Praying for you and yours!

Where is this? (I’m in driving range and get up to the City from time to time.)

To a large extent what these questions come back to is the responsibility of a democratic citizenry. I used to do volunteer work at an elementary school in a poverty stricken, ESL, gang-ridden community. There were really good people there, and they had to contend with risks of extreme violence every single day. When you are not able to assume basic life safety to be the probable norm, you don’t have the emotional and physical margin to move forward very much—mostly you expend your energy on just surviving. There were 5th graders there who had never been out of the little neighborhood. They didn’t know that at a university in the contiguous town they could see the authors of some of their library books in person, and they could get scholarships to learn anything in the world. They didn’t know anyone who had been to college except for their teachers. They were not being raised to think ahead about much of anything except the best way to get by and to avoid major injury or death—jail being a fairly common alternative to those two. They were great kids, but they could not envision a good future or even a reasonable life. My view is—A democratic citizenry is not going to be raised in that setting consistently. Plus a DC has a responsibility to say, This is entirely unacceptable. Basic assumptions of safety that allow people to grow into their actual potential are something that we should provide, along with a reasonably effective public school education available to everyone. Teaching all to have the self-control and morals to fail to inflict horrendous harm on others, and conveying clearly that criminal attacks are unthinkable are among the other responsibilities of a DC. From a systems standpoint, the underlying assumptions of democracy require a responsble citizenry having reasonable self-control, decent education, available basic assumptions of ‘if you work hard, you will do fine and be reasonably safe’, and basically shared morals and a basic mutual as well as individual responsibility for conveying these responsibilities as well as rights to future generations. We don’t have a critical mass of these, and that does not bode well for our future as a democratic nation of free people with liberty and justice for all.

Well, it's awkward to know what to do with the reality of challenges to be overcome. Do you pretend they are not there? Big fat recipe for Imposter Syndrome and maybe a nervous breakdown down the road. Do you talk about them sympathetically? Makes people very uncomfortable, and also tends to identify some as 'affirmative action hires' interpreted to be getting an unfair advantage and probably less competent than others. I think the thing to do is to mentor or coach people. But that's much more one to one than most bureaucratic systems can pull off officially.

This is true, although it is also the case that the grandparents felt that they had done a poor job with their children and were trying to make up for that later on during his life.

OH! Forgot to mention--our newish top of the line KA requires those 15X cleaning capsules, the liquid ones in the gel pack. Also forgot to mention--up at the cabin our neighbors bought a Samsung appliance at Lowes. They bought an extended warranty. But the local service guys would not work on it, so when it failed very early in its life and Lowes wanted to fix it for them, there was literally no one who could do it. So then after some churn around the extended warranty being essentially meaningless, Lowe's wanted to get them an entire replacement unit and swap it out. They checked with the repair guy about what brands he IS willing to repair, and came up with Kenmore, Whirlpool, and Kitchen Aide. So they told Lowe's they didn't want to be stuck with an appliance that could never get any service, and after more churn Lowe's gave them a Whirlpool of equal value and delivered it and hauled the Samsung off. So, there is what those warranties say, and what they actually do, and sometimes those are two different things.

I have an old thread that is entitled 'Plantar Fascitis: what has helped you' that you might be able to find. It has tons of great crowd sourced input on this. Can't help with the heel spurs, though.

Think about iron. You can get very run down if you are low on it, and catch every little thing that comes your way.

I would like to add--at our cabin we have an old dishwasher that sounds like a garbage truck that is overloaded. I hate how noisy it is, although it does get the dishes clean (not dry, though.) I had every intention of replacing it, but researching dishwashers made me decide to keep it going as long as possible. It is at least 10-15 years old, and I expect that it will last longer than any new one on the market today. I think that that is both sad and unacceptable, but there you have it. #dodgedabullet

I investigated this a few years back and finally made a purchase last year. First of all, there is no Speed Queen in dishwashers, sad to say. Based on reviews from this board I went to the store to buy a high end Bosch or a Miele. I decided against both. The Bosch had diagonal tines on the bottom rack that would have prevented me to washing, say, my spaghetti pot in it. Unacceptable. And the Miele required a fair amount of routine maintenance to nudge it into peak operation, kind of like a Mercedes car. Plus the Miele looked SO overwhelmingly modern that it would have made the rest of my kitchen look glaringly dated, not just comfortably dated. So I got the top of the line Kitchen Aid. It is dead quiet. It has a true hot water wash option. It cleans my dishes extremely well, thanks to the multiple sprayers. I find the top rack kind of useful. And later in life if I can’t reach the bottom rack easily it has a top rack only wash cycle. Plus there is enough room above the top rack to wash even dinner plates in it. I really like it.

It was my absolute favorite book the year it came out, and my book group loved it the next year, too. But that doesn't mean that it's a thorough and complete sociological study. Still, it touched on imposter syndrome in the context of a true rags to riches story, and on the assets that helped this particular person move forward without losing his connection to his family and his roots. That was nice to see.

Um. I am the one with the legendary deer head. I can't remember whether I ever updated to mention that we also now have a bear skin.

Yes, carefully avoiding fragrance is first priority. Then comes avoiding solvent smells.

I thought the suggestion section was weak, but one of the things he touched on was financially incentivizing helpful prioritization behavior, like getting the kids to school every day on time. I felt like he kind of tacked that stuff on, and didn’t really think it through. Policies, IME, are not as workable as determined, loving, local people who teach and who refuse to give up. But, I imagine that the combo would be the best. Still, a determined, loving, teaching, local person who refuses to give up is going to trump everything else. That’s the Marva way, for instance. Or the former principal of one of our local elementary schools, who basically set out to uplift a whole neighborhood from that job vantage point, and who accomplished a ton. Bureaucracy always can steamroller over those individual efforts, particularly in the long run, but it usually can’t negate them completely at least for those being helped in the moment. The starfish analogy holds here.

Poor little guy! It sounds like you’re on the right track, though.