I remember reading the paper when I was a kid and there was a letter to Dear Abby from a woman whose last name was "Hore" and she had been waiting her whole life to get married and change her name, and she was in love with a man whose last name was "Hooker".

In the interest of making materials more openly available, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has released 375,000 images of art, in high resolution, free for any use under a Creative Commons license. These are artworks the Met believes are in the public domain. More info

I missed posting last week and am only partway through this thread. I had a long post about Euphoria disappear into the ether. I'm not sure I'm up for recreating it, so I think I will create an abbreviated version in another post here. I'll write a blurb about it soon, but I get the feeling you would not enjoy the first part of the book, but probably the second half. If you're attached to the original outcome of events, it's probably a really good decision to not finish the book. Re: Lady Gaga. I love Lady Gaga and thought the halftime show was terrific. (I also enjoyed the Schuyler sisters from Hamilton singing at the start of the game, but then I have Hamilton fever.) Gaga very outspoken and interesting, with the real talent to back it up. Here's a fun video of her singing The Lady is a Tramp with Tony Bennett. I'm no fan of Tom Brady, but he's like the ocean--never turn your back on him! He is essentially a football machine in human form. I was rooting for Atlanta, but I did notice their younger players getting cocky way too early in the game. I might need glasses too, but am somewhat in denial. My mom and I have the same eyes, and I'm 2 years older than she was when she got glasses. Lalalala I'm sticking my fingers in my ears.

Wonderful news! Congrats.

Dryer sheets work too. I'm not sure why, but they do.

I haven't yet. All the homeschoolers I know are either still pro-homeschooling or gave it up reluctantly for various reasons, none of which made them against it.

Jane, thank you very much for the poem; it brought tears to me eyes. I need to read more Hughes. Stacia sent me a postcard with a Hughes quote. I keep it on my fridge, along with other BaW postcards. (They all make me happy when I look at them!) Here's a pic of the same postcard I found by Googling. It says, "My soul has grown deep like the rivers." I love the image and the quote together.

One of the books I'm reading I started in July, and the other in 2013. :o

Nan, I hope your surgery goes well! I didn't finish any books this week. Our family and community is going through a difficult time so things are all out of kilter. I am enjoying Euphoria still, and the more I read it the more interesting it becomes. There's a love triangle, but it's also interesting to see how these 1920s anthropologists are approaching different native cultures, and their desire to capture their ways before they are wiped out or assimilated. Just when I thought it was safe to read Hawaii again because a certain anger-inducing character died, we're back in bad times with the treatment of Chinese laborers. I still love the book, even though by far my favorite part was the first 20%.

Creekland, I asked my dad, who sat on a medical school admissions committee for ~30 years before he retired, what he thinks. He is quite shocked! He says it is common for people to re-apply and be accepted the following year, and that the view of the committee is usually that the student really wants to be there and they do not hold their previous rejection against them. Some students spend that year improving their portfolios, but he said your DS sounds great as-is. Just an FYI.

You guys are making me nervous about the language I use to post here. It's meant to be conversational, often typed between kids needing my help with math or history. Apologies if I do something which is driving you crazy! Sadie, I'm so sorry. In my ideal world anyone could study whatever they wished to learn without regards to money. :grouphug: Yes, the images are ghostly for me too. That's exactly right. I also tend to skim any long descriptive passages. Lest you think we are twins, though, I do very well with directional sense and most geometry and calculus. You know what I'm really bad at? Those things where you have to look at a 3D figure in varied 2D pictures and figure out what the other side must look like. Or those geometrical maps of things ostensibly unfolded along their edges and you have to figure out if they would re-fold into the correct shape.

Is it normal that I'm sitting here with tears in my eyes for moms and kids I've never even met? Congrats to all! :party:

PM me if you have any questions. I've read her books and we did the whole shebang for about 3 years.

Right now, if you asked me to form an image of an apple in my mind, I cannot do it. I can maybe get a few glimpses of parts of an apple, but they disappear quickly. We had DS evaluated by a neuropsychologist a couple of years ago and he did really badly (> 10th percentile?) on an exercise in which you look at a figure and then try to recreate it without looking. When I got home I did the same experiment on myself, studying the image for 2 minutes and then trying to reproduce it 30 minutes later. I only did a bit better than he did because I at least figured out how to form a structure into which everything else would fit. But I knew I was going to be asked to reproduce it, and he did not. So I figured I'm pretty bad at it, and everyone else is having a very different experience than I am. He and I are both very conceptual thinkers. That said, I do think visually when I'm looking at things. I color-code things quite a bit, etc. But mental images are a bust. Thanks for the info about the reader for The American Slave Coast. I agree the book looks daunting, and I had an idea to look into an audiobook version but mispronunciations would drive me crazy.

I've missed a couple of weeks, mostly due to illness. During that time I finished Colson's The Underground Railroad and made progress on Hawaii, and Euphoria. For culture this week, I'll keep reading Hawaii. The Underground Railroad was a very gripping book, although I did find the writing a bit abrupt at various times. I know Rose stopped reading it, and Jane made it through. I find the current discussion interesting because I form almost no images in my mind. I mostly deal in concepts and language. It was of course a very disturbing read but because I had no images in my mind, or movies of the scenes, I was able to go through it mostly like any other book until the last 25 pages or so. That I ended up reading in the bathroom so my kids wouldn't see me crying so hard. The fundamental unfairness of the situation was rage-inducing, and the way the non-human world affected the main protagonist (Cora) in cruel ways when humans were already being so terrible, was heartbreaking. It would be a fine book to turn a believer in God into an atheist. I also own The American Slave Coast and feel it would be a good idea to go from the fiction I just finished to a non-fiction work, but I'm not sure about starting a foray into a difficult 750-page book right now. Maybe if I decided to take this year and work through it here and there instead of straight through. On the topic of synesthesia, I don't think I have it, but I do think of numbers as structures, particularly spirals. They all have their place, although I don't see it. It's more of a conceptual experience, and doing math involves those structures, at least until math becomes too complex or abstract in my mind to do maintain the illusion(?) or idea.

Seconding the Instant Pot.

I've been offline due to illness, but am sending good wishes to all who are having any trouble due to rain. Night before last I woke up to a simply spectacular lightning and thunder display. It was so bright that even though we had the blinds closed and we were sleeping, I was awoken when my eyelids lit up like I was sleeping under the sun.

We are doing okay. I was thinking of you so I'm glad you checked in. We're close to the coast and flat so we don't have orographical effects, and the water mostly runs to the sea if the drains are not blocked.

We had quite the downpour for a few minutes when the cold front pushed in behind the storm. This was around midnight. I woke up DH just so he could hear it. It was like we were under a waterfall.

Happy birthday Rosie! 1Q84 was also my first Murakami read, two years ago when I joined BaW. Funny thing is I was just coming here to say it was a great introduction! This week I finished a few books: Night School: This is a Jack Reacher book. It was enjoyable, but I much prefer the early books in which Reacher is sort of a lone wolf. I hope this idea of him being called in to do work for the government as part of a team is not a recurring thing. There was barely a nod to some of the appealing things that were always in the early novels. Not happy. The Return of The King: This is the 3rd book in the LoTR trilogy, which has been our family's read aloud for over a year. (And before that, we read The Hobbit.) We've gone very slowly, supplementing with our own drawings and The Atlas of Middle Earth, plus a trip to Oxford while we were in the UK. There was saw some original Tolkien art, the botanical garden where he used to spend time, and some other related points of interest. Yesterday was the culmination of this large project, with the exception of DS looking over the appendices today. The Plover: This turned out to be a wonderful book. Thank you Stacia! Haunting, poetic, and with a certain level of humanity that I feel is so often missing from the modern industrialized world. I enjoyed the long sentences and the lists. I will definitely check out more books from Brian Doyle. I ams still working on The Underground Railroad and Euphoria, the latter having been set aside for the former. I've also been taking a long break from Michener's Hawaii, but I think I might pick it back up after reading The Plover. I had really enjoyed the earlier part of the book the most, which was mostly about oral histories, way finding, etc and had become a bit depressed after the whaling ships and missionaries arrived.

Even more moisture keeps getting pulled in! GOES West rainbow loop

Webcam of Merced River in Yosemite @ Happy Isles https://ca.water.usgs.gov/webcams/happyisles/ So far it's still not crested.

South bay is going to get a lot of rain over the next few hours. Winds are basically out of the south this afternoon.

Sorry, I mistyped. Near Lassen, this one. My friend lives nearby and that's what she heard from neighbors. I should probably not have posted as it's rumor and not confirmed.

Nothing at all. Just keep going! :thumbup1: