It's not just a nuisance. Call a few exterminators and see what chemicals they recommend. Tell them you have sensitivities and/or concerns. We seem to have gotten rid of the occasional ant with a good bait/chemical. It sits in one place and isn't all over where kids and pets can get into it. But, it took a long time. The workers had to take the poison back to the queen -- meaning if it were TOO poisonous it also wouldn't work. The workers would die before they could get back to the nest and feed the poison to the queen. So if an exterminator just wants to come in and nuke 'em, they may not know what they're doing. You need to find an exterminator who realizes you need ot get rid of the nest. Nuking only works if it's aimed directly at the nest.

A rebuttal to some points in the book: http://devlinsangle.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-math-myth-that-permeates-math-myth.html My own personal observation is that there are some kids who don't "get" higher math in high school (or middle school), but many of them do seem to be able to get it later. I don't know if that's a brain maturation problem or if the teaching in some schools is bad (or just that the 3rd around is the charm), but I do think that telling a child they're bad at math so don't ever bother is the wrong message. There's a reason why reading isn't generally taught until about age 6.5. By the same token, it wouldn't surprise me if we just haven't figured out the best age to teach these math concepts, or if the best age is highly variable between individuals.

These are kind of fun too, although not for absolute beginners. (There might be a version in French too?)

http://wlcmedia.csumb.edu/Spanish/Destinos/audio/ I know the tapes have been online at various times and various places. I haven't listened to enough of this link to see if that's it, but it might be. If not, you might find it by searching around. You would need the workbook to use them , as I recall. We actually found Destinos to be a great introduction and doing the workbooks was a big help. My only complaint about Destinos is that the sound quality tends to be bad. We did a lot with Pimsleur too, which has much clearer audio. I will say that the only use I've gotten out of the French in Action textbook is to figure out what they were actually saying in some of the scenes. The text is mostly a transcription of the video (which is good) and a few reading exercises (which were small and not terribly useful). But the Destinos text has a lot more reading and grammar instruction. If you could pick it up cheap it might be a good investment if you plan to watch the Destinos videos.

Are you watching French in Action for the French? I think that would be fun or useful

Don't we get a picture of the offending beasts? :001_smile:

Are you sure? Cause I had a raccoon take off with a bag of candy.

I did this, but my key worked. At the last moment before getting in, I realized it was not my car. Because this car was clean.

OK -- I got them to prescribe a different antibiotic. Now I'm just waiting on the very slow pharmacy that is the only one open on Sunday. Thanks for the advice. I didn't know if I was just panicking without cause. This isn't hurting very much, but there is pain. And that black box warning.

I would tend to pick a 2nd name that I liked for itself. Then see if it went ok with the first name. I have hated to have the middle name be a throwaway name just because it sounds like it goes with the first. (And there were people advocating for names for our 2nd daughter because they thought it would sound good with the name of our first daughter.... uh, no. We weren't producing matched sets but individuals) We've tended to pick family names as middle names -- names we wouldn't consider for a first name because it would be confusing or too common or too old fashioned. Spelling it with an E or without is going to cause her the same problems. People are still going to have to ask and still spell it wrong no matter which it is. So pick the one you like best. (Or name her Anna and call her Anne....)

There is nothing I vomit with more consistency than apple cider vinegar. It's a surefire trigger. (I don't even have to be pregnant) And one can definitely overdose on baking soda. I can't find if there are cases of lethal outcomes, but it does seem possible. I don't know what a safe dose is. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/002749.htm

I've been on this Cipro antibiotic for 3 days. The dr had warned me to call if I felt any tendon pain. So I did and I called and the nurse just kind of laughed it off and told me to take ibuprofen. Should I call back and get the nurse to actually ask the dr whether this is still safe? Or is that whole tendonitis thing with Cipro just so rare that I shouldn't worry about it? Anyone have experience with this? Also, is there any chance I'm just going crazy this weekend because of this drug? Or is that the infection that's making me a mess?

My kids would want to know what was up and they would want me to tell them. They would also want their father to tell them, but if he wasn't forthcoming they would understand that I couldn't force it out of him. I don't think you should be hiding anything or keeping secrets in this situation. Your kids are part of your family and you have a relationship with them. It's not only perfectly ok to tell them, it may be better for all of you in the long run to have some honesty. It doesn't need to be a big vent if you're uncomfortable with that or see it as immature. Just state the facts -- and tell the kids it's because you think they should know so they understand what's going on. If I were in this situation, I also would not be trusting the spouse to tell the truth or be fair. He is no longer the only party involved on his side, even if he was/is a good honest guy who would never hurt the me if he were still married to me. He's not still married to me. His perceptions as to who is family have changed.

Saw this article and thought of all of you: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/9912822/DNA-ancestry-tests-branded-meaningless.html I was not even aware that these sorts of genetic tests were being sold. They're claiming they can tell you if you're related to Richard III? Or was that hyperbole by the writer of the article? I keep meaning to look up the evidence for the more reputable tests. (Hinting -- anyone have that information handy?)

I looked up Mitt Romney's ancestry online (weirdly, it was available). He has several repeats and it wasn't back all that far. I picked him because we're some kind of distant cousins due to our mutual ancestry off the Mayflower. Because he's Mormon, I figured his ancestry would be fairly thorough. Maybe he's kind of my "control" of 1. But the extensive ancestry that relatives of mine have done don't seem to have turned up any repeats yet in our ancestors. So I've begun to wonder if a bit of inbreeding is more likely in some lines than others. There might even be genetic reasons for this -- some people might carry genes that cause wanderlust, putting them in new places so they're kind of forced to marry/breed with people they're not related to at all. How does one even trace ancestry back to the 900's or so? I know that there are some lines in our ancestry that have been traced that far, and I suspect some of them may even be true. But for the most part, in order to do that sort of tracing, one would have to have people living in areas with good recordkeeping that was not destroyed in the intervening years. It probably also helps if that line didn't move around much -- so one can keep finding the family in the same records. If they moved, they may have arrived out of nowhere (unless you're lucky and somebody happened to mention that this person was "of somewhere else") or they move away and just disappear from the available records. The sorts of people that would tend to stay in one place and then be easily tracked generations later would probably be rich people (landowners) or perhaps people who were inclined to stay in one spot (is this genetically determined?). Whatever the reason, this is going to skew the data to make it look like inbreeding was more common than it actually has been. The outbreeders would tend to be lost from the records. Just in the US, my ancestors never seem to have stayed in one county for longer than a generation. Oftentimes, they picked up and moved between states from one generation to the next. Meanwhile, there was a fairly large population that seemed to stay put along the eastern seaboard (unless they were ALL new immigrants every few generations?) I also find that the more I look into this, the less likely I am to believe geneaologies that other people put up on the web. There seems to be a lot of putting lines together just because someone shared a name and maybe lived in the same state (not even the same county). This has a tendency to make a lot more people descendants of rich people, because the rich people got written down in various histories -- even little podunk histories about small towns are a trap for this. But once that line is firmly established, everyone just refers back to it as a fact. When I look at censuses from the 1700's, I'm struck by how many people had the same name. Were they all descended from one guy with that name? Or were they just popular names? This doesn't even bring into consideration the fact that most people weren't even getting named in the censuses. In the US (well, what would be the US) at the time, only the landholders are named. So if one looks at censuses and finds an ancestor name, how can you be sure he was actually that landowner? And not some random underling who happened to have the same name?

I'm amazed by how many people it took to make ME. And how I have yet to run into a repeat ancestor. I've always been led to believe that there was a lot more inbreeding than I've found. Maybe my ancestors just didn't hang around in the same town long enough for that to happen. I'm impressed by the record keeping that was going on in Prussia. And the number of censuses the city of New York seemed to think was an essential part of government. That obsession with record keeping in the New England states early on is why I can trace so many ancestors in those lines. But around 1800, I kind of lose track of people who were living in Virginia and Tennessee. The early US censuses can be pretty unhelpful. I guess no one had considered that descendants might be using them.

I keep hearing the argument that students will appreciate it more and work harder if they have to pay for it. I just don't get this. My college was essentially free for me, as well as everyone else who went to a public university/college in my state back then. To be honest, I don't really see any difference in the work ethic of students these days who are paying umpteen dollars for essentially the same education. For some students, maybe it still seems free, because they're living off loans. For others, though, holding down more jobs and worrying about their loans has just increased their stress levels. The one thing I do see is that students aren't as well prepared after going through high school. But this seems to be ALL students. It's not just a subset of kids who never would have gone to college before. It's as if a lot of high schools are saying, whatever -- the kids are going to college. They can learn whatever they need then. If college were to be made free, I would also be interested in figuring out some way to make high school education worth something and not just seen as a holding pen for kids who aren't old enough for college.

I can't imagine the police around here have time for this kind of thing

Someone might have also hacked her account. Or she could have shared it by accidentally clicking on something. Which is really easy to do without even realizing. I don't take anything seriously on facebook. If she's good to you in real life that's what matters. I've got a friend who continually "likes" some pretty sketchy articles. Now possibly this happens when she goes to read these articles and she doesn't know it's showing up on facebook. So I'm reluctant to mention it to her because I'm not sure we're good enough friends that she'd want me knowing that she read those things. But I suspect it's more likely that she's been minorly hacked by some advertiser.

http://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/02/16/npr-books-end-of-average "How does what you term "Averagerianism" impact our school system both historically and today? It's so ubiquitous that it's hard to see. We design textbooks to be age-appropriate, but that means, what does the average kid of this age know and can do? Textbooks that are designed for the average will be a pretty bad fit for most kids. Then you think of things like the lockstep, grade-based organization of kids, and you end up sitting in a class for a fixed amount of time and get a one-dimensional rating in the form of a grade, and a one-dimensional standardized assessment. It's everything about the way we test and move kids forward."

Of the teachers I could have had, they were the best ones. They were just honestly telling me their experiences. There are a lot of adults who quit. There are also a lot of kids who quit but people don't seem to notice them much. I was up for opening their eyes. If I could. It seems to have worked.

Have I posted a link to the adult beginner violin and fiddle facebook group? I'm on the wrong computer to find that right now, but I'll dig it up and post it if people don't know about it already.

I started both voice and violin as an adult. Both times, I had teachers who said something to the effect of, well, we'll just see how it goes. You're doing it for fun. You're older, so don't expect much. The voice tends to give out in older women. You will never be a soprano, even though your kids are. (you're just too old....) You're going to develop arthritis in your fingers. Adults just aren't stretchy enough. etc. etc. They've stopped saying that. They just hand me the harder repertoire and we keep going. Every now and then they do mention that I got over a hurdle a lot quicker than their younger students do. I don't think I'm a musical genius or anything. I just practice. And I don't give up. Turns out I'm a fairly high soprano by the way.

Here's what I learned while working part time and going to school part time while hsing the kids -- A) first and foremost DO NOT CLEAN. Yes, the laundry needs to occasionally get done and there do need to be clean plates to eat off of, but you can let most of the rest of it go. At the end of every semester you can clean. If you're busy, you won't notice the dirt anyway B) absolutely essential housework can be shared by spouse and kids. A husband CAN integrate cleaning/cooking with childcare. Even when he's working 60 hours a week otherwise. Even a four year old can do housework. C) you find a space where you can shut the door (for real or metaphorically) and tell everyone you're doing your homework. No, they can't interrupt unless it's to evacuate from a burning building If your family can't do these things, then you're either asking too much or they're falling down on the job. If it's the former, you need to talk about priorities. If it's the latter, they need to step up to the plate. Most importantly, IT IS NOT YOUR JOB TO TELL YOUR HUSBAND WHAT HE NEEDS TO DO AROUND THE HOUSE. He needs to see the problem and do it. If he can't see it, well, it is possibly not a problem (you really can leave the floors unmopped for a long period of time). But if the problem he sees is, "kids are hungry and wife isn't feeding them" then he doesn't understand what it means to have you in school and how he needs to support that. I discovered that my husband could figure out the essentials -- having food in the house, basic cooking, and something to eat from are the essentials he settled on. Sometimes people wore dirty clothes, but after a couple times, they figured out how to do the laundry.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35193414 I lost track of what got posted so I hope this isn't a repeat. "Foods that make some of us put on weight can have little effect on others, according to research being carried out in Israel. It might be time to rethink the way we diet, writes Dr Saleyha Ahsan. ...Foods have, therefore, been traditionally classified by how much of a blood sugar spike they cause - with "high GI" (Glycaemic Index) foods being thought of as bad for us, and "low GI" as good. Every nutritionist would tell you this. But the Israeli research, led by Dr Eran Segal and Dr Eran Elinav, suggests that it is simply not so."