And of course, DH's work told them that it's up to them whether they come in or not tomorrow. That means if they don't, they have to take vacation time. Never mind the fact that a mandatory curfew has been put in place and the governor has asked that all non-essential workers stay home.

We are okay as well. We aren't near any creeks or on low ground. Bridges are collapsing and dams are bursting all over Columbia and low-lying areas are completely submerged. I have many friends whose homes are flooded. This is a complete disaster. I admit that I was skeptical up until this morning that we'd see what was predicted.

I'd tell her your dinner was expensive too since two portions didn't get eaten. And I'd stay away from her.

This is what I expected and why I answered shelter. We have the same neighbors. I took their dog back to them twice but each time they looked at me like I was weird. I don't have time to take it to the shelter, so now I just ignore it, but if I had time, I'd definitely be taking it to the shelter every time I saw it (which is at least weekly).

Adding another voice to the choir that a lawyer really is needed here. At minimum, she'll need to start formal eviction proceedings. But, the fact that he and his wife also paid for the addition could complicate matters.

I know you already did it, but I vote shelter also.

I was late for school one day in elementary school because when I woke up none of my shoes fit, including the ones I'd worn the day before.

I loved puzzles as a kid, but my kids don't like them. Older has done 100 piece puzzles but my 6yo has only done 24 pieces.

Ours is white at Dh's insistence. It looks SO much better than the red brick.

I also assumed Yogi Berra was dead before today. That "boo boo" article is hilarious or I'm giddy from lack of sleep.

I'm a project failure too. I keep telling myself I'll do them when they come up for the next child. That way, the first one will get to experience it also and I won't have to do it twice.

Are you on Facebook? My local sale group on Facebook always has people looking to rehome dogs.

OMG, how funny! Mine too, exactly the same. I got it from my dad apparently, who got it from his mom. None of my kids got it. I don't care one way or the other now, but was terribly self-conscious about it as a child as I was teased a few times. ETA: DH has clubbed thumbs. None of the kids got those either.

My library has it! Thanks!

Stride Rite is what fit my kids who have similar feet best.

Just an update: DH did contact him. He was very apologetic and said he's done hundreds of floors and never had this happen. He was here all day Saturday and Sunday carefully taking up the tile and scraping them to reuse them. He took up the backer board and put new board down. He laid the tiles yesterday and is planning on coming tonight to grout. I really hate not having a kitchen and we can't do school because our dining room, where we work, is filled with our appliances. I really hope this works and we don't have to go through this again. ETA: And it's my middle son's birthday and I can't make him a cake or dinner which is our tradition.

Has he been xrayed? I know someone who had those problems and an X-ray revealed a huge ball of mold in her sinus cavity. Once removed, she was fine. My grandmother was a flying nurse during WWII and was not taken care of herself. She was so badly infected that she had the sinuses in her forehead removed. My mother said she suffered from terrible headaches the rest of her life.

I think part of what people find so obnoxious is that they try to bill themselves as historical experts for hire when they don't seem to quite "get it." Then there is her whole attitude of how superior she is to everyone else in the world.

The first page of reviews on Amazon for her book tap into the odd vibe I was getting when on her website. She just seems really angry and disdainful. http://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/1626361754/ref=acr_offerlistingpage_text?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1 And now I've spent enough of my day on her!

The tweets while reading her book are funny: https://storify.com/ImAmandaNelson/in-which-i-hate-read-that-victorian-lady-s-corset-

Somebody else took it further: I'm a professional Victorianist and all, so I had Some Reactions. The part of the article that struck me the most was when she talked about how the Victorian era was actually very optimistic about the future and was a time of innovation, and how she's also trying to latch onto that optimism -- but by burying herself in the past and by constructing a static historical bubble to live within. That made me wonder whether she wasn't missing the forest for the trees when trying to understand the Victorian zeitgeist. This was also my immediate response. Most middle- and upper-class Victorians (to stick with folks equivalent to our author) would have thought this exercise not just bizarre, but inane: people liked new technologies and took advantage of them whenever they could afford them. Trains! Telegraphs! Typewriters! (I'm sure there are other things beginning with "T" that I'm missing here.) There's a reason that the Great Exhibition was such a hit across the social spectrum (even though a lot of commentators were also anxious about the effects of free market thinking). More to the point, aside from the nineteenth-century cosplayers (e.g.), high-profile Victorians who pursued similarly nostalgic projects weren't necessarily thinking of them in terms of personal lifestyle choices that could be commodified for a mass readership: they were making social, economical, and political statements. To the left, you've got John Ruskin and William Morris, who were trying to revive artisanal practices that predated the Industrial Revolution--because they were critiquing the physical and moral effects of factory work on the laboring classes, and trying to imagine alternatives. To the right, you've got somebody like the execrable Catholic novelist E. H. Dering, who walked around dressed up like somebody out of the seventeenth century because he was deeply opposed to the culture of the nineteenth. As it happens, Chrisman and her husband remind me most of Walter Scott and Abbotsford, and Scott liked his mod cons, thank you very much. On to the article: They help us understand the culture that created them — a culture that believed in engineering durable, beautiful items that could be repaired by their users. Constantly using them helps us comprehend their context. Absorbing the lessons our artifacts teach us shapes our worldview. They are our teachers. Seeing their beauty every day elevates and inspires us, as it did their original owners. Most middle- and upper-class Victorians could not, in fact, repair their own "items," unless it was clothing, and even then that depended on social status (a middle-class woman might make and repair many of the family's garments; an upper-class woman would probably hand this job to a servant or hire a dressmaker/tailor). More to the point, here and elsewhere the authors slip between the self-consciousness produced by historical distance to identification with Victorian self-consciousness, and that's what caused much of my own dissonant response to this essay. The Victorians were not particularly "mindful" (other than in the usual "how much did we spend on gas this month?!") way; most of them quite cheerfully bought factory-produced goods because they were cheap; and if they got more out of their possessions than we do in the twenty-first century, the documentation they left behind doesn't exactly prove it. Now, you absolutely had people attempting to produce this kind of mindfulness--that's part of the Arts and Crafts movement, for example, and the revolutions in interior decorating during the 1890s--but it wasn't some essential property of the period. Finally, those "ideals" were strangely...vague. For example, they're supposedly in the 1880s or so. Is the author a New Woman? After all, she's out and about on her cycle...and yet, she's wearing a chatelaine, when pockets were an important and liberatory late-century innovation in woman's clothing. (When you come across references to women's "pockets" in literature of the 19th-c. and earlier, they mean a separate bag attached to the clothing, not to pockets sewn in.) Are they imperialists? Anti-imperialists? Pacifists? Christians? Freethinkers? Vegetarians? Anti-vivisectionists? Free market capitalists? Socialists? Eugenicists? The article sells the performance as counter-cultural, but, as others have already pointed out, the Amish and Mennonites got there a long time ago, and it's not immediately obvious what "ideals" they think they're importing from the Victorians--given that the only visible ideals are pretty twenty-first century. posted by thomas j wise at 12:06 PM on September 9 [108 favorites]

Reading through it. Lots of interesting points. I found this one resonated with me in my initial reading: The part of the article that struck me the most was when she talked about how the Victorian era was actually very optimistic about the future and was a time of innovation, and how she's also trying to latch onto that optimism -- but by burying herself in the past and by constructing a static historical bubble to live within. That made me wonder whether she wasn't missing the forest for the trees when trying to understand the Victorian zeitgeist. posted by rue72 at 10:48 AM on September 9 [11 favorites]

Google tells me that the maximum amount you can withdraw from ATMs per day is almost always $1000 (or less for some banks). It sounds like the claim here is that more than that was taken, in which case the circumstances of going into the bank sound very strange if nobody noticed the suspicious activity. Do you know how much money was involved, kewb?

I'm in SC but our marriage license doesn't say anything about what names will be once married, only what they are when applying. I went to the Social Security office with my marriage certificate to change my name and got to pick then what I wanted. Then I went to the DMV and sent in to have my passport changed. IIRC, that's all I had to do legally.

Yeah, I went browsing on the website and she definitely gives off an odd vibe. It appears she runs a massage studio out of her home and her husband works in a bike shop. And she blogs and sells books and they both try to market themselves for paid appearances. They've certainly gone farther into their "dress-up" than I would care to, but I do agree that it's still "dress-up" without not only fully physically immersing themselves in Victorian ways, but also because without the social context surrounding them, it can never really replicate the life they say they long for. Having said all that, they're not harming anyone that I know of and I have no problem with them.