island. Worth every penny.

All but one of my health care worker friends has had it now. Fatigue is the only symptom anyone's mentioned. My MIL is in her state's first cohort by age, but her county is still doing their 1A HCWs, so she doesn't know when she'll be eligible. My parents miss the age cutoff by a few months, but Dad might get it earlier through the VA. I think he feels a little guilty about that, because he keeps saying that at least if Mom gets sick he'll be able to take care of her instead of both of them being sick at the same time.

Good Lord. That pediatrician is either an idiot or actively hostile to measures to protect public health.

Has anyone ever given names to the types of logical fallacy that result from identifying similarities between a statement and cases identified in the various field guides to logical fallacies?

On our Zoom church service yesterday we played some recorded reflections from leaders in our denomination, to give the pastor a week off from preparing a sermon. One of the speakers mentioned watching the show “Hope in the Wild” which is about wildlife rehabilitation and re-introducing animals to their natural habitats after crisis-care, and that we all are going to need intentional re-introduction into “the wild” when this crisis is over. It was a minor part of what she said, but it stuck with me. Especially for kids who are young enough that not constantly taking precautions will feel like a disruption of normal instead of a return to normal.

No, it is not even remotely a possibility. Elections are carried out and supervised by the individual states. Voting machine counts were checked against hand counts before the votes were certified. The suggestion that the federal government and/or some other party seize voting machines and examine them has been rejected by the courts at every level.

I think it was the rolling 30 day average of the ratio of deaths to positivity 14 days prior.

It didn’t help at all when I tried it earlier in the fall. The correlation actually went down. I think because positivity is least accurate as a predictor when things are changing quickly, and that’s also when using the most recent numbers as your scaling factor will be less accurate. Everything works much more neatly when things are holding steady.

I have a doctor friend who was vaccinated this week. She is high-risk for both health and situational reasons so everyone who knows and loves her is very relieved.

*hugs* You are awesome, and if you brought that menu to my house and fed my kids dinner every night I would kiss your feet. I think the best response to the bolded is "She didn't eat any meat." That gives him the information he's asking for without conceding his assumption that milk and cheese aren't protein.

For discussion's sake, here's MN positivity (red), cases (yellow), and deaths (blue). Positivity and cases shifted 14 days forward. Positivity was definitely the stronger correlation in the beginning, then for most of the summer positivity and case numbers both worked (since test numbers were fairly stable at that point they were measuring basically the same thing). But when things started to skyrocket in the fall positivity plateaued but cases and deaths kept going up. I'm guessing that the change was that the population that was voluntarily testing and the population that was getting sick diverged, so a higher percentage of cases were only tested because the person was sick enough to need to see a doctor. Cases and positivity are both headed down, but deaths haven't turned the corner yet. 😞

You aren't even a little bit wrong.

Some people can’t handle moderation and balance with food. My husband is one of them, and it’s so strange. He’s diabetic, and much more of a morning person than me, so even though I do most of the cooking he makes his own breakfast. The only way he can stay within a reasonable diabetic-friendly breakfast is if he eats the exact same thing every morning. I’ve tried having options available, even sitting down with him and making a list of three breakfast options that we have all the components for, but if he has a choice he will choose from the list for a few days and then drift into making other things that don’t fit his dietary requirements. It’s like his brain hears that there’s a choice involved and thinks that means free-for-all. I don’t get it, but he’s tried multiple things over the 15 years since his diagnoses and the only one that seems to work is the same meal every day, no choices. He has amazing willpower in sticking to that one meal, though. I could never do it. Perhaps your BIL knows he needs strong guardrails to make healthy food choices and has a hard time conceiving of other ways to make a balanced diet happen. I think, though, that he’s going to have to get comfortable with “because that’s the rule in our family” if he wants to enforce his choices with his kids when you’re cooking.

Try Zumba Gold. It's aimed at older participants so it's less intense.

Pork tenderloin.

Like most things in the pandemic you have to think of it in terms of populations not individuals. It would slow everything down and complicate things immensely to evaluate each individual’s risk level. Instead you go by category. It would add time, process, and expense to skip your husband and circle back to him later.

The classic: https://www.verybestbaking.com/toll-house/recipes/original-nestle-toll-house-chocolate-chip-cookies/