We had a fantastic woman as minister of our church when we lived in Rhode Island. She gave great sermons and brought order to a congregation that had been floundering before her arrival.

If you rent the space I really don't think you should continue to access the kitchenette. You're either offering someone a home in return for rents, or you're not.

The Indian Parliament is about the size of the U.S. House of Representatives and I believe conducts its business in English. (And this is not a criticism of NH. I live in a neighboring state and feel a definite solidarity with yours.)

Well, at least you have a certain consistency.

Yes, but which ones? And how did you decide where the line between personal freedom and safety should be drawn?

How many protective laws would you repeal? Seatbelt laws, it sounds like. How about anti-drug laws? Indoor smoking bans? Would you do away with food safety laws, drunk driving laws, and laws regulating inflammable materials in children's clothing? How about laws prohibiting the dumping of raw sewage or hazardous chemicals into the water supply. Surely you agree that there's a reasonable point somewhere between safety straps in the shower, as you put it, and prohibiting the distribution of crack cocaine on school grounds.

Do any of the women on the WTM board who believe that women should be submissive to men ever feel frustrated by this role? Maybe you are a natural leader or have other interests, but feel that the Bible really does teach you to be submissive. How do you deal with these feelings?

I don't know much about RRs, but if you don't need them for hunting and you're worried about the animals, you could always stick to a golden retriever. I don't know anyone who has got a GR and wished they had something else.

Law or no, I feel the same way about skiers on the mountain or motorcyclists on the road who won't wear helmets. Well, I guess if your brains are so unimportant to you that you won't wear a helmet that should be your business. Too bad my taxes might have to support assisted care living for the rest of your life.

Don't beat yourself up over the problems. I'm sure they're just random hiccups of the sort that everyone, saint and sinner alike, has to face in these situations. Just keep plowing forward the best you can. (And buy your husband a measuring tape!)

I was reading the OP at first and think you were overreacting, but I had fixed in my mind that these kids were about sixteen or seventeen. 12 and 13? Wow, that is very, very young for this sort of behavior. At that age I might have sent a note to a girl in class, but I'd have never thought of talking to her or heaven forbid, kissing her. As far as I know, my 13 year old son is just entering the "admire girls from afar" stage, which I hope will last another two or three years, if not longer. My vote is with the allow heavily supervised friendship. I might also have a calm discussion with the parents of the girl and hope to set some mutual boundaries.

It's not that much different than bread: 3 cups sifted flour, 1 pkg yeast, 2 tsp salt, 1/3 cup sugar, 8 oz milk, 4 oz water. You add the dry ingredients, add the warmed liquids and then go through the usual rise, punch down, rise cycle before rolling it out. The key is to cook it on a preheated pizza stone at 400+ degrees to get the crisp on the bottom, chewy crust that you get in a restaurant. A friend taught me this once when we were at a writing retreat and he improvised a pizza stone with a bunch of found, thoroughly scrubbed bricks. (Off-topic, but this was on an island on Lake Ontario. Have you ever noticed walking around Lake Ontario or Erie how many smooth, eroded bricks there are on the shore? I want to collect a whole bunch and make a path or even a full pizza oven out of these old bricks.)

I like the idea of the homemade pizza. I recently got a pizza stone and you can make a very tasty, restaurant-quality (or higher if you get creative) pizzas and it's very inexpensive to put together.

If the costs is great enough to justify a visit to a second dentist for another opinion, I would consider that. I think that dentists can look at the same evidence and come to different conclusions about the necessity and scope of dental work. For example, I have a slight weak spot in one tooth that I've had since I was a teen and the dentist who first identified it wanted to put in a filling. For whatever reason it didn't happen and subsequent dentists have either commented that it should be watched or have thought it should be filled. So far, it hasn't changed and it doesn't hurt in any way. As for the sedation, intrusive dental work can be very painful. If he's going to be drilling in deeply enough to put on crowns, I would probably go along with his recommendation on that point.

I saw that too. On your behalf, let me argue that children who are breast-fed, lovingly cared for, and don't eat too much sugar can still die from horrible illnesses.

If it makes you feel any better, I worked as a software engineer and there were several other software engineers at my firm who thought those old lines of legacy code would bring civilization to its knees. When even the so-called experts are fooled... I have mixed feelings about these things. On the one hand, sometimes civilization does suffer a collapse of sorts, and I'm not just talking about the fall of the Roman Empire or the Black Death. Imagine living in Poland in 1938, for example. I bet people who had a few gold coins or some extra wheat had a better chance of surviving, and maybe getting their families out of the country. I think the chance of a huge disaster in any given lifetime is non-trivial. On the other hand people have been predicting the end of the world for as long as we have records. Every time there has been a big war or a famine or a even a comet in the sky, people have said that it's the world coming to an end. But it hasn't yet. And it probably won't next year, or the year after that, either.

Do they have a vaccine for that yet? ;)

I looked through some of that Richard Eyre stuff and it might be a little too religiously oriented for what I'm looking for. It looks like the author is Mormon, so he might be approaching this from a different angle than I am. Has anyone had a child go through the UU program? I read a little about it when we were attending a UU church several years ago, but my children were much younger then and we no longer live near that congregation (or any UU church, for that matter).

As a general observation, it seems like men and women communicate differently in those regards. If I showed up at a friend's house and he laughed and said, "Dude, you need a new pair of pants, you've gained some weight and those ones look like you can barely fasten the button," I'd make some snarky comeback and shrug it off. When I got home, I'd probably renew my vows to eat better and get more exercise. If someone said this to my wife, she'd be devastated. She would stew over this for a week and probably not go back to that friend's house anytime soon. On the other hand, while women seem much more tactful, they are not at all hesitant about voicing these sorts of things when the person being talked about is not present. Men do this too, of course, but I'd guess we're probably a little more blunt to someone's face (especially a male friend) and commensurately less to strangers and when the subject is not present. The thing about these general tendencies is that they are very general. It sounds to me like the OP simply ran into someone who speaks her mind. Other people are thinking the same thing but either keep it to themselves or wait until they have someone else with whom to gossip. This is not one of our best traits, but it's very human. Speaking of which, I was at the supermarket with my outspoken grandmother once when she started to berate a younger guy who had parked in a handicapped spot. "You know, those spots are for handicapped people, and when people who are NOT handicapped park in them..." Grandma stopped abruptly as the guy struggled to get out of his car. "Oh," she said in a loud voice. "You are handicapped."

As the person who started the thread, I naively believed that we would be discussing the ethics of vaccinating or not vaccination, with the assumption that vaccines save lives, even if there was disagreement/uncertainty about which vaccines are necessary and whether or not certain people could or should opt out. I knew that the HPV vaccine was hugely controversial and that many (including myself) believe that the MMR is given too early in life and should perhaps be broken into its component parts. I didn't realize that some people would have such strong beliefs against vaccinations in general. As such, the discussion has evolved in a different direction than I had expected.

As my oldest son is passing through puberty, I've been thinking about how best to explain my beliefs about healthy human sexuality. I think school does a terrible job in teaching this subject and peers are even worse. I also disagree with many church teaching on the subject, which seems either dogmatic, in the case of conservative religions, or doesn't want to touch the subject, in the case of more liberal churches. First, to explain my POV, I have a secular viewpoint, so I don't think that sexual relations between a loving couple of a proper age is a sin. This does not mean, by any stretch, that I want my junior high son to be having sex, or for that matter, any time in high school. By college, my concerns start to diminish, and if I had an older child who was in a committed relationship and thinking about marriage, I think physical intimacy would be appropriate at that stage. But in between those ages and life experiences are a whole lot of questions that I need to answer. I don't think a teenager is emotionally prepared for sex or generally wise enough to protect against pregnancy and STDs, but at what age would it be appropriate to have a boy/girlfriend, to kiss, to engage is non-intercourse sexual play? I don't know the answers to these questions. And what if my high school student came to me asking about birth control? My gut reaction is, "Not while you're under MY roof, mister!" but I want to have a healthy enough dialogue with my child to where he/she would feel comfortable asking me these questions, as sneaking around would be much more dangerous. For those of you will a similar viewpoint, but with older children, how have you taught your kids this subject and how have they responded?

Yes, but one of the things we've evolved (or been, given by a creator, depending on your point of view) is a keen intellect. Couple this with the discovery of the scientific method and the development of modern medicine and we can defeat many of those diseases. We don't have to shrug and say, "Well, it was God's (or nature's) will that he die."

I thought I answered it with this: Around 1990, the mortality rate from measles in the United States was 2.83 deaths/1000 reported cases. The measles vaccine is saving roughly 1,100 lives in the United States every year.

We use the 1-2-3 Magic method for discipline and it works wonders cutting down on back talk. It also helps keep Mom and Dad's blood pressure under control.

One of my favorite games was Power Pete, which I used to play on my IL's Mac back in the mid-90s. I almost bought a Mac just to get that game.