My first thought was biking. Mountain biking or bike-touring (or racing, for that matter.) No one said scouting, if that's an option.

As a cross-curriculum idea, I love all the David MacAulay books: http://www.amazon.com/David-Macaulay/e/B000AP72G0/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_2?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1301182301&sr=8-2 And I was going to suggest model-building...I'm a Naval Architect so I was going to suggest ship models :tongue_smilie:Many of the Anatomy of the Ship books are amazing. In particular I recommend the Endeavor and the Dreadnought. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=anatomy+of+the+ship&x=0&y=0 I built mid-ship section models of each, which shows the structure. Also check this technical drawing and design series: http://www.drawyourworld.com/Catalog/HTML/sketch1.html

I own it. We are finishing Vol. 1 first and have until probably the summer until we are ready. But I have read through #2 and it is great! I'm a lover of BFSU, though, and it has a high attrition rate, so keep that in mind. But did I say I love it? :)

They are pretty preventable, in terms of bringing them home. I suggest leaving your luggage, when you get back, in the car or the garage and bringing it in straight to the washer/dryer. Even if you happened to have a problem at the hotel, you can do a lot to seriously minimize the chances of infesting the house IMHO.

This is a cool website: http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/content/animals/kidscorner/kidscorner_games.htm I did two projects with mine. I made cards based on this game: http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/content/animals/kidscorner/games/animalclassgame.htm Just on index cards and we used them to play a kind of 'rummy' (collect three characteristics from the same animal family. Then I made a huge poster and divided in in tiers. Top tier = all things Second Tier = <<Living Things>> <<Non Living Things>> Third Tier (subdivisions under Living)= <<Plants>> <<Animals>> <<Fungi& Bacteria>> Fourth Tier (subdivisions under Animals) = <<Vertebrates>> <<Inverts>> Fifth Tier = subs under Vert. = Mammal, Reptile, Amph., Bird, Fish and under inverts = Anthropod (insects, spiders, crabs, lobsters), Mollusk (snail, clam, squid, lobster), Cnidaria (anemone, jellyfish, hydra), echinoderm (sea stars, sea urchins), worms I got the smallest Avery labels which are 1/2"x3/4" and used 200 little photographs of animals from all these categories and natural and manmade non-living items. I would love to share these files because I worked hard on them, but I don't really own the rights to share the photographs many of them came from Montessori Printshop here: http://www.shop.montessoriprintshop.com/Animals_c152.htm?page=all But it wasn't hard at all. Then we started at the top and peeled off one of each of the stickers and stuck them in the first tier. With a second set of stickers we peeled them off and sorted them non-living and living (and discussed criteria for each.) With a third, discussed criteria for plants/animals...etc. and stuck them down. It turned out to be very fun, and a visually beautiful reference, really, when we were done.

Check out Montessori Printshop's files, by continent: http://www.shop.montessoriprintshop.com/African-Landmarks-GeoF-19.htm http://www.shop.montessoriprintshop.com/Asian-Landmarks-GeoF-14.htm http://www.shop.montessoriprintshop.com/Australia-Oceania-Landmarks-GeoF-39.htm http://www.shop.montessoriprintshop.com/European-Landmarks-GeoF-35.htm http://www.shop.montessoriprintshop.com/North-American-Landmarks-GeoF-28.htm http://www.shop.montessoriprintshop.com/South-American-Landmarks-GeoF-34.htm The photos print really well. I cut them up and we play memory or Go Fish type games with them.

This is a make-your-own, but m daughter will play Go Fish (and Old Maid) with *anything.* For phonics, I could put a letter on one card and a picture on another, print it on cardstock and she beg to play. "Do you have an 'uh'?" No, go fish. It would force both pronouncing the sound a letter makes and the leading sound of a word from a picture. We use the same cards for memory matching and bingo-style games. To play bing, we divvy up one half of the cards between players and put the matches in a bag, then take turns pulling a card from the bag and calling out "who has ____?" ETA: Sometimes I've used materials downloaded from MontessoriPrintship, like these: http://www.shop.montessoriprintshop.com/Phonics-Sound-and-Picture-Sorting-PSF-1.htm but from clipart searches are sometimes just as easy.

Yes. It could eventually tax your Internet connection, though. We use a public WiFi here and if we get too carried away with streaming (usually 2 is okay, 3 depends on different things) everything sloooows way down.

I think trying to scare young people into doing anything by telling them they will hurt themselves is howling at the wind. Teenagers often think a) they are immortal and b) it won't happen to them. The Oooh ScaryScary approach had been shown not to work well. In part because it's not really so true. All those things may very well happen to teenagers who get addicted to heroin...way down the road. But those who try it and find that the sky does not in fact open up and they aren't cracked like an egg in a pan pretty quickly realize it was hyperbole meant to manipulate them. There is also a James Dean kind of glamorous attraction to masochism and self-destruction that actually lures in some teen personality types. So I'm a 'no'.

I'll post photos of my apt., although it doesn't 100% fit your bill. I just moved into a 1 bedroom and gave DD the bedroom. The living room is the size you describe, about 14' x 12 or 13'. This is what it looks like from the entry: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=31661133&l=98d3391825&id=1447299302 And this is the view from the bed so you can get a sense of the size and layout of the whole room: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=31661130&l=813568ef52&id=1447299302 http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=31661129&l=0e5cb713f9&id=1447299302 It works...to seal it off a bit more I could see using a curtain, on say a 4-poster-type frame like an old Victorian bed...I would like a loft in my perfect world (and you can see I have the ceilings for one!) but at this point I don't have the $. Murphy bed would rock, too, but those are $$$. It works, though. I like it actually. (I am getting one chair to go where that mess of wires for my computer is :))

Where I live, they only do the tax assessments once in a fairly big while. It's common for the tax assessments to be very, very out-of-date, especially if work's been done on the house. If you do enough work you might trigger an assessment, but you just as easily might not.

I have wanted to use the forum here to sell some of my unused stuff for a while, and what's held me back is inexperience. When it involves someone else's money, I don't want to be left not sure of something. Right now, I really can't afford to sit on things I don't need. So to be clear: I can list each item ppd; take the first responder's address and request that she make payment; with paypal, I can generate an email that let's a buyer use that for payment (or give an address so she could send a MO), correct? then just take it down to the post office to mail it out. To be sure, ppd is 'postage paid' and that is the way most books here are listed, not 'actual shipping costs'. And Paypal is typical, and that's the way it works? Also people who ship books...do you like tyvek or bubble mailer envelopes? Thanks for taking the time to read mundane questions. I just don't want to get to the middle of a transaction and be unsure.

Check your reading comfort. I like the Kindle because it lets me avoid doing so much reading on an LCD screen. As much as a use a computer, this is a concern of mine. I have an iPhone and appreciate all the various functions available, but for focused immersive reading at long stretches I much prefer the unlit, real ink display.

This is the only thing, it's been bugging me all night long. I have not caught up on the morning's replies so if I'm repeating something then I'll just lend my voice... His *choices* are about the way he treats...HIS HAIR. Your *choices* are about the way you treat another person. You can't compare the way I treat MY HAIR with the way I treat YOUR KIDS. You see no difference in effect and consequence? This whole "you're being intolerant of my intolerance" argument I have never been able to wrap my mind around, to pretend that all "choices" are just equal "choices."

It's true, I'm not a sports-watcher. I get my news from print/internet, but if I still watched live sports that would bother me. Consider making friends at your local sports bar/restaurant. I'm not really kidding, either. It's fun, to watch the game with the same people all season. When we were first married we would go down the street to watch even though we had the games on TV.