Halliburton isn't actually expensive; it's just the pricing-bot weirdness that makes OOP books appear to command high prices. When a seller actually has a copy in stock and checks what they've priced it as, the price drops dramatically. I've seen it many times in the dollar bin (where I got mine).

:grouphug: How terrifying. Continuing prayers.

Well if you ever have a visit to the Bay Area planned, I can send you a list.

I understand. Dh is a state employee, and it always helps encourage me to keep my nose clean.

You shouldn't be too impressed. I don't do much fluffy reading, but I way make up for it by my horrifically junky tv viewing habits.

If there's a cult compound in the making, it needs to be a proper one with a strict dress code. Pants/trousers only for the women; kilts for the men; and burkhas for the teenagers, male or female. Dh can explain the difference between modus ponens and modus tollens ... patiently ... several different ways ... repeatedly each semester.... That's gotta be good enough to get fed, right? Lailasmum, I think Texas would fill your weather conditions.

Colleges would start slashing departments, especially the non-remunerative humanities (SUNY Albany has led the way; UVA nearly went there). Easy way to get rid of expensive tenured faculty.

I was guessing that they changed the location because of too many innocent people there for license renewal getting run over by the 16-year-olds on their driving test runs.

Awesome! :hurray:

Here in Travis County, the paper temporary now has your photo (in b&w) on it. I wonder if these things vary by county as much as by state? ETA: I got my new one last month. The photo was consirably less flattering than my avatar.

We get a paper temporary license that diesn't look very license-like, and they clip a chunk off the corner of our old license. I got pulled over once in New Mexico with these, and the officer was furious that I'd cut up my driver's license (and refused to believe the temporary one counted). I thought he was going to take me in.

Thanks for that link. Interesting reading. I'm so grateful for the "TEA Partiers" (no, not that Tea Party, nor TeA Partiers) of a previous generation of Texas homeschoolers.

This is just crazy, and my complete sympathies for having to deal with people making your life harder/ more aggravated without actually contributing something to your education of your children. :grouphug: How did PA end up with such intrusive laws? Is there any sign of deregulation in the future?

Fantastic to have you add your list! I'm glad you came out of lurkdom to share. :). Which books did you like best? And which would you not recommend? I'm looking at that little list of non-finished books....

I understand. I should clarify that it's not a series; when Augustine was writing, the ancient world was transitioning from scrolls to modern books. Scrolls were separated into pages, which were collected in 'books,' which were themselves assembled into a codex. Today we would think of these 'books' as more like very long chapters. My Penguin edition of City of God is about 1000 pages, and each of the 22 'books' (i.e. paginated scrolls) is 40-50 pages long.

There's one in our little neighborhood. It isn't a McMansion, and I would guess that it was built in the '70's (just from the general age of the surrounding houses, and the size of it), but it looks an awful lot like a Disneyland castle facade. My younger girls desperately want to live in it. I guess some grownup did, too.

In theory ... except for those who drive to the traditionalist Catholic parish, or the charismatic Catholic parish, or the Spirit-of-Vatican-2 Catholic parish, or the gay-friendly Catholic parish, or the university student Catholic parish, or the Vietnamese Catholic parish, or the Central-American-but-not-Tejano Catholic parish, or the [fill in the blank] Catholic parish....

It's this, St Augustine's magnum opus, written in 22 books between AD 413 and 427. The first ten books take some slogging through, as they're composed of Augustine's detailed refutation of various now-vanished polytheistic theologies and philosophies, including an extended refutation of a book that hasn't survived to the modern era. But the sailing is a little clearer now. I was slowed considerably by needing to get hold of a better translation. The Dods translation, which I bought for my Kindle, preserves Augustine's lengthy Latinate sentences, whereas most modern translations break them down into shorter sentences more typical of English. I finally lost my temper when I got to a section that was about teA in Eden, where Dods decided that it was too salubrious for the casual reader and so left it in Latin! Now my Latin is okay, but it was annoying: if I pay for a translation, I would like my book actually translated. So I poked around the used book stores until I found an affordable Bettenson translation.

No. There's no way I'm driving through any small town in Texas with an open invitation for a ticket dangling from my mirror.

Ah, being ahead means it's time to really buckle down to City of God. Only eight books of it to go! So what is a Japanese urban fantasy? Last year dh made me read Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. That sort of thing?

Prayers for your mom, Mytwoblessings. Finished a short story collection, Doctor Brodie's Report, Jorge Luis Borges. Dang I love Borges. By the way if anyone has any idea what the titular story is about, please tell me. Well that's book #9 for the year. I'm officially on the Book of the Month subset of the Book a Week challenge.

Avocado and Harvest Gold. I promise you, it's just about to be trendy.

Middle Girl's preferred method: Step dripping wet onto bath mat. Try to dry self with towel. Notice that you're not achieving anything because absurdly long hair is dripping all over you. Gather up said hair and wring it out, creating a lake on the tile. Decide you've wasted enough playing time trying to get dry; drop towel on floor and bounce, nekkid and still dripping wet, into bedroom to play until discovered.

Ooh, you'd fit in so well around here.:D You know, the whole "Keep Austin Weird" meme was originally a Shop Locally campaign. And like the Farmers and the Ranchers, in these parts the atheists and the believers, the unschoolers and the classical educators, are all friends.

No, you're not an oddball. I try to refrain from doing business with companies that act directly in ways I find intolerable as part of their business model - and over the many years that's meant not buying from Nestle, Gap, California grape-growers, Shell, and Disney - I don't care to patronize companies that knowingly use sweatshop and/or child labor, abuse their workers, or injure their customers, is all. But like you, I don't have the time, energy, or inclination to care about corporate public statements, donations, or publicity stunts. Call me callous. Besides, there's a Sonic only a few blocks away. :D