I started putting a reminder in my calendar to start using it in early-mid october. Waiting until I feel bad is too late because then I have trouble being consistent with it. It is on my kitchen table and I sit in front of it as I eat breakfast and plan my day. Some days I only have 10 minutes in the morning, but it is worth it. Mine is an older model and it pretty big. There are newer models that aren't as big.

Man gets off on torturing people. Gosh. Sounds like the plot of a Lisa Gardner novel.

The school is very familiar with what is going in in Barcelona and this has been discussed in dd's study abroad meetings. My friends who live in Barcelona say that the city is still really safe ...The unrest is in small and easily avoidable pockets.

This!!! A thousand times, this! How eloquently put! Yes! And I love how you managed a "whilst" in there ... perhaps my American is showing.

This isn't a "well, I'll refrain from picking my teeth in public" sort of situation. Baby needs to be fed ... often. So, whose discomfort should take precedence? The person who has a childish discomfort with the God-designed manner of feeding a child? If so, then the mom is temporarily banished because feeding needs to be done.

But, this makes banishing the nursing mother and her baby OK because someone else is uncomfortable? If it makes someone uncomfortable, then HE can leave, he can avert his eyes, or he can just deal. We need to stop putting up obstacles to breastfeeding. If people can't deal then that is THEIR problem, not the nursing mother's problem. I haven't nursed a child in 16 years and I am terribly sad that this is still a conversation. I long for the day when nursing in public is so commonplace that nobody notices.

Our local homeschool group moved to groups.io and it has been a success. I do hope that the people at hs2coll are working on making a change. That has been such a fantastic resource.

Yay!! Best of luck to you!

Thanks for the advice so far. So helpful. Thanks for the links and the reminder to clear my cookies. I had forgotten about that. More details ... She will be flying out of Chicago and is planning on arriving in Barcelona on January 3rd and staying with family friends. She checks in with her host family in Madrid on January 7th. After that, the study abroad orientation starts and classes begin soon afterwards. I'd much rather her fly into Barcelona because, although she is a somewhat adventurous person, I imagine she will be very tired from a long day of traveling and I'd rather that the last part of this trip go smoothly. If she goes to Madrid first, she'd need a place to stay or she'd need to get further travel to Barcelona. I know that after 10+ hours of traveling, the last thing I'd want to do is arrange more travel in an unfamiliar area. She has no firm plans about what she plans to do after the semester is over (May 14th), which is making her return trip planning difficult. She'd like to stay a few days longer ... her visa is supposed to expire a week later. She may meet some people while she is over there that she'd like to travel with or she may go back and visit the family in Barcelona and go rock climbing with them (that is how we met and they are avid climbers.) She has been following the advice of people who have been on this program (it is another campus of the university she currently attends here in the states, so there is a fairly large contingent of students from her university that go to Spain.) Based upon the advice she has received, she plans to pack very light (she is very good at this) and buy a fair amount of her clothes in Spain and be very judicious about what she will bring back. She is aware that what she wears at school now would be out of place in Europe. She has had 4 years of high school Spanish (and the last 2 years, no English was allowed in class.) I'm not sure how much time she will have to brush up on her Spanish before she goes since she is taking 18 credit hours as an engineering student. I am working on a list of Spanish language movies, TV shows, and podcasts for us to listen when she is home for winter break. (I minored in Spanish in college, but need to brush up beyond the 3 months of duolingo I did last summer.) I know I need to get past the frozen tongue when faced with native speakers ... my mind goes blank and I sound like a stupid American and then I replay the conversation in Spanish in my head with all the things I meant to say. (Shhh ... I am admitting that I am totally living vicariously through her since I wanted to study in Spain when I was in college, but my dad forbade it. He had a point. Back then college at an in-state school was really cheap and study abroad was really, really expensive in comparison. These days, it will cost us the same. At least I get to go visit her next March.)

Dd is studying in Madrid for the Spring semester. She is planning on visiting some family friends in Barcelona just after the new year before she moves in with her host family. She is also planning on staying a few days after move-out to either travel or visit this family again. I am just overwhelmed trying to book her tickets. Plus, I have to buy our tickets to visit her towards the end of Mark. How to get best prices? How to make it easy for a non-seasoned traveler? Should I book tickets into and out of Barcelona instead of Madrid? I hate the thought of her having to navigate traveling to another city after a long flight. Any advice? I'm a grown up. This shouldn't be this hard.

I'm chiming in here that I am a still a little creeped out as well for these exact reasons. He has moved beyond awkwardness into a complete lack of respect for boundaries. This young lady isn't a prize to be won. She is a person who should have the right to not be manipulated.

It is the people on Android and Pixel phones that aren't getting the messages from the iPhone users. But they are seeing ours because they are replying. Only we don't know that they are replying unless someone else reacts to their posts. And this only happens in a group text, not individual texts, which go through fine.

Messages that comes with the android phone.

So, I am in a group chat with my cohort at school. It has been a great way to share information as well as encouragement. Most people have iPhones, but there are several android and Pixel users on the chat. We don't get any of the messages from just a couple of the people on the chat. We only know that these people have posted when others react to their posts (not having an iPhone, I didn't know it was a thing.) What is going on that we non iPhone users can't get these two people's posts to appear in the message.

Our library does the last 4 digits of our library card and our initials. This offers some privacy protection as well as reducing mix ups. I'd be really irritated of my name was on all of my holds. Nobody in my town needs to know what I am checking out. (It's a big town, but most of the homeschoolers who also checked out books by the basket full would have recognized my name.