Ditto everything.

There exist situations in life in which it's in the best interest of a group's dynamics for members of the group to interact with each of the other members in basically the same way. I might not like a particular coworker, for instance, but I would interact the same way with them as I would with the others, not because I enjoy being duplicitous but because to make my dislike apparent would make everyone uncomfortable, and accomplish nothing. I wouldn't pretend that person was a close friend, but my manner towards them would be indistinguishable from my manner toward another coworker that I did like. I wouldn't invite just that person to dinner, but if I were having the group over I world include them. I would appear to like that person just fine. And so I do not assume anyone likes me. Neither do I assume they dislike me, and none of this makes me uncomfortable in social situations.

My requirements: 1) Either unscented, or with a scent that disappears *entirely* within minutes. I'm very picky about this--I wear good perfume, and it doesn't need competition from my body lotion. So save your keystrokes if you're thinking of saying ''It has a little scent, but it's really nice!'' about something. ;) 2) Very fast-absorbing. I shouldn't have to wait more than three minutes between lotioning and getting dressed. 3) Spreads easily. 4) On the very high end of the moisturizing scale. This one tends to conflict with #s 2 and 3. Not required, but very much hoped-for: can be applied to wet skin before toweling off, without losing much effectiveness. I currently do this with almond oil, but it's not as moisturizing as I'd like. Yes, I'm sure that toweling some of it off reduces some of the moisturizing effect. I've just bought Curel's Intensive Healing one, but it was hard to spread and slowed me down getting dressed afterward (I think it's better suited to small areas than to the entire body). The Lubriderm Daily Moisture one looks like it could be good? I might well be looking for a unicorn, but I thought I'd see if the Hive might know where to find one anyway.

It was going to be either Tom or the car guy, and soon as Mary called Tom her ''brother'' at the beginning of this episode, I told my husband the car guy should show soon. I think it was about 4 minutes? Yeah. So clearly, Lord Grantham is going to die of something that could have been prevented by one of the new and modern medical advances that his mother is preventing arriving at the village hospital. Perhaps Daisy and Andy will get together and be a happy family with Mr. Mason?

I have a Zip, and it doesn't have a charging feature, so I can't answer this question, I hope someone can!

Are you sure it's dead, and doesn't just need a new battery?

If you're taking two or three days to get through a section( lesson problems in the grey boxes and the exercises), you're doing great. My daughter's taking it online from AoPS directly, and they cover 2-3 sections a week, typically, but only two a week in Chapter 2, with an expectation of 4-7 hours spent. They split the book into two 16-week courses, so if you're fine with spending longer than 32 weeks on pre-a (as it sounds like you are), then you're in wonderful shape. It's good that your daughter wants to read the solution to lesson problems after working one and before working the next--that's what she's supposed to do! Sometimes more than one solution is given, and there's value in seeing why different solutions work. The errors are annoying, but not disastrous, as long as she can find them herself and fix them. I think some of it is the age, and some is just experience with multi-step problems, which students don't often have much of prior to pre-a (again, any pre-a program). With age and experience, that should sort itself out. Something I did with my son when he was in Chapter 2 last year was to work the lesson problems together, then have him the corresponding topics in Alcumus to build some confidence, then do the exercises (not all in one day!). And it was Chapter 2 that made me realize we could and should move on without complete mastery, that he'd keep getting experience with exponents because they're everywhere. If you'd said that she hated the program, I'd have given a totally different answer.

Since a budget wasn't specified and several inexpensive options have been made already: Mason Pearson brushes are truly wonderful.

This is only sort of related, but I'm a grad student and the teacher of record in an algebra class at my university, and we had only a five-hour orientation that focused entirely on administrative details before we started teaching. We also have a one-hour class on teaching once a week, so by the time I've finished teaching my first quarter, I'll have received a whopping ten hours of instruction on how to teach. And even then, it turns out that the one-hour class once a week is also mostly focused on administrative details. It happens that I have the experience of teaching this material to just my own kids, but none of the other new teachers had even that. Our students will be expelled from the university if they don't pass our classes, and these are almost exclusively under-privileged first-generation college students. I feel the weight of 25 futures and their effects on their communities upon me, and I think these students deserved much better than what they received (i.e., us).

My DS10 is in the class now, and it's a good challenge. The biggest challenge, actually, isn't so much the content but the time management to handle the workload. The quizzes vary rather wildly in length, so he's learning to check to the quiz early in the week and budget time for it (I say ''learning,'' present tense, because he hasn't totally mastered that yet). He also ran out of time to submit a good rough draft of his first essay, and his essay score reflected that. They're allowed to resubmit for up to one letter grade's improvement, and he's doing that. He has plenty of room to grow in this class, which is what I wanted.

What do you mean to refer to a ''unit'' in AoPS? Do you mean section, like Chapter 2, section 3, for example? If so, one of the most common recommendations I've seen is that teacher and student do the lesson problems (in the grey boxes) together one day, and then the student does the exercise problems another day, mostly without help. It sounds like the biggest problem is the little errors, and I'm not sure I understand why the thought is that switching programs could help with that. All of the errors you mentioned would come up in any pre-a program, not just AoPS. If she's doing well with the concepts and likes the program, I'd stick with it. In Chapter 2, I had my son do Khan Academy problems as well as Alcumus and the AoPS text just to get extra practice. It's okay to move on without total mastery, too, because exponents will be revisited over and over. I've found that when they see the same thing many times over a period of weeks and months and in different contexts, it cements in their minds.

It certainly can be. I see ''So-and-So liked/commented on this post'' all the time. It can also happen if you like/comment upon a post on someone's personal page, if their privacy for that post is set to ''Public''. ETA: I don't have the ticker on the right enabled, and I see such posts directly in my newsfeed.

I'm sure you've had this suggestion before, but have you (re?)considered working through AoPS Geometry on your own? They're not big on memorization, as you know, and go beyond what's typically taught in high schools, so it should be a good fit and not a waste of your time. Regarding the differences in texts: in general, math texts on a subject will all cover certain obviously important topics (like volumes of solids), and then choose which special topics to cover, and there can be a big range of those, but one set of special topics isn't necessarily better than another. It's like taking a cooking class that starts with basics--probably covered in every cooking class--and then you practice and expand those basic skills by actually cooking, and the recipes would vary from to class to class. One class might make typically American food and another typically British, but the point isn't the particular recipes or where they're most popular; the point is to practice making food, and perhaps especially to start to get an intuitive sense of why two recipes with nearly identical ingredients in different ratios produce totally different results. Once you have that intuition, you can think about a similar food that you don't have a recipe for, and figure out what the recipe must be. Similarly, it doesn't matter which shapes or solids your text focuses on, as long as you really get the intuition that volume is area*height, for instance, and then you can apply that concept to whatever solid is in front of you. So you're absolutely correct: beyond the universal basics, there actually isn't agreement on what should be covered. Feel free to choose a text whose special topics particularly appeal to you, like choosing a cooking class with an emphasis on Indian food, if that's your thing (as it is mine), and to pass over the one whose emphasis is on 567 ways to make tofu not really taste like (fill in the blank).

Because they're not American. It would have been strange if he had kissed her in church, given the context. I do like like Mary and Tom together, sappy as it is. They're not doing poor Daisy any justice so far this season, though it does look like she's going to get the teacher post. So--bets on which of the Bates couple is going to get killed off now that Anna's probably having a baby? No one's allowed a baby on this show without one of the parents dying.

This. ''Children's'' classics are often stealthily difficult, due to the slightly old-fashioned language and sentence structure (I say ''Children's'' because I don't actually think such good books should be cheapened by qualifiers). Choosing with an eye toward variety of vocabulary and style is an excellent strategy.

This exactly. My son started AoPS Pre-A after BA 4B, because it was going to be another five months before 4C would be published. He did fine, though it would have been even smoother if we'd had all of BA 4 available. I covered some BA 4 topics like integers, fraction operations, and decimals with Khan Academy and MM, but having now gone through all of BA 4 with my daughter, BA does it better than Khan and MM. I'd feel free to breeze through BA 4 and go on to Pre-A (which is what my daughter did), but I wouldn't skip BA 4 altogether. My daughter also worked through parts of Mathematics: A Human Endeavor, while waiting for BA 4D to be published. I let her choose topics, and she particularly enjoyed the ones on graph theory and Fibonacci. The book is full of wonderful topics that aren't typically covered by K-12 curriculum.

Graph theory was one of my favorite classes ever. Her first class went well today, though she was a little dismayed by how easy it was (just proving things commutativity/associativity/distributivity/multiplication by negatives), but I told her it's going to get much harder quickly. She's a slow typist, so I typed for her (and didn't correct the one or two mistakes she made). We'll see how it goes! I'm in grad school and really need to outsource as much as possible, so I hope this works for her.

What does your son think? I don't have a 13 year-old yet, but I was one once, and for me at that age, buy-in and ownership of my workload was absolutely essential. Could you talk to him about your concerns, and together come up with some ideas to make things work better? I know that sometimes parents just have to lay down the law, of course, but if possible, it might be effective to include him in the decision-making. I think Farrar's idea of putting TWD on hold until soccer's over is excellent.

I think they did. Her husband referred to Mary as Marigold's ''Auntie,'' and the only person surprised was Mary. So far, this season is a big yawn.

With a sample size of 600ish students, it could easily just be the neighborhood. My neighborhood is far less than 10% white.

Perhaps you weren't in CA or homeschooling wasn't on your radar in 2008, but a SoCal family that lived by the notion that their only obligation as homeschoolers was to attend to their children's religious convictions inspired a court ruling requiring all homeschooling parents to have teaching credentials. It was vetoed by Schwarzenegger. This kind of thing is why some of us react quite strongly to people casually dropping these phrases. This philosophy could have cost us our homeschooling rights.

Oh, I'm not concerned or impatient at all. I just thought it was funny that she was alternating problems from Pre-A with problems from a grad course I took last year (she did run out of problems she could actually do pretty quickly, and switched to graph theory). She's loving AoPS so far, though I know what's coming in Chapter 2, having gone through it with her brother last year.

In my experience, ''Nana'' is almost always the maternal grandmother. I'm curious whether that's usually true, or just coincidence.

Because she's alternating each problem with working examples from hyperbolic geometry. Today is DD8's first day in AoPS Pre-A, and she's working on the homework due on the first day of class next week. I'm so thankful for AoPS, because I can't think of any other way that she'd be able to take classes at her level, and still be able to cuddle her jujitsu doll on her lap while she works.

Man, and I have his sister coming up behind him, too. I once saw a meme that said ''Take a walk on the wild side: raise boys.'' And I thought that a much more illustrative meme would say ''Raising boys: Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Raising girls: Here there be dragons.''