In the 4 I've been party to (only one was on me), they've had the lights dimmed. So there's less sense that you're out in the open and completely exposed. the techs were very good about keeping things covered. The ones that weren't on me were on my teen daughters. The last one my daughter had done was by a guy. He was really very professional and I didn't hear any complaints later about embarrassment. I have been told (by my daughters) that it's ok for the tech to be in the room but not ME. But they still wanted me there for comfort. So I sat behind a curtain where I couldn't see anything but the display. It's possible your daughter is in the same boat -- wants you there but doesn't want you there. So you might find out if there's going to be a curtain.

It also sounds like he needs a lot of sleep. That may just be a phase, if you're lucky. Has he finished growing? That can really burn kids out and they don't even know it. Or it could be a sign of depression. So it might be something to discuss with any health care professionals that are responsible for him.

Yeah, he does nothing, you do nothing. Meaning you don't bother to buy the laptop. There are consequences.

As more and more of my friends have kids getting into this age group, I'm seeing that there are a lot of kids doing this. Boys and girls. "Diagnosed on the spectrum" and not. It's just a thing that happens and the parents can't do much about it. You don't even see it coming most of the time. The one thing they all have in common is that their parents care and hate to see them fail. (Not that that caused it, but that's all the parents I know) But there isn't much that can be done unless the kid actually steps up to do it. I know a number of seniors who are now in "credit recovery programs". That's not a real thing. Just what the parents around here are calling it. The kids flaked out through most of high school, didn't pass a number of classes, and are now seeing that they need more on their transcript to graduate, let alone get into college. A lot of them will pull it together in time and get into an ok 4 yr college. Others will have to go to cc for a bit. Some have just decided it's their failure and they intend to own it. You've done what you can. You need your life back. Your other kids need you back. If he doesn't want to go back to ps, you might ask him if he's intending to drop out of school. Because that's effectively what he's doing. It would be easier to see if he wasn't avoiding ps. If you name it, it might make him care. Or not. I'd be inclined to just enroll him in ps and let him deal with the consequences of truancy if he decides not to go. Depending on the laws in your state, he might not be truant if he's already 16, but if he is still required to be in an educational situation of some sort, you might point out that you enrolled him because for legal reasons you couldn't keep him at home and say he was being homeschooled if he, in fact, was not. The other option you mentioned was maybe sending him to live with his dad. I'd consider that. Alternatively, if he wants to go to college, tell him to just apply now, since he seems to be done with high school. You can provide a transcript for what he HAS done. He'll quickly find out what sort of college that will get him into. It might be better than you might think. Or maybe it will tell him what more he needs to do for that dream.

We're winding down our IDL license at work (way too expensive), so I'm seeing if Matlab has as good a graphics now. Things have been changing rapidly over the past few years and I suspect Matlab may be getting better. It's ability to "read" data off images is a lot better than it used to be, for example. (I don't even know how well IDL does that) And there are just a lot more things written in Matlab code these days. Also, I see that there is a coursera online course in Matlab (I think it's coursera. If not, it's edx) The first few lectures were pretty basic. Not sure how far they're going to go.

Is there a free student version of Mathematica? I have a recollection that my daughter was supposed to get that onto her computer to do her math homework. She never succeeded in getting one that worked (we have old computers) so just used the school computers to do her homework. But I'm pretty sure they were told to download a version and that it was free.

Start with Octave. It's free. Before we had a site license at work for Matlab (for more than 2 people at a time) many of us were using Octave. My daughter has used both Matlab and Mathematica and has found Matlab to be a little more user friendly. But that may be just because she was forced to use it more. But I really wouldn't spend money on these programs until you know if you have to. You probably will never need to. Most colleges have site licenses. If he just wants something to play with now, then try Octave.

I swallowed a penny when I was 3 (I think - could have been earlier). That was the last I ever heard of it. If my mom went looking for it, she never told me about it. I still wonder if it's there. She DID put a penny in my underwear for me to find the next morning so *I* would think it came out. So I must have been upset about it. As I recall, it was an accident. But if you suck on a penny all the time, it's bound to get swallowed. I don't know why my mother encouraged such a thing.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/10/faulty-research-behind-mammograms-breast-cancer "Mammograms do help a small number of women avoid dying from breast cancer each year, and those lives count, but a 2012 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine calculated that over the last 30 years, mammograms have overdiagnosed 1.3 million women in the United States. Millions more women have experienced the anxiety and emotional turmoil of a second battery of tests to investigate what turned out to be a false alarm. Most of the 1.3 million women who were overdiagnosed received some kind of treatment—surgical procedures ranging from lumpectomies to double mastectomies, often with radiation and chemotherapy or hormonal therapy, too—for cancers never destined to bother them. And these treatments pose their own dangers. Though the risk is slight, especially if your life is on the line, a 2013 study found that receiving radiation treatments for breast cancer increases your risk of heart disease, and others have shown it boosts lung cancer risks too. Chemotherapy may damage the heart, and tamoxifen, while a potent treatment for those who need it, doubles the risk of endometrial cancer. In a 2013 paper published in the medical journal BMJ, breast surgeon Michael Baum estimated that for every breast cancer death thwarted by mammography, we can expect an additional one to three deaths from causes, like lung cancer and heart attacks, linked to treatments that women endured." Wondering if people have thoughts on the matter, or perhaps other articles to read on this.

Another interesting comment from another article : "Sure, our lifestyle has changed over the decades in parallel with the increased use of BPA. Yet scientists have noticed the same fattening trend in newborns, lab rodents, pets and wildlife that live in close proximity to humans. Have babies or mice really changed how much they eat or exercise? Experts highlight this as further evidence that more than just caloric intake is driving the current epidemics of obesity and Type 2 diabetes." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/14/bpa-chemical-hormone-obesity-diabetes_n_1276996.html

I can't find the thread so I'll just start a new thread to post this article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/09/150928124400.htm?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook "Emerging evidence ties endocrine-disrupting chemical exposure to two of the biggest public health threats facing society -- diabetes and obesity. EDCs contribute to health problems by mimicking, blocking or otherwise interfering with the body's natural hormones. By hijacking the body's chemical messengers, EDCs can alter the way cells develop and grow. Known EDCs include bisphenol A (BPA) found in food can linings and cash register receipts, phthalates found in plastics and cosmetics, flame retardants and pesticides. The chemicals are so common that nearly every person on Earth has been exposed to one or more." Apparently this is building on their previous work. I still have trouble believing the whole calories in/calories out hypothesis. Just my personal observation -- back when I was in college we ate like pigs in the all you can eat cafeteria, drank huge amounts of full sugar soda, and never got any exercise to speak of. We were all pretty thin. I see college students today and a lot of them are what we would have considered huge 20-30 yrs ago. Yeah, so they're probably sitting around, eating a lot at the all you can eat cafeteria, drinking lots of sugary soda, not getting much exercise..... but why are kids today a lot fatter than my generation was at that age? The behavior looks exactly the same. It's just the outcome that's changed. I knew ONE person who might have been considered obese when I was in college. I knew one girl who was a bit fat and managed to lose 20 pounds. But that was IT. These days, there are very few kids I see on college campuses who are as thin as most of the people I hung out with back in college. I can't believe there's been that huge of a behavioral shift.

VSO = violin shaped object Also, my aunt's Stradivarius sounds like what you're describing. A Kleenex box with some strings. The point of renting, I've always thought, is to get an instrument that you can't afford to buy outright. So you can get something better.

I just looked this up on Musician's Friend. There are "stage" pianos that sit on a table, it looks like. Maybe you can buy a stand. So whatever I said about keyboards was wrong. http://www.musiciansfriend.com/digital-pianos/kawai I don't really know what the difference is

A digital piano comes in a "case" that looks like a piano and sits at the right level? With a bench? And a keyboard sits on a table? Is that the difference? Then a "piano" would also come with built in pedals and the keyboard wouldn't. You could buy a sustain pedal separately. Or I might not know what I'm talking about. Get weighted keys if you think this is going to last longer than a couple weeks -- a lot of keyboards that don't even have the full 88 keys come with weighted keys.

If they're bad, just go for the drugs. All the holistic/home/gentle remedies in the world won't touch that pain. Some of us grew up in the bad old days before we were allowed to take ibuprofen for cramps. Trust me, we tried everything. Changing diet, extreme exercise -- none of that works for some people. Even codeine does nothing. Doctors were considering putting me on a morphine IV. Although -- extra bonus -- I suffered with it so long that childbirth was very nearly a piece of cake. At least childbirth didn't feature continuous vomiting for 24 hours. Any kind of over the counter strength ibuprofen (or whatever Aleve is -- naproxen?) works for many people. But it has to be taken before the pain gets bad. If she waits, it may not do much. If she's throwing up at all, then she definitely needs to take the drugs early. Tylenol does nothing. Aspirin does very little. I think the mode of action of ibuprofen and naproxen in this case is not just the pain relief (although I'm sure that's some). They actually work on the mechanism that produces the cramps. That's why Tylenol is useless.

Did his doctors send him home with any recipes? They should have. A lot of doctors do that now. I ran into this: http://www.catholichomeandgarden.com/Meatless%20Meals%20Printable%20Book%208.5x11.pdf I found this recipe interesting: Fast Noodle Soup Ingredients: 1 can tomato soup 1/2 can water 1 can cream corn 1 Package ramen noodle soup Worcestershire sauce Onion salt Sugar Salt and pepper to taste It's like they were spying in some grad student's kitchen

My teacher does lessons over skype. If a big problem with lessons is just getting the time in the day to get there, that might be an option. I think there are other teachers I've seen on the web who do this too.

I've self taught myself recorder, trombone, mandolin, accordion (and maybe a couple others that I'm forgetting). I managed to teach my daughters flute and trumpet without knowing myself, but eventually they got to a point where a teacher who actually knew how to play those instruments was necessary. However, I must have been fairly successful at it as their band teacher was trying to get me to do private lessons for some of his other kids. But violin.... yeah, that kind of stumped me. I was able to start and could play, but I wasn't sounding like how I wanted to sound after a year or so. I seemed to hit a dead end. So I finally gave up and got a teacher. It made a huge difference. There are a lot of teaching videos online that I think would be helpful. Someone suggested http://fiddlerman.com/tutorials/beginners-tutorials/which I will second. They'll get you started. I do think I was fairly successful at teaching myself for the first year. In fact, I could have just kept plugging away at learning tunes and sounding kind of eh. I do hear a lot of people who sound that way who seem perfectly happy with their playing. Some of them even get up and play in public. But that wasn't enough for me. I had to get all perfectionist and everything. That said, though, if you do decide to get a teacher -- I have found a whole lot of bad violin teachers out there. This may be because playing violin is just hard, and telling someone else how to do it is equally difficult. So you may need to shop around a little. Ask people whose playing you like who their teacher is. It's not enough that the teacher be able to play well. They also have to produce decent playing students. There's a facebook group of adult starters on violin: https://www.facebook.com/groups/119127121451810/(hope that works) They're a nice bunch of people. A lot of them are struggling with a lot of beginner issues so it would probably be fairly enlightening. And supportive.

The news media often don't get it right either. And I don't know that the police talk to them at the scene much. Couple months ago there was an interesting car accident near us that ended up on the news. The news guys kept asking the cops what was going on, the cops were non committal, but then the TV guys set up and did a report even though they knew nothing. When all else fails, look concerned and make something up....

I do often see a single seller charging different prices for different sizes and colors. So it isn't just amazon doing that. And it isn't always easy to find the one that's the lowest price (and once I find it, it's usually in XS. And a ghastly color) It doesn't seem to matter if I'm using a fancy new Mac or old PC. I can see where they might have different prices for different parts of the world, but I suspect my hardware isn't making any difference. Things in my amazon cart will vary in price, but usually by no more than a few cents. Maybe that just reflects the sorts of things I have in my cart. (It's not that I buy many of them. But once the price starts varying, then I get intrigued and want to keep watching the fluctuations, so things often don't leave my cart)

The other thing we've found helpful is to make up larger portions of vegetables, fruits and salads. Once those fill the plate (and stomach) you don't have as much need for the meat. So you could even go for "lower meat" days instead of "meatless" if that's a stumbling block for him.

Split pea soup. Just put a lot of garlic in. Hummus. I love falafel, but it's not something I'd be making on my own. If you use red lentils they pretty much fall apart into mush so he might not know what he's getting. Once again, lots of garlic. Throw in some kale and it won't look anything like legumes. I've also made a nice red lentil soup with coconut milk. It might have ethnic spices. (Every time I make it I have to get the recipe off the web somewhere, so it can't be hard to find) I know you said no lentils, but consider ketchup as a condiment. It might completely change the dynamic. I boil lentils with rice and add a lot of pepper. My husband douses it with ketchup. I think it just tastes like a fairly moist steak at that point. He actually prefers the lentils over steak and he's not exactly a vegetarian. We also do a lot of "things on pasta". Meatless tomato sauce, vegetables, etc. Sometimes I throw in kidney beans and no one notices. We do macaroni and cheese too, but I'm not sure that's what the drs are thinking of when they say meatless. Refried beans and cheese and salsa in a tortilla is a big favorite here. Homemade refried beans are way better than canned (which taste like dog food to me), but we ate canned for years with no one but me complaining. I guess our chili tends to be vegetarian too because we're always too lazy to put meat in it. It comes out fine. With the spices, we don't notice the "missing" meat. I kind of prefer it. Ground meat in chili always seems a little chewy and strange to me. I know a lot of people who replace meat with textured vegetable protein. It's not my thing, but some people swear by it.

Is it just me, or are Daleks beginning to seem a bit too precious? I'm thinking I should only watch episodes that are not written by Moffat. This one.... I dunno. My dreams tend to be more connected. First we're here, then we're there. No explanation as to how we got there. I like the new Dr. But the writing...

Water. It's the only thing that works for me. Just little sips to keep the cough reflex calmed down. I haven't had pneumonia, but water was pretty helpful when I had whooping cough.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/09/150921133654.htm Millennials, Gen Y need to eat less, work out more to stave off obesity, researchers say The study results suggest that if you are 25, you'd have to eat even less and exercise more than those older This is based on self reports of exercise and calorie consumption, but I gather that so were the original studies.