I saturated our Ektorp couch cushions with Nature's Miracle (enzyme cleaner) then dried in the sun earlier this summer. It was a last ditch attempt to save the 20 year old couch to also avoid the cannot-find-a-new-couch problem. In our case, we had a cat door malfunction while we were on vacation and the cats did not have access to their litter boxes for a few days. Whoops. They at least chose the oldest piece of furniture rather than the wood floors or something more important to us. I did not have much hope but it did work. I stripped and washed the covers then put the pre-rinsed cushions, one at a time, in a big rubbermaid bin, saturated with the cleaner, and stomped with my feet to get it everywhere. Then hung them to dry for days. It took several days for them to dry completely. They did indeed clean up all the way but unfortunately, I hate the smell of the cleaner almost as much as cat pee. I am hoping that will fade with time.

Another way to make sure people have complete mess kits is to make it a group project pre-camping. Have everyone bring their components then make "swishy bags" as a craft. A swishy bag is a hand-sewn bag made of mesh or very loose washcloth material with a drawstring top. In the olden days, we put our dirty kit into the swishy bag and literally took turns dunking them into soap and then rinse water bins. That is gross and I do not suggest that. But they can also just be a cute mesh bag to keep the kit together (and in one place) and campers can put their clean, wet kit in the bag and hang from a branch/clothesline to dry. This keeps dishes from getting mixed up and puts them all in one place for easy access at the next meal. If you suspect some scouts will not bring their kits or will not have all of the components, you could just grab a small collection from a thrift store to build up missing/incomplete kits. As for foods, if you are trying to only use fire, I suggest things on sticks and instant oatmeal. Or using a big grate over the fire as a cooktop. Or if you have the funds, tonka cookers can be used to cook an amazing array of foods with no waste or major clean-up. My family has eaten for days using only tonka cookers. For a group that big, you will want at least one cooker per three people and plan to take turns.

Stand alone basement toilets are very common in my area. Several of my friends have them and there was one in our basement at one point in the past. In our case, all of these houses were built pre-plumbing (and electricity, for that matter). When water and sewer were put in, most homeowners could not afford to fully plumb their houses or reconfigure rooms to make traditional bathrooms. Often the introduction to having indoor plumbing was a single kitchen sink and the easy-to-install basement toilet. We affectionately call them "thrones" here as they are usually on a small platform. Seeing as the alternative was outhouses or chamber pots, without sinks, it was not considered odd that there was not a sink nearby. These houses often held large families so even when proper bathrooms were installed, people kept the thrones as back up. And many persist today and are used as back-up. The basements in our area are typically not tall enough to finish so it is rare for one to put proper walls around the throne or make it into a real bathroom but that is not 100% unheard of. My family does volunteer work for an agency that assists the elderly in our area and we have come across the occasional house that still has a throne as the only toilet. It creates a special challenge for home health aids.

I get that. And understand the intent. But the flippant, "just run a fan" rubs me the wrong way. When people are grappling with a second Christmas with isolated family members being alone again, it just stings. I live in a very harsh climate and we have maintained socializing by being outside despite the weather. Our fire pits and snow pants have never seen so much action. Anyone who lives in a climate where they can open a window and run a fan can (and should) meet outdoors with risky mixed company anyway assuming everyone is healthy and hearty enough to do so. But this does not work for our elderly and fragile family members. I am not really arguing anything here, just that advice like this can feel a little hurtful and dismissive. In our case, we will celebrate Halloween with friends outdoors. I handed out candy last year, outdoors and masked, and will do so again this year. Thanksgiving is still up in the air. We plan to visit our families in person at their locations but we have one person in assisted living that may or may not be allowing in-person visitors or pick-ups and another side of the family that includes a family of anti-vaxxers/maskers. We cannot call that one until we know the status of boosters, local surges in infection, and AL rules. I cannot even think about Christmas yet. We will be winter camping, outdoors (obviously), for NYE with friends.

A window fan? Really? My heating bill is through the roof that time of year! I cannot even imagine. Many days our furnace struggles to keep up without opening windows. It is like the recommendation is ignorant to the fact that it is COLD for half the U.S. during the holidays.

OP here. Yikes! Thanks for chiming in. I will get it checked out! It sounds easy enough to do.

I am dealing with a persistent and annoying pain in my leg and google is failing me. Maybe someone has an idea? I am a runner and run 5-10 miles, 4-5 times a week, mostly on gravel or trails. I ran in my annual half marathon in mid-July and it went very well. I took a day off and headed out for a normal 5 mile trail run. I felt off the whole time and ended up tripping on a root and falling very hard about halfway through. I brushed myself off and finished my run. The next day, I came down with a nasty cold (multiple negative PCR covid tests), which is why I probably felt "off." Between the fall and the cold, I took a whole week off of running. When I started back up, both legs had a lot of tightness and pain from the fall. Nothing bad enough to worry me but annoying. I put up with it for over and month and it did improve but settled into a persistent dull pain in one leg that is present even when resting. It gets worse right after a run and is most noticeable when sitting for long periods, which I do daily for my job. So, I went to the chiropractor. I needed some adjustments but he could see nothing that would be causing the pain. He told me to rest, stretch, and ice and all the usual stuff. I did and it did improve the pain while actually running. But the ambient pain while resting as not improved and gets worse each week. It is so hard to describe what it feels like. It started as general, all-over, leg pain that is pretty normal after a wipe out. But this last persistent phase that I have been "stuck" on for over a month is a dull, throbbing, deep pain in my thigh. It is not always in the same spot and I cannot pinpoint the location as it is deep. No poking or stretching or repositioning makes it better or worse. Almost like a very bad case of restless leg syndrome. Advil does not touch it. I am almost beginning to think it is in my head. Now it is so distracting that it is hard to concentrate on my work. Driving or riding in the car for long periods of time is also very uncomfortable. Google tells me that I do not have the right symptom match for thrombosis. No swelling or redness. Although I do have a strong family history of blood clot issues. I am up to date on my annual exam and bloodwork. Nothing unusual there. I have not had covid and am fully vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine, well before this all started. Anyone experience anything like this? I'd really like to know if I can just safely ignore this and it will eventually improve. I had a nasty shoulder injury that took 18 months to fully recover so I do know things like this can take time. Or should I be more proactive in trying to get to the bottom of it? If so, where would you start? I don't think my PCP is going to take "annoying leg pain" very seriously. And even if she did, what would the next step be?

These are the worst! We get them year round as our yard houses several large pine trees. They prefer to hang out in the carpet on the stairs, sticking straight up. At least once a year, I have one puncture the bottom of my foot. Pure evil. I'll take the cat hair in the fridge over those needles!

In that case, it is totally up to you. It sounds like more of a favor for a friend rather than the school asking you. You are perfectly within your rights to decline or only provide what you are comfortable providing. I also want to say that I cannot speak for practices at a community college. My experience is as a non-tenured instructor at a university over the span of 13 years. Sharing was the norm but not required. My contract did not address it at all.

What upset me most about the latest episode was that "M" felt the need to apologize for being upset. To make others, ADULTS whose job it is to help her, feel OK when she was so obviously with 100% proof bullied.

No trigger. I chose to listen to it. It just makes me feel so hopeless. It's important to know this is going on.

I have seriously contemplated stopping this podcast. It is just another hopeless situation that *I* can do nothing about that is contributing to my daily anxiety. At the risk of stepping too close to the politics line, this is EXACTLY what I worried about after the 2016 election results were tallied. I was so hoping to be wrong.

I've been listening and I was appalled by the principal's slant. The conversation with "M" was handled very poorly and I really do not understand why the parents were not invited to the conversation.

Unless your contract states that your materials are the school's property, I don't think you have to provide them. Are they suggesting you must do this or just asking?

Totally anecdotal but all of the materials that were given to me when I started were developed by male instructors as I taught in an overwhelmingly male-dominated field.

Quoting myself to elaborate a little. I was not "required" to do this but it was strongly encouraged. But for every class I taught, I was given access to the previous instructors' materials. Some I altered and used, others I didn't. But it was super helpful to have insight into how the classes were previously taught. By the time I left, I had developed all of my own materials, metrics, and outcome statistics. I passed them along to the next instructors without a second thought. I mostly taught classes in which I was the sole instructor but in other classes in which there were multiple sections taught by multiple instructors, we always collaborated to some extent. I think of it as intellectual property that I was paid to develop and therefore does not "belong" to me.

In my experience, yes.

Our vet also did not bring up putting our very old and suffering cat down either. In our case, I think he assumed we were in "treatment mode" since we kept bringing her in when really we wanted an honest option of whether it was "time" or not. We finally just decided on our own and the vet said they were glad we "finally" decided to let her go. I was pretty angry as I think she suffered for weeks past when she should have. It sounds like you know it is time.

I have an always-homeschooled 18yo that just started college. She did not have a smartphone until she was 16, never got into video games, and had limits to technology (mostly via lack of access and being busy with other things rather than screen time limits). All of her friends went to public high school so she definitely saw all things social media even when she was not directly engaged. She for sure does not always know what the latest everything is as far as popular culture goes but is a huge music lover (we did allow her to have a Spotify account) so has listened to all things current and past. Time will tell if she truly feels she has missed out on things but so far she seems content and well-adjusted. She did note upon moving into the dorms that many students are glued to their video games. She is baffled and has zero interest. But she found plenty of people who are interested in the things she likes to do and has gravitated towards them. She's seems happy and well-adjusted. If anything, she seems far less concerned with conforming than her peers. I had concerns about homeschooling, just like I would have with any educational path, but "fitting in" was never one of them.

It seems to be full steam ahead here. Dd attends university in our home town so I have a front row seat. We have a very short and fleeting time before LOTS of snow falls so many events are outdoors. Campus is abuzz, which is nice to see after the last year when everything was online. Dd reports that there is not much happening indoors at this time, other than class. I'd say from the outside looking in, campus activity is higher than it was pre-Covid.

Dd's uni is full steam ahead with in-person classes and no distancing. There is no vaccine mandate and they are not asking students so I have no idea what the rate of vaccination is. Masking is required through the month of September, which I suspect will be extended. No routine testing and what testing is available is difficult to access. Dd's roommate is sick and has been for over a week. A FULL week ago dd started trying to find a way to test. It took until this Tuesday to get an appointment. Luckily it was negative but meanwhile she was attending class and other functions, masked. So the "dashboard" shows almost no cases but does not mention how many tests were taken....which I know to be very few. Luckily, the school is well-equipped to go online. They were online all last year. But that is NOT the experience my dd wants. Fingers crossed.

Hugs! We moved our only dc into the dorms two weeks ago and I was a mess. And this is only 2 miles down the road! It is the little things like different meal prep and how much less hair gets stuck in the shower drain that remind me each day. I also have a very sad and lonely cat that misses her person terribly. Even though we are just down the road, we have agreed to not see each other in person due to Covid since the school does not have a vaccine mandate. We might as well be on different continents. But I do know it is NOT the same as launching a kid so far away!

Very true! We used to just make last minute plans to camp. That is mostly not a thing anymore if you are looking for full service campgrounds. State, county, and national forest campgrounds (almost always rustic) are often not reservable and even in the pandemic, you can almost always still find many open sites last minute. So we do plan ahead when there is a specific place we want to go. I literally set an alarm to wake up to hit the opening minutes for reserving at state parks and even then, I often do not get the sites I was hoping to. It is bananas. I am hoping this eventually calms down. It is also obvious in the parks themselves that there are a lot of newbies camping. Most are fine but we have witnessed amusing and sometimes alarming things that we have never seen before the pandemic.

We have had trailers for the last 18 years and LOVE them. We were tent campers and backpackers prior to that....both of which we still also do. Our current trailer is a pop-up which is a very different animal than a van, motorhome, fifth wheel, or larger enclosed trailer so there is some overlap in experience but not directly comparable. We love the pop-up because we love sleeping out in the air. We tend to camp at rustic state forest campgrounds (no hookups at all) up to state parks which do have electric hookups and modern bathrooms but no water/sewer. Our trailer does not have a bathroom but some pop-ups do. During the pandemic, we have mostly stayed at rustic campgrounds with pit toilets. Using those is more risky than having your own bathroom but not as risky as using a bathhouse, IMO. People do NOT linger in those. Lol! We do not need any hookups to be comfortable. Electric can be nice for lights and charging stuff but it is not nice enough for that to ever be a factor when choosing where we will camp. Our fridge, stove, and heater run on propane and we have solar chargers for the most essential charging needs so we can be completely off grid. We cook and wash dishes outdoors and just use the campground pump for water and pit toilets for the other business. We even removed the sink from ours because it was far too much of a pain to deal with rather than using a dishpan outdoors. Always responsibly dump dish water and use biodegradable soap! We typically dump dirty water in the fire pit if the campground does not have a drain or dump station. I have noticed that even our friends with much bigger rigs still tend to not use their indoor water, opting instead to wash up outdoors and use the communal restrooms or pit toilets. Since we rarely camp at places with hook ups, this is true of most other campers we see. Only the biggest and best rigs have enough tank capacity to truly sustain normal bathroom and kitchen water functions for more than a day or two. A previous poster mentioned campground help with parking. I have never seen this. I have also never camped in one of the more resort-like KOA campgrounds, so this might very well be a thing. But anywhere I have camped, the neighbors pretty much point and laugh while you are on a fast-track to divorce court trying to park. I kid. Mostly. I am comfortable pulling our trailer but parking it is very hard for me. Dh is much better at it, but even he has struggled at times. You just have to be patient. Hooking it up is easy as we have a back-up camera on our tow vehicle. Even without one, it is not that bad. I have done it solo with a 10yo helping to direct with no problem. Again, as long as you are patient, you'll eventually get it done. We typically camp with a group that has everything from tents to huge trailers and no one seems to struggle much with hook-up. We almost always spend multiple nights at each site so being able to have a vehicle to go do things without securing your whole "house" is non-negotiable for us. If we were doing a more epic, move-every-day type trip, I could see us going with a van or very small motorhome, but that is way out of our budget and likely always will be. We may rent in a situation like that. For those that are grappling with tight spaces, keep in mind you can kick the kids out to a tent. We had to do that when dd turned 8 as she outgrew the bed she was "assigned" to. We set up a tiny backpacking tent up right under my pop-up bed so we could talk easily and I could hear her if she needed anything. By age 10, she was happy to set up further and further away from the rig. This may or may not be why she is now comfortable solo backpacking for days on end at age 18. It was also nice to contain the kid mess to another piece of real estate! That is a ton of mostly-useless info but thought I'd chime in as someone who has spent at least 400 nights in an RV over the years.

Yes. My whole family came down with something that could very well have been Covid several weeks ago. It was a 5 day wait to get testing appointments and they predicted another 4-5 days after that for results. So, we did not get tested. What's the point?