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Serenade

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Posts posted by Serenade

  1. I'm in central NC, and I started peppers, tomatoes and eggplant today. The tray goes on a heat mat under grow lights, on the second floor where it is warmer. I've also started several things via the winter sowing method in milk jugs -- broccoli, lettuce, chard, and some frilly mustards. I've also started some flowers this way -- alyssum & ageratum.  I wanted to plan some cardinal flower seeds, but alas, they need cold stratification and I was too late.

    I'm currently harvesting broccoli that my DH and I babied through the winter, with DH even putting out a heat hose on some of the coldest nights and then putting sheets over it. The lowest we got this year was 13, and the broccoli pulled through just fine.  I also overwintered some lettuce, covering it when it got especially cold.  And I've got a large pot full of all-volunteer mache that is the result of letting some plants go to seed last year.  Mache is a total winter lettuce, I think it goes down to 5 degrees, and I never covered it at all.  It will go to seed as soon as it gets warm. Mache is not very common in the US, but it is very common in Europe, where it is also a weed!

    My plums are just starting to flower.  We only get plums every few years due to late frosts, but I have high hopes this year.  They are blooming two weeks later than usual, and the long range forecast is looking promising.  But I'm trying not to get my hopes up, because I could see us getting a deep freeze at the end of March.  It happens. 

    • Like 1
  2. 21 hours ago, Corraleno said:

     

    My biggest expenses involve having two kids in college, but they should both be finishing this summer and should be (mostly) self-supporting after that.

    This is a big one!  I'm waiting for that day, too, but it's still a couple of years out for me.  The cost of college is more than tuition, too -- it's the trips there and back, the other things college students need, etc.  There are so many hidden costs with college that really add up.

    • Like 2
  3. 7 hours ago, Roadrunner said:

    Why this would make a difference in increasing the number of female engineers continues to escape me. And why this would make no difference to men. 

    Yes.  Why would women need more flexibility in course options than men?

    Many engineering programs have specializations where the students have somewhat different courses the last two years, but the basic coursework is the same for all. At my son's engineering school, for example, students can choose a BSME, or a BSME with a motorsport concentration, or a BSME with a biomedical concentration, so that allows some flexibility. Many schools also have engineering technology degrees which don't focus on theory as much as the BS degrees, and these degrees also don't require as high a level of mathematics.  So there are usually plenty of options as it is. 

    • Like 1
  4. 5 hours ago, ieta_cassiopeia said:

    Possibly because there's evidence coming in that small changes to the situation makes a big difference. If the Open University study generalises, then something approaching half of the young women interested in engineering in high school could be getting lost simply because most engineering courses only allow one path through the core engineering modules, rather than offering a choice of modules that cover the same essential content. Even offering students the choice of learning essential topics through the context of different types of engineering (instead of cramming all of them into the same module and insisting students only take that one) might result in some improvement without causing the individual accreditation difficulties that can open up when making engineering a free-for-all degree.

    If it's possible to halve the number of female students lost to engineering by a relatively small change of curriculum format, then I would venture to suggest that the gender difference isn't as important as intuition might suggest. (It's also worth adding that there are simply many more university spaces in biological courses these days than engineering, to the point where despite the bias, there are also more young men pursuing biology than engineering. There are possible directions for this, some of which could feed into Roadrunner's suggestion. There is a lot we don't know about this subject and there may well turn out to be merit in the intuitive position, so nothing can be ruled out yet.

    Perhaps I'm not understanding what you are suggesting, but I'm not quite sure how the pathway through a particular engineering major could be significantly altered due to sequencing issues.  Engineering is so inflexible because so much builds on the previous courses and thus going out of sequence is not really possible. Maybe I'm missing something?

    • Like 2
  5. On 1/24/2024 at 8:12 AM, TechWife said:

    They are both young, still. 
    Is it possible that one or both have cataracts? I’ve lost count of the number of people who have told me that the first thing they did post cataract surgery was clean their house. 
     

    Just today I was talking with my mom, and she told me that one of the first things she noticed after having cataract surgery was how blue the sky really was!

    • Like 1
  6. 12 hours ago, Tap said:

     

    Seriously, I would never worry about it if I was less than one hour past.  

     

    This.

    I also think it would be worthwhile to look at the difference between check-out time and check-in time.  If there is a difference of a couple of hours (which is common), that's probably done purposefully so there is plenty of time between when one person checks out and the other checks in.

    • Like 1
  7. I turned 11 in 1974.  Breakfast could be any kind of cold cereal or maybe a hot one like grits or oatmeal.  Sometimes my mom would make a soft boiled egg for us, too.  Maybe we'd have a grapefruit on the side or banana in the cereal.  Lunch was pretty much always some kind of sandwich brought to school, along with a piece of fruit and a couple of cookies. We'd buy our milk at school, which was probably a dime when I was 11.  For supper it was likely that we'd have venison in some fashion (my dad was a hunter) along with a fresh vegetable or salad, and some kind of starch.  We usually had a small dessert after supper. (This was in the US, in the state of North Carolina.)

  8. 9 hours ago, wathe said:

    $50 around here would be a great deal!   We paid $100 for a very average tree.   

    Planting a bunch sounds like a great idea.

    That's what we paid,  too.  Trees were through the roof this year.  However, I noticed just a few days ago when I was out, that many lots still have plenty of trees, and one loaded lot was not even manned anymore. I'm guessing the trees were so overpriced that people did not buy them. Many people are switching to artificial due to the cost.  I'm not ready to go there yet.

  9. 20 hours ago, HomeAgain said:

    That is all.  I swear I'm going to flip my lid on these people!  Last night dh had to kindly tell ds24 that yelling at a video game after 10pm was not going to go over well.  This morning I woke to a dishwasher full of dirty dishes and more in the sink, because starting the machine is....hard??  And just now I had this conversation with a young adult standing in front of the fridge:

    "How old is the roast beef?"
    "There's a date on the package."
    "How old is the bologna?"
    "There's a date on the package."
    "Are there any more meatballs?"
    "I don't know.  Do you see any??"

    I am becoming exhausted with the lack of common sense from more than one person at one time.  And because it is Monday, and I get rare time to myself, I put on an episode of The Crown, only to have the current YA conversation that has now devolved into them sitting at the table watching Youtube at an unacceptable volume.

    Okay, bright spots:

    I have closed captioning on the tv. Win.

    The rain is calming.

    I finished making candy - maybe a win. Maybe an episode of "What's This?" while pointing to each one later.

     

    I feel so drained.  I'm an introvert anyway, and constant noise is grating. 

    Oh my goodness, thank you for posting this.  I have one who is really clueless about this sort of thing as well.  At least he is moving out in January.  I'm trying to repeatedly bite my tongue until then.  I hope I can make it these next 17 days without exploding.

    • Haha 1
  10. 33 minutes ago, PeterPan said:

    For the person in your life who really needs another shark book. By a guy who got his leg bitten off by a shark. Maybe not the shark in the pictures.

    https://www.amazon.com/Shark-Portraits-Mike-Coots/dp/0847873544/ref=sr_1_8?crid=3R2MM6TF5RMRV&keywords=shark+book&qid=1702948713&sprefix=shark+book%2Caps%2C106&sr=8-8&ufe=app_do%3Aamzn1.fos.17d9e15d-4e43-4581-b373-0e5c1a776d5d

    I would so buy that book if it weren't so expensive.  My 21 year old (yes, really) is getting an IKEA stuffed shark for Christmas, that he hinted about, and this book would be perfect to go with it.  But not at that price! Eek.

    • Like 2
  11. I inherited some land that was part of a larger family parcel quite some years ago.  The property was a 10 hour drive from where I lived, so basically I inherited a tax bill. In my case, I gave my portion to my brother before I ever officially owned it.  It was a pretty simple process -- I believe I wrote the lawyer a notarized letter saying that I refused my inheritance and wanted my portion to go to my brother instead.  That's all I had to do.  But this was almost 25 years ago, and I never had the deed to the property. (The property was not worth much -- it would have cost me more money and aggravation than the property was worth to hire a realtor and attempt to sell it, plus it would have been messy because it was part of an undivided family lot. It actually did end up getting messy in the end, when years later my brother decided to sell his portion, and the other relatives were very angry about that.)

  12. 12 hours ago, Hyacinth said:

    Yes! We set up a password book for my mom and last time I was there I saw she had all these 5- and 6-digit numbers scribbled all over one of the pages because “they keep changing my code.” To try and explain to her how and why multi-factor authentication works is beyond me. 

    Yes!  I kept telling my mom she didn't need to write the code down because it would change every time.  Glad she's not the only one. 🙂

  13. 3 hours ago, Hyacinth said:

    My poor mother is 83 and businesses are completely overlooking people like her. She had a simple phone for a while that had calling capabilities only. No texting, no internet, no camera. Try to multi factor authenticate with that!

    And companies have all these “scan this QR code” and “chat with this bot” options for so-called support, but where’s the “call this phone number and talk to an actual person?” 

    I guess they think enough people adapt easily enough to newer technologies and they can afford to lose the ones who don’t. 

    Oh my gosh, this.  So hard on the elderly.  My mom is 86, and I give her credit for trying, but she just can't do multi-factor authentication.  It confuses her every.single.time. She is always calling me because she thinks her account is messed up every time she has to do this.

    • Like 4
  14. This little tool is the single-most valuable gardening tool in my arsenal.  I bought one last Christmas for myself and also for my sister.  It really makes it easy to transplant small plants without disturbing the soil of others around them. And you can get the root from fairly deep down with little effort -- so much easier than with a garden trowel.  

    https://www.botanicalinterests.com/products/widger

     

    • Like 2
  15. I enjoyed a few of the Panera charged drinks this past summer with a meal. I had maybe two of them over the course of a several hour lunch with a friend, and I didn't especially notice any caffeine jolt. I didn't get nearly the jolt that I'd get if I drank two Panera coffees!  I was well aware of the fact that they were "charged" because it was posted on the drink machine.  Perhaps the fact that I drank them with a meal, over a good half-cup of ice, and sipped them slowly, helped me not to feel any particular caffeine jolt.  If somebody ordered them for take-out, and didn't fill the drink themselves, perhaps they wouldn't notice the sign that they were charged, but it was pretty obvious to me. 

    • Like 3
  16. 12 hours ago, Ali in OR said:

    I had my first crown put on when I was in college. I have a lot--maybe 6? I had large cavities filled when I was a kid and those teeth tend to break and need crowns. Anyway, I have not had to replace any of them and the oldest must be over 35 years old.

    My dentist now has equipment to make a crown in his office. I watched the machine last time I got a crown. The dentist makes a model on a computer designing all of the contours. The file gets sent to the machine and the material turns and is somehow ground into the designed shape (I think a diamond bit? can't remember). Very cool. No temp crown needed--all done in one visit.  My dental insurance over the years has usually paid half of the crown cost and even with that, yes, it's an expensive hit. But I like having teeth.

    My dentist makes the crowns in-office, too.  But it doesn't save me any money, just time!

    • Like 1
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