We're semi-rigorous, or at least aspiring to a multum non multa sort of rigor; which is to say, we (try to) work hard and well at a few important things, but we definitely aren't doing all the things or taking all the time. At any rate, my 8th grader spends about 6 hours per day, 4 days a week, an hour of which is independent reading. The fifth day is music lesson day, and she spends about an hour on schoolwork that day. Piano practice (30 min) is part of the school day. Our school day runs from 9am-4pm, with an hour-long lunch from 12-1pm. My 8th grader's schedule looks broadly like this: 9:00-10:15ish: Independent work 10:15ish-12:00: Mom teaching time (math, Latin, and either writing or grammar) 12:00-1:00: Lunch 1:00-1:30: Piano practice 1:30-3:00: Independent work 3:00-4:00: Independent reading So she has 1.5-2hr of teaching time with me, 2.5-3hr of independent working time, 0.5hr of piano practice, and 1hr of independent reading, 4 days a week. She could definitely use more time to work, as she never gets everything done - there's always at least one subject undone that gets rolled over to the next day. (It's a combo of too much to do plus lolly-gagging.) When I first saw the problem, I'd figured that we'd reached the point where we needed to have regular "homework" - not because of wasting school time, but because at this level there's just too much to do to get it all done during the school day. But after talking with my sis, I've decided that just because ps students her age regularly have hours of hw doesn't mean I need to do the same. I mean, I'm hs'ing because I don't want to do things the ps way - and upon reflection, I *don't* think it's good for school to spill over into non-school hours like that. Last year, I'd already made the choice to not let school work spill over into independent reading time - at 3:00, school work is put away, finished or unfinished, and quiet reading time begins. It prevents written school work from taking over reading time, which imo is important in general, but is extra important for us, since we hit so many content subjects through independent reading. And I found that it makes for a much better end to the school day; it gives everyone a chance to relax and decompress before afternoon activities or chores, and my kids really needed that. I'm thinking that something similar applies here: that the things that happen outside of school are important, too, and so non-school time needs to be protected as much as school time needs to be protected. And overall, I do think we are making good progress on school - I think we are doing fine.

I haven't been paying attention to what's going on when I log in (although I have had to login on all my devices in the past few days), but I checked and one of my security extensions lists "madebytribe.com" as a site that wants to run a script on this page. (It, like the twelve other sites wanting to run scripts here that I haven't approved, is blocked on my desktop; I'll have to pay attention on my tablet to see what's happening there.)

Try bookfinder - it searches several booksellers at once. Scanning the results, I saw some copies for under $20. (I remember when I bought my copy, it took some looking before I could find an affordable used copy - they seem to be getting scarcer every year - they aren't everywhere anymore, not like they used to be in the early 2010s.)

Don't have any experience with those specific curricula, but I do have two lefties. As far as it goes, the number one thing that helped me teach them handwriting was making the effort to write with my left hand (I'm a rightie). Nothing makes the nuts and bolts of writing left-handed clearer than to pick up a pencil in your left hand and try it out yourself. (Idk about you, but the how-to-position-your-page instructions always made no sense to me - I had to actually pick up the pencil left-handed and move the paper around till my slant looked right before it made sense.) Plus it made demonstrating and troubleshooting problems for the kids much easier when I used my left hand just like they were, even though I'm no better than semi-adequate writing left-handed. (Was an interesting experience, having to consciously pay attention to letter formation - helped me explain techniques for trickier letters better, when I had to figure out how to prevent *myself* from writing them mirror-image.) I'm not necessarily proud of this, but I used no program to teach printing. Just lots of copywork. I demonstrated a cursive-friendly letter formation (aka the one that cursive-writing me found most natural), but didn't force it. There was plenty of bottom-up and right-to-left letter and number formation from all three, but especially the lefties. (I actually didn't teach letter formation to my youngest lefty - he learnt at preschool - and he's the most idiosyncratic of the lot.) I used Smithhand to teach cursive (because I liked the stroke focus and the appearance), and the process of learning cursive did wonders for my oldest lefty's handwriting, printing as well as cursive. I didn't need to modify anything but paper slant (and tbh I didn't worry overmuch about that). My oldest lefty ended up naturally writing the meant-to-be-slanted cursive straight up-and-down, and it hasn't been a problem - it looks good and writes fine. I did make the kids always use "school pencils" that encouraged a tripod hold during school, and I corrected their grip as much as possible. And I did watch out for if my lefties started "hooking" their hand, and corrected it right away. Honestly, teaching my lefties has gone about the same as teaching my righty. I stressed about handwriting too - a main reason why I never actually *taught* print (hello, procrastination, my old friend) - and, idk, between casual corrections and putting a fair bit of work into cursive (I used cursive as part of phonics reinforcement), it so far seems to have worked out well enough despite my haphazard approach. Unless your dd turns out to have some kind of writing issue, I expect any decent-ish handwriting program, done with decent-ish attention, will work just fine.

I second Dolciani. After a brief try at AOPS Pre-Alg that was too intense for us, we went to Dolciani and that's been great. It does a review of arithmetic from first principles, showing how everything builds up and fits together, which was exactly what oldest dd needed. It introduces the idea of proof without putting it front and center.

I'm going with very individual. My kids all have/had difficulties with decoding. With my oldest, decoding actually lagged behind reading comprehension - she was a whole language poster child, naturally using picture clues and context clues and grammar clues to bolster and work around her weak decoding. With my middle, I think decoding and comprehension went more or less hand-in-hand, although I think her reading comprehension lagged behind her decoding, while her decoding lagged behind her oral comprehension. For a while, after decoding was solid (except for decoding unfamiliar multi-syllable words, which we were working on explicitly), she wouldn't read anything unfamiliar, while she *would* read fairly high-level books that she was very familiar with, from read-alouds and audiobooks. Youngest is still learning to decode, but his oral comprehension (with read-alouds and audiobooks) is quite good. In general I'd say his (fledgling) reading comprehension is more-or-less in line with his (fledgling) decoding skills, in that he understands what his readers are saying. One thing I did notice with my younger two, wrt decoding and comprehension, is that they both try to decode first, understand second (while my oldest tried to comprehend without decoding if at all possible). And so they found individual words easier to read than connected text (unlike oldest, who was the opposite - the more context, the easier to guess and thus avoid decoding). Which meant there was/is a decent period of time where their connected-text reading stamina lagged/is-lagging behind their individual word decoding. And therefore their reading comprehension lagged behind their decoding. (Although I thought of it in terms of their connected-text decoding stamina lagging behind, since in general decoding was harder than comprehension for my kids.) That said, not one of my kids was reading in Oct of 1st grade. End of first for oldest, end of second for middle, and I'm hoping for end of second with my red-shirted youngest.

If you took out painters - "I think that (we, us) need help" - then I would intuitively pick we - "I think that *we* need help", not "I think that *us* needs help." Thinking it through, I think that the "that" is key - it's introducing a clause. So "(we,us) painters" is the subject of the that-clause, so it's in the nominative case.

I will say, our garage is still full-ish of random crap, and it does bug me. We have it useable-ish, in that we can now get to everything we need to get to, plus have a decent walking path from the door to the house to the car in the driveway, and (with five minutes of moving) can get one car in the garage in case of hail-storm. But it needs a really good sweeping, and it can't get that while there's all the crap in the corners - crap that I'm scared to touch for fear of black widows. So I've just left it for dh, who occasionally puts on gloves and tackles a spot - so there's incremental improvement. And it's at a level now that I can live with - it was a really milestone for me when that happened. So I guess vote for pitching everything it takes to get it liveable enough. Maybe toss all the cardboard and rearrange - see if you can live with the clothes bags for a while or not.

We did just throw out most of our cardboard boxes. There is no recycling here at all (which is so weird to me, even after a year here we still maintain our dedicated "paper trash" can, even though it just goes into the big trash can with the rest in the end). I hate throwing out good boxes, but when we found a black widow (!) in the packing material in the garage - well, that was a great impetus to just chucking it. (God help me, I moved to a place where it is *normal* to find black widows in one's garage every so often :svengo:. Everyone I told that story to just nodded their heads and said, "Yup, that happens sometimes.") I saved the 15 or so best boxes, breaking them down and storing them in the attic, and let dh throw out the rest (wearing gloves to handle them!). ETA: WRT old clothes, idk if this is a great thing to do, but what I would likely actually do: if there was ever a chance I'd end up in one of the towns with a donation place, I'd save the clothes and take them with me whenever I ended up going. I don't have as many old clothes as you do right now, but what we do is just save them till our church's rummage sale (once or twice a year) or till we go see out-of-state relatives (once a year). Not sure that's the greatest option (and we can't even keep them in the garage (bugs!)), but that's what I do. The "collecting for rummage sale" old clothes bag is on the dog crate in my bedroom , and that's where they live in near-perpetuity.

We've used them (Black & Decker model 310), to good effect. We had mice in our basement up north, and my parents (who'd used them) got us four packs (of three), and we put them all over the house. They seemed to work, in that we had no more signs of mice for the rest of the time we lived there (at least 3-4 years). We put them up in our new house, and haven't had any mice problems, even though we are by the woods. They haven't bothered the dogs at all. Things my parents noticed: some brands have an audible (to humans) hum. The Black & Decker ones were the second or third ones they tried. Even then, one or two of the B&D ones were audible - we either returned them or didn't use them or used them in the garage or some other out-of-the-way place.

This.

Honestly, I think this is your answer - you've used it, you like it, you're currently using it, and it's presumably working - you're probably better off resisting the "grass is greener" syndrome. My oldest did *not* get fractions, so I have tried several things: LoF, MM, MUS, and Keys. Of those, MUS was probably the most helpful - all the manipulative work provided a concrete conceptual base - but that might be overkill if he already basically gets fractions. The best part of MUS was the fraction overlays, and they only wanted to use them when they needed them to understand the problem; once they understood what was going on, they quit using them. What ended up working best for us, in cementing fraction understanding, was going through the fraction chapters in our pre-alg program (Dolciani). So maybe keep that in mind in choosing a pre-alg program, to get one that hits fractions thoroughly and well, for extra fraction reinforcement. But as for right now, in your shoes I'd still continue on with Keys to Fractions as long as it is working.

A woman in my church actually witnessed someone do just that last week (in Houston). She was on the phone with her boss when she watched someone use bolt cutters on a chain securing a giant leaf blower, realized what was going on, and started yelling to get the yard guys' attention.

So he gets the sounds right, but the spellings wrong? If his ears are good (getting all the sounds right) but his visual memory is bad (picking the wrong spelling for the sounds), SYS isn't a bad choice. From Level C upward its focus is on improving visual memory of words. I especially like its color-coded marking system. It might be insufficient, though. Why do you think SYS might not be the best choice for him? Is he balking at it, or doing badly on the dictations, or doing well on the dictations but with no noticeable improvement in his regular writing? WRT doing badly in dictation, fwiw, it's taken both of my dds five or six weeks in SYS before they started showing improvement on them. Or do you think he might do better with a more systematic program, one that explicitly explains some of the hows and whys of spelling?

Something I just learned - you can highlight the section of a post that you want to quote and a little "Quote Selection" button appears right at the end of it. Click on it, and it will add the quoted selection to wherever your cursor is. That's the easiest way to work with quoting little bits of posts, especially lots of little bits and/or from lots of posts. If you want to quote several posts, you can hit the little plus sign that's to the left of the "Quote" link at the end of every post - it's the multi-quote function - and it will add the post to a multi-quote queue, in the order that you add them. When you've added all the posts you want to reply to, hit the little "multi-quote" button that appears at the bottom right of the screen. Once you've quoted a post, and it appears in your reply window, you can delete parts of the post(s) if you want to - just highlight the bits you want gone and hit delete. Does that help any? That sounds like a lot of different ways - a well-done version of spelling-list spelling. So I can see why you're looking for alternatives to a spelling-list approach. Either a rules program or a morphograph/morpheme program would provide some explicit, organizing-the-parts-into-a-big-picture guidance to aid his eyes and ears in spelling. A decent phonetic awareness is *great*, but I agree with you that English spelling takes a decent visual memory for words, too. Not so much that you are using visual memory *instead* of phonics, but that you are using that visual memory to *supplement* and *guide* your phonics. Good ears are *such* a huge help in spelling - you always want to use them as much as possible. But, yeah, good ears alone are insufficient in English. And it sounds like time alone isn't enough to teach him to develop his visual memory for words. A rules program uses rules to help guide and aid the memory; a pattern-based program uses linguistic patterns to help guide and aid the memory; a morphograph- or morpheme-based program uses meaning to help guide and aid the memory. Any program for struggling spellers will use a *lot* of repetition of its memory aids. I have not used Apples & Pears spelling, but it is supposed to be very good for kids who need a *lot* of guided repetition to build up their visual memory for words. On the program site, you can view samples of the whole program (click on the "Look Inside" button for whichever book you want to see), as well as placement tests. Another program, that has a strong auditory component - so might play to his strengths - is Phonetic Zoo. WRTR/SWR has a "think-to-spell" technique, for words where a vowel sound is indistinct, where it turns into a nondescript sort of schwa sound. When you learn the word, you emphasize what the vowel sound *ought* to be - so /DEE-scrip-shun/ - like how you'd say the word if you were giving special, extra-precise attention and emphasis - to help you remember how to spell it. Because English schwa's a ton of vowels in unaccented syllables, and you want your ears to be able to give your eyes as much help as possible. Especially for someone like your son, whose ears are stronger than his eyes when it comes to spelling. My middle does that a lot, too. While some dialects clearly distinguish between the /w/ sound and the /hw/ sound (usually spelled with "wh"), ours does not. (It was a revelation to me when I first heard a dialect that *did* clearly enunciate them as separate sounds.) In our dialect, both "w" and "wh" words are pronounced with a /w/ sound. This poses a problem for spelling, since without the sound cues, there's no apparent logic as to why one versus the other. I explained the dialect issue to her - so she understood that there *is* a clear phonetic logic to it - and why that logic has been obscured for her. And I've been doing the "think-to-spell" technique with her. When learning to spell "wh" words, we practice saying them with a clear, even exaggerated /hw/ sound. It gives her a sound peg to hang her visual memory of the spelling on.

I have a 70s Dolciani Modern Algebra, plus 60s teacher's editions of Modern Geometry, Algebra with Trig, and Introductory Analysis (aka pre-calc) from my grandpa. He was a high school math and science teacher, and not only did he teach from original Dolcianis, he was the person responsible for bringing New Math to his school. I was so chuffed to see those Dolcianis on his shelf! (He'd had an Algebra 1 book, too, but he'd lent it to my cousin and she unfortunately lost it :sigh.)

I have been really impressed with the Dolciani Pre-Algebra.

FWIW, as the mother of spellers who have/had struggled, a 6th grader getting that close on a three-syllable word - phonetically correct and just one letter off - in my possibly-skewed opinion, that's not too bad, in the scheme of things :shrug. I think my oldest was at least two or three spelling milestones in before she was spelling that good :lol. (I semi-joke with her (now that she's a fairly decent speller) that her first spelling milestone was going from truly horrid spelling to garden-variety bad speller :lol. It's sort of a joke, but also not - it was a real achievement, and one I celebrated in my head.) Is he just missing words like that - multi-syllable words - or is he also missing phonetically irregular shorter words, or other common, easy-seeming words? (For example, my 5th grader often misspells "whith" for with, although the correct spelling's starting to sink in.) What sorts of things do you do to study the words and learn them? A rules program might well be a very good thing for him. In addition to AAS, there's also Writing Road to Reading (WRTR), Spelling to Write and Read (SWR), and Logic of English (LOE), all of which are rule-based. ~*~ Two programs that we've used that might be helpful are Spelling You See (SYS) and Spelling Through Morphographs (StM). Spelling You See is based on copywork and dictation, is very open-and-go, and has a really nice visual word-marking system. My oldest didn't really pay attention to the insides of words until we did SYS, and marking the words kind of opened her eyes to the details of words. My middle has just needed some consistent in-context practice, and it has provided that nicely. (For both girls, it took till about week 5 or 6 for them to start showing improvement.) It could be a nice complement to a rules-based program. Spelling Through Morphographs is based on, well, spelling by morphographs ;). Spelling by morphographs means spelling by breaking words into chunks of meaning; e.g. "spelling = spell + ing", "refreshing" = "re + fresh + ing", "inconceivable" = "in + con + ceive + able", "description" = "de + script +ion". You learn prefixes, bases, and suffixes separately, then practice building up words from morphographs and breaking apart words into morphographs. My 8th grader is just finishing, while my 5th grader is just starting. It did wonders for my oldest's spelling - she had several leaps during the program, and now finds it quite easy, and spells most things correctly in her writing (averages maybe one misspelled word per page). And I feel like it kind of taught me how to teach spelling. (They use lots of oral spelling and lots of review, among other things.) Unfortunately StM can be hard to find - it's a school program and is quite expensive new. I bought an older edition on the used market several years ago, but recently a poster here was having trouble finding one of the necessary components. (ETA: Just looked it up, and the book she couldn't find, Teacher Presentation Book 2, is now available quite inexpensively, and the one that was easy to find then, Teacher Presentation Book 1, is over $100. What'd you need to do it are those two presentation books plus a Student Workbook (about $10-$15).) Another morphograph program that is well-recommended - and easier to find - is Megawords. From reading reviews, they cover similar ground. A morphograph-based program could be a good follow-up to a rules-based program, or a replacement for. And like a previous poster, both my girls also do TTRS - last year they finished about 1/3 of the program, and we are continuing this year. I don't know how much it is helping with their spelling, but I can definitely tell when we hit a weak area in their spelling - typing goes from easy to wailing-and-gnashing-of-teeth hard.

FWIW, with two or three failed spelling programs behind you, I'd probably do a both/and: an explicit spelling program *and* copywork. An explicit spelling program to learn how to learn to spell, and copywork to practice spelling in context. Being able to spell by sound is actually a really good, necessary foundation for spelling. (I had to work really hard with my kids to teach them to spell by sound.) In some languages, spelling by sound would get you all the way there, but sadly, in English we have to work harder ;). Is he accurate in spelling by sound? I mean, does he accurately break the words into the correct sounds in the correct order, and choose a phonetically correct phonogram for each sound. Not that he picks the *right* phonetically-correct phonogram, but that whatever phonograms he picks actually do spell the sound he was trying to spell, if not the right one for this word. Things like "braik" for brake, "bred" for "bread", "littl" or "littul" for little - phonetically correct options, but not the *right* phonetically correct option. Because if he's hearing words accurately, and spelling them in phonetically-correct (if not dictionary-correct) ways, that's a very good thing. It may be that a rules-based program isn't a good fit for him. (I personally didn't understand spelling rules until my second time through our phonetic-pattern-based phonics program, when I noticed the pattern, put the pattern into words to explain it, and then realized I'd just made a spelling rule.) Although Sequential Spelling is pattern-based, and you said that was a disaster. What went wrong with it? What kind of easy words, specifically? Short words? Common words? Phonetically-regular words?

UPDATE: God willing, I think we might have solved the fraction problem! In a ridiculously anti-climatic way, though, which is somewhat disconcerting considering the years of frustration, but I'll take it ;). I'm cautiously optimistic that it's for real and will stick. We're doing Dolciani Pre-Alg (1970), and went through the two fraction chapters (one on the nature of fractions and the next on fraction calculations) with great care and attention (on my part), and a miracle occurred! Somehow, in the first few sections of the nature of fractions chapter, whatever her missing piece was got filled in, and it was clear sailing through both chapters :jawdrop. I was all geared up, when we started the first fraction chapter, for major weeping-and-gnashing-of-teeth trouble, but somehow it made sense to her this time. I know a significant part of her problem was how she thought the rules of math changed with fractions - that everything she'd learned in arithmetic suddenly did not apply with fractions. I talked a lot about how fractions/rational-numbers just expanded the rules, not changed them, and how the expanded rules worked for the whole numbers she already knew, too. And Dolciani's presentation was right in line with that, and spent a lot of time building up "what a fraction is" before moving to calculating with fractions. And I liked how they did fraction division - explicitly multiplying by the reciprocal every time, never introducing the "short-cut" of flip and multiply. And somewhere in there she finally made sense of why multiplying by a fraction can result in a smaller number, not a bigger one. (She'd previously had the flawed intuition that the nature of multiplication was to make things bigger, while the nature of division was to make things smaller, and fraction multiplication went against that.) In any case, the pre-alg fraction chapters did just what they were supposed to do: consolidate understanding of fractions, fill in any holes and give a more solid, more accurate, conceptual foundation. It's by far the most successful fraction experience we've had :).

"The subject does the action" guideline only applies with active voice. With passive voice, the subject is *not* the actor - in fact, this website says that what makes active voice active is that the subject is doing the acting. Likewise, what makes passive voice passive is the very fact that the subject is being *acted upon* by the verb - the subject is *passive*, not active. So in "The youth is chosen to be a leader of the soldiers", youth *is* the subject even though youth isn't the actor - being in passive voice turns things around, makes the subject the one acted upon by the verb, not the doer of the verb. The whole how to reconcile "subject does the verb" rule with passive voice really confused me, too. Hope this helps.

FWIW, ime serious depression itself is more than sufficient to make someone unable/unwilling to work through animal ownership issues. Once dh and I were out of school and had a more permanent home, we got a dog, as we'd planned to do, because dh is a huge dog person and always lived with dogs. I was pretty much non-functional with depression, and that plus a new dog was a really horrible combination. Even though dh was 100% in charge of dog care and dog training, I was still the person home with the dog and so needed to be able to do at least some minimal dog care - but I couldn't. (We muddled through somehow, but it was a lot of work on dh's part.) Now, I was utterly not a dog person - presumably unlike your DIL - but even if I was a dog person, I would have been in no shape to be primary on dog care. At one point when I was depressed, before dh and I married, I desperately wanted a cat - I was lonely (dh was at school out of state and I had no roommate) and wanted the companionship so badly. The only reason I didn't was that I was in the dorms and animals weren't allowed, and I wasn't quite willing to sneak one in. But in retrospect, knowing how badly non-primary dog care went while depressed, a cat would have been a disaster - there is no way I would have been able to manage caring for one, as depressed as I was.

Spelling has been a challenge at our house. No approach to spelling - spelling by sound, spelling by sight, spelling by morphographs - came naturally or automatically. (Threw me off, as I'm a natural speller.) So I hit each area in turn: I started with phonetic-pattern-based spelling by sound, using our phonics book, followed by SYS for spelling by sight, followed by Spelling Through Morphographs for, well, spelling by morphographs ;). (Spelling by morphographs means spelling by breaking words into chunks of meaning; e.g. "spelling = spell + ing", "refreshing" = "re + fresh + ing", "inconceivable" = "in + con + ceive + able".) IOW, first we work on breaking words into phonemes and building words from phonemes (analyzing words by sound, plus applying phonics knowledge to spelling), then we work on visually breaking words into phonograms and learning which phonetically-correct phonogram to choose, and then we work on breaking words into morphographs, into chunks of meaning, and building up words from morphographs. ~*~ What kinds of mistakes is he making? Mistakes in spelling by sound, such as dropping sounds, adding sounds, mixing up the order of sounds, mistaking one sound for another? Mistakes in applying phonics knowledge, so that he can correctly break the words into phonemes, but then chooses a spelling that is never used with that phoneme? Mistakes in spelling by sight, namely choosing a phonogram that *does* spell that sound in general, but isn't the phonogram used in this word, such as "braik" for break/brake. Mistakes in long, multi-syllable words? Different programs target different areas of spelling. (Learning from copying tends to hit the visual areas of spelling, and the later levels of SYS (Level C and up) also focus on spelling by sight, but do touch a bit on morphographs.) So it helps to consider what sorts of problems he's having, so you can match the program to your specific needs.

Fwiw, though the cursive program we used slanted (Smithhand), my dds naturally didn't slant and I didn't make a thing of it (cursive was hard enough) and it wasn't a problem - they ended up with a nice-looking, legible and practical cursive hand. I mean, if you otherwise like the program and it is otherwise going well - your dc's non-slanted cursive looks legible enough and they aren't having difficulties with learning a non-slanted cursive from slanted teaching - I'd think you could just ignore the slant but otherwise go on with the program you have.

I keep a full bookcase shelf reserved for library books - it's our "library shelf". (Actually, we have two library shelves, one for kid books and one for my books.) All library books live on the library shelf. When the kids were littler, I was really strict about making sure all library books were put back immediately after use, but now that they are older (and unattended books don't tend to get lost under furniture anymore), we have a daily clean-up time and any library books laying around get put away then. I've found that having a dedicated library shelf works so much better than any other kind of library book spot - it's easier and more convenient get books out and put them back, and the books stay neater, plus it piggybacks on the same "book picking up and storing" habits they have for all other books. Eta: At your kids' ages, I picked up any unattended library book I saw and put it away immediately (or called for the relevant child to put it away while I watched). Waiting till evening clean-up time was too late. Whenever I saw them get up from reading library books, I reminded them to go put those books right away. But there was a lot of me just constantly grabbing unattended library books throughout the day, every time I saw one out.