The mountains, forests, and quiet.

My oldest has been repeatedly exposed with the Army National Guard, and that's what we've done. The first time was potentially a major exposure (inside an Army vehicle for hours with no mask because it was so hot), and he actually isolated in a friend's basement because it was hard to truly isolate him here. He had a negative test after several got sick. The other times they were social distancing and masking. He had a negative test, but out of an abundance of caution, quarantined at home. We wore masks too, went out only when we had to, and fed him separately. He actually quit is gym job because gyms remain a bit of concern around here. They social distance primarily, but all that equipment! I don't know how they can possibly keep up. When I had P.T. this summer, there was an employee that constantly walked around cleaning after people left equipment. I used the weights and bands and was told to leave them on the bench so she could clean them and put them back. After I got up from the warm-up bike, she was right there cleaning it. The gym is not doing that, trust me. I've lost several family friends now and know others who have lost loved ones, and I just don't believe in taking chances.

Yes, every student I've had come to online office hours talks about how stressful it is right now. I had one this summer who had four people in the hospital at once with COVID, and he was trying to get his work done in the hospital parking lot. One came today and said that bluntly she doesn't do well with online classes.

Must be happening here too. I can't imagine proposing that to a professor, but I'm a boomer. I just graded more assignments in my "interesting" class, and fully half of the class is now failing. Tomorrow I dig into their project plans. The student who made up an assignment made up another one even though I told them not to do that. I gave them 10/100 which is what I give for almost no effort at all. I confronted another one who was not following the directions. What they did might have been cheating (hard to prove), so they also got 10/100 with a message from me that I showed mercy. If I see that again, it will be a zero. Now they are all repentant and claiming that their partner helped them without knowing what I expected. Whatever, the grade stands. I couldn't tell if they actually did the work or not with the way they did it.

Well, I just finished grading all four assignments from my "interesting" section. Seriously the worst group I've taught in twenty years.

Ignore.

My oldest is graduating from business school in December, and he had some people on group projects like that. I was helping him with his resume and suggested that he talk about his group project that he did in his capstone class, and he said he might not want to. He reminded me that he did about 80% of the work on the project and had to scramble and then put in long hours to get the final project whipped into shape. He got an "A" in the class, but suspected that the others did very poorly in the end. One class member never showed up for the group Zoom sessions and contributed nothing until they were preparing for the final presentation.

I teach web development and multimedia. The classes are based on creating progressively more complicated web pages and media. Both have weekly homework to create different web pages and media focusing on certain skills. Both classes develop parts of a project all semester that is graded at midterm as a draft and then final at the end. Both are freshman-level classes for information technology majors. This is a nationally-ranked community college with strong transfer agreements and guaranteed admission agreements. That said, I get all kinds of students. There is no average student. I get everything from students who live in their cars to students who went to pricey private schools K-12 and then flunked out of an Ivy that I suspect are very well off. I have 16 y.o. dual enrollment up to folks in their 70's who are retired and just doing it for fun. It's an inability to focus on very detailed information, an unwillingness to troubleshoot their own work, and an inability to follow instructions. As an example, instead of following the directions for uploading web pages on the college enterprise system and providing me with a URL for an HTML file via the Canvas assignment, they email me a shared Google link with Word files instead of HTML files on the enterprise system. My instructions give exactly how to use the enterprise system and how to put together an HTML file that will work in a browser. I was telling my daughter about the student who wanted to just summarize the chapters and then did their own thing on a web page after calling a professionally produced, five-minute Adobe video "boring and hard to follow." My daughter laughed and said, "That's a homeschooler." LOL.

I've taught a STEM field for over twenty years at the community college level, so I get a wide range of students. Some are thinking they want to major in my field because of the money, and it's really not their thing from my side of the gradebook. My classes that started in August have been fine. They really aren't any different from previous years and semesters. But oh, boy! I have one that started on Labor Day, and I predict that half of the class is either going to drop or fail. They just aren't getting it. I did notice this morning that eight had dropped out of thirty so far. I have several students who are way out there. One is supposedly a sophomore, but she emailed me yesterday to ask if the grade was based on summarizing the textbook chapters. This is a very hands-on, project-based class, which I pointed out. Then she said that she found the videos I linked to "boring and hard to follow," so she made up her own assignment. What? Others have been asking me questions like they aren't using the textbook and my instructions at all. I have another one that starts in October, so we shall see.

I teach online for a large community college and a private K-12 school. Both strongly discourage fill-in-the blank. Students should not be penalized for a space in the wrong place. My oldest (a graduating senior) said he had a fill-in-the blank quiz this week in college. When they had their weekly Zoom session, the student were livid, and the professor said she wouldn't do that again.

Excellent! It goes so very quickly. It will be twenty for me next summer. Not long ago, a homeschool mom I know asked me for curriculum recommendations for middle school writing curriculum. Gosh, other than IEW, I really don't know what's out there any more!

FWIW, one of mine has been exposed multiple times, and thus far has always tested negative. In one situation, he also had to take off his mask in close quarters for quite awhile, but in general he's very careful to mask and washing his hands. I was around a friend midweek at a distance in her house with no mask, and she got it four days later. To be sure, I self-isolated, but I didn't test (very poor health insurance at the time). So thankfully exposure doesn't always mean sickness. Not downplaying, but I think this is our new normal.

We rent a 1980's split level. I'm almost positive that the washer and dishwasher are either original or from the early 1990's. Both have some minor issues but are going strong. The dryer was the same age I'm guessing but had a catastrophic failure last fall. The landlord brought one from another rental house. It's not a very good dryer, but it works.

I've had it for some forty years. I use the NeilMed sinus rinse system, antihistimines, Symbacort, Floanase, and allergy shots. I use a CPAP which I think has had a positive effect because of the moisturized air from that. We are renting a carpeted house, and I know that it's not good for me because we had wood floors and a whole house filter in our previous house that we sold. Still, I haven't had near as much coughing as I did say 5-6 years ago. When I go into significant allergy situations, I take an additional antihistamine. When I worked in receiving at Macy's I always took one because it was moldy, and I take one now before church because they have black mold that wasn't properly treated in the basement. Even not going into the basement, it fires me up. When I have trouble sleeping because of the coughing, I take a cough suppressant.

Yes, I have something similar with my quilting supplies. I paid more than that but got it at Dick Blick.

One of mine was tested by the driving instructor, a nice man who was very picky nonetheless (fine with me). I didn't have the money for the driving instructor the second time, so I taught her myself. I had been encouraging her to go get tested because driving her several times a week to the college and elsewhere was getting really hard for me. Then one afternoon she decided this was it. She got an older lady who barked at me, barked at her, and then off they went. DD said she was strict but nice and complementary at the end. When they came back in, the lady said that I had taught my daughter well and that she had passed. DD said she was completely nice near the end. I guess it was all a show to get it done.

Yes, this is very interesting to me. My small church seems to go back-and-forth with how compliant they are with the indoor mask mandate. It wasn't good this Sunday at mine despite a sign on the door since June that masks are required per the state and multiple emails from the elders. There masks at the back of the church where the programs and such are. It will be good for a week or two, and then it isn't. As the morning goes on, people in that church tend to take off their masks. Now the speakers in the teaching hour no longer wear masks in a small building with poor air circulation. It's been that way for the last three weeks. At the college where I work, professors teaching live classes are behind a plexiglass shield and are wearing masks or shields. All students in live classes are supposed to wear masks or shields or have an accommodation letter on file. Same with the college my kids attend, but they are home because all of their classes are online this semester. My landlord came by yesterday to look at a tree that needs to come down and told me that their daughter's school is doing the same for their face-to-face classes. But not at my church. I have severe asthma and complained twice, but I'm just going to make the right choice for me and leave after the first service which is all front-facing and mostly masked. The elder who gave the announcements after the first service this morning talked about how COVID is just like a cold and how silly he thinks all of the mandates and such are. Well, I have several friends who still aren't feeling right after COVID and have lost several family friends from it who were older but otherwise healthy. I don't think it's "just a cold" at all, and my asthma doctor would agree. You just can't convince all of the people all of the time.

Gosh, you guys are cracking me up! Funny substitutions.

We're renting a 1980's house, and the landlord replaced the refrigerator when she bought the house because apparently it was on it's last leg. She bought small side-by-side that I truly hate. It's about the size of a smaller freezer-on-top refrigerator. The actual refrigerator compartment is about 15" wide, so no way can I get by with grocery shopping once a week. We are house-hunting and looking at newer houses, so it isn't worth it to me to buy a second refrigerator at this point. There are cabinets over the refrigerator that are very hard to get to. If I bought a house like this, I might look into just removing those cabinets and getting a taller refrigerator.

1. Up until we were getting ready to ship the remains, I had no contact with the VA. Everything was handled by the funeral home. Then the funeral director gave me a number to call at the actual national cemetery, and I made a phone appointment with a case officer. During the phone call, he took down all of my information and gave me a rough estimate as to when the actual funeral would be, depending on demand and when they received the remains. The only way I could have done it was with a coast-to-coast red eye each way, and I decided to not do that. The only other relative could not travel either, and none of his friends could come because of health issues and/or distance. 2. The case officer called me back when they had the remains and were going to set a service date and time. At that time he took down what I wanted on the headstone. Then he emailed it back to me and asked me to confirm. The front is standardized, but they allow something customized on the back. Since I couldn't come, they did a just a burial. Their volunteer organization makes sure that someone always attends a burial if no one else can be there. She took pictures that she emailed me both of the service, and then later when the stone went up. 3. I don't remember if there was a deadline, but I didn't do that until some months later. The case officer emailed me the information. This was five years ago this week, so maybe they changed it. It was a really good experience. We had some legal and financial issues, so he didn't get buried until over six weeks after he died. I felt good about that choice because the VA takes such good care of their cemeteries. We went out almost a year later and bought flowers and then visited the grave site. I was glad that we could do that.

Only twice called up. Once I had a breastfed newborn and just faxed them a letter from my pediatrician. The next time we were homeschooling, but they were too young to be left alone all day. I wrote a letter and faxed it with my homeschooling paperwork filed with the county. That did it. But that's been over a decade ago, and nothing since.

Yes, a good friend has been here for years and is undocumented. She married a citizen several years ago, and they got a lawyer and just had their interview. She debated for a long time, but decided that making it legal was important to her. The lawyer was very encouraging because they dated for several years and are financially in a good place. She's in her late 50's.

Yes. We had to find his discharge papers because he was a Viet Nam Vet (limited electronic records), and then the funeral home handled it from there. I only paid for handling, cremation, and then transport to the national cemetery. The VA handled the rest. The one disadvantage is that the actual burial is at their convenience. There were some delays for various reasons, and it came at a time when I truly could not go (many states away). However, I did get pictures from a local volunteer group that provides various kinds of help for the families.

Yes, it's hit-or-miss here too. I found that the weekend crew is worse than the M-F crew. Morning is better than afternoon. They're all young with the exception of one older guy that was there even when I was ordering from them two years ago. He seems to be in charge now.

It depends on the market in your area. I teach information technology at a local community college and was in job-hunting mode for over a year. There's a subtle age bias in tech that is a major issue in some markets. It seems as though they prefer recent grads in the related fields. In my area, it used to be that certification in certain areas was all you needed, but increasingly you need a tech degree as well. That is currently not true in cybersecurity where people with the certifications are doing well, period. It would be good to look at local job ads for programmers to see what they want. I actually do this as a graded assignment for one of my classes.