re best advance interval to buy: I think this really depends on where you're going, whether the destination is seasonal, and -- particularly -- how much competition between airlines (as opposed to lots of daily flights all with one or two airlines) there is. If it's a very seasonal destination with not much competition (like some Caribbean destinations), then high season flights will likely keep going up right to the bitter end (and then maybe have "flash sales" at the very last minute of any remaining seats... or not, if there are no remaining seats). If OTOH it's a more year round destination with lots of competition (like Orlando/Tampa) the seven week rule of thumb may make sense. Depending on how much of a gambling woman you are, lol.. Me, though I'm a big-time armchair and medium-time IRL traveler, I'm not by disposition much of a gambler; and I have made myself just crazy waiting for fares to go down and getting burned watching them only go up, so I work best by establishing rules, sticking with my rules, and then -- this is for my own sanity key -- never looking back to second guess a flight I've already booked. Here are my rules (ymmv): 1. If I HAVE to book flights for a specific date (a wedding, for example) I only allow a three-week shop-around interval. Then I just do it, and don't look back on where fares go after I've committed. Because, crazy-making. 2. For certain destinations (in our case Singapore, where a hunk of my family lives, and nearby airports in Malaysia) I keep chronic watch and if fares (on airlines we fly on -- that's a whole 'nuther subject) dip below a pre-set number (for Singapore, $850, which happens maybe 2-3 times a year), I have a rapid-mobilization drill in which I try concertedly to see if anyone in the family (me, my husband, my eldest, either or both of my parents) can go in the interval of the special fare. If anyone can clear the calendar and go (which only happens maybe 1 out of 5 times?), I'm prepared to act quickly. 3. For other destinations that are sort of bucket-list we'd-love-to-if-only (these days: Iceland, Nepal, Kenya) I keep chronic watch and develop a sense of what a "good" fare looks like; and if I see one for a window that makes reasonable sense schedule wise (say, next Thanksgiving week) I make a proposal to my husband. Usually, that conversation plays out along the lines of "oh, I dunno, let's think about it" and we end up missing the window, lol, but every now and then we manage to pull it off. That's fine for the armchair dreaming. 4. Flash fares (last minute sales of remaining seats of flights very soon to depart) have never worked for us, since they are by definition last minute and our schedules are at any given moment too piled up in the next 3 weeks... but there are some GREAT flash fares that come up repeatedly for certain destinations (I've noticed Portugal, Germany, South Africa, India a lot recently). I've told my husband that when the kids are launched I'm going to reserve June and September as "flash fare" months, and we'll just go wherever is cheap at the last possible minute. A girl can dream... The NYT Frugal Traveler column is great on general insights. I used to subscribe to an unrelated magazine also called Frugal Traveler, which also had good tips but which drifted more and more to the young spontaneous backpacker crowd, which (sigh) isn't our demographic anymore. For fare-watching specifically, hopper and kayak are the best all-around, and it's worth signing up to certain airlines' email lists (South African Air, KLM and Delta all seem to promote on their own lists a couple of days before the same fares show up on hopper and kayak).

I also start with ITA matrix if I'm actually looking to book. If you read travel guru sites, which is a bit of a hobby for me, some general tips you hear for MOST flights (but everyone's MMV for your specific origin and destination) are: Wed and Th tend to be the lowest fares of the week, Fares tend to be lower if you can stay over a Saturday, Fares tend to dip a bit at the end of the month and particularly at the end of the quarter, Airlines tend to revise fares right around midnight Tuesday night (though they'll respond to a competitor at other times), Clear your cookies, Sometimes you do better doing two sets of 2 seats on the same flight, than booking 4+ on one ticket (this is crazy-making, but I have experienced this personally) If your timing is flexible and you're just trying to learn the vagaries of a particular segment, I find flight hopper also to be helpful in figuring out which month is better and so on. Keep at it. There are a couple of destinations I just sort of watch compulsively (my brother and family live in Singapore) and big dips do happen, if you're able to move quickly once they happen.

Oh, man, I have to go out in three minutes and y'all have got my mind going all :willy_nilly: . Rose, Bluest Eye is very, very good. If you're looking for color in the title, and you've already hit the obvious The Color Purple, I'd go for it. Re colonialism, "inherent evil" and "strategic racism": thank you, Eliana, for that article. Yes, very relevant to other discussions we've had about books closer to home; and also to Passage to India, I'd say. It hits on a distinction that the Ian Haney Lopez book made in the one I spoke of upthread, between what he calls "structural racism" (which he defines mostly in terms of differential investments over time in infrastructure, both whose potholes get filled/water pipes get replaced/schools get funded/training programs get developed... and the resulting differential in human suffering and capacity today) vs. what he splices out and names as "strategic racism," by which he means simply, taking advantage of existing racism / legacy effects of racism in pursuit of money or power. A good example of "strategic" racism is Coates' example in his reparations piece of commercial banks targeting blacks who lived in red-lined districts, who were ineligible for regular mortgages because their neighborhoods had been designated poor risk, for predatory sub-prime loans. Were the strategic gurus in the banks who hit on such a marketing scheme "evil"? Were the individual loan officers who pursued the strategy once developed "evil"? Or is it just business, nothing personal, naturally you target customers who have no other option? Colonialism can I think be thought of in similar terms... One of the books I've read by an African author who actually lives there (Nigeria) that has most held me over the years is Say You're One of Them, a collection of (long) stories by Uwen Akpan, a Jesuit priest. The stories are pretty lacerating, but I years later I find myself still thinking back on them. Here is a review of it with NPR. Somewhere on the Interwebs is one of the stories from the book, I think in the New Yorker, but I can't find it quickly. Running off, will return.

Yes. Intercepting him as he came off a flight was the *ideal* circumstance to arrest him -- LEO knew he had no weapons, they knew he was alone, he had nowhere to go. A conspiracy theorist might even postulate that Michele Fiore entrapped him. :leaving:

O Fearless Leader Jane. Passage to India. :svengo: What are our discussion parameters and timeframe? Stacia - I did manage to excavate Smile as They Bow; will send along!

(Of course the conch shell in Lord of the Flies was supposed to work the "peace stick" way too, lol, so it maybe takes more than a stick... :huh: ) A lot of good habits feel artificial in the beginning. Until they feel normal. What I liked about the tool as described in the OP was that the listener was supposed not just to keep-quiet during the "listening" time, but also to "reflect back" what the speaker said in his/her own words. That skill really is the essence of "active listening" as taught in all sorts of expensive corporate and non-profit training courses on communication skills.

Yes, this is the sort of atmosphere that my daughter's Quaker school was also able to achieve, through a lot of time and a lot of work. And also the use of tools like that "peace wand" -- that sound artificial, but once the kids have internalized the habits through the tool, then they have the habits... and teaching other content is actually easier, because the atmosphere is different / more cooperative and teachers waste *less* time on classroom management than in schools that don't have such an atmosphere. It's hard to describe in the abstract.... and I don't know that it's containable or marketable in a "curriculum"... but I do think that communication skills and conflict resolution strategies can be taught/learned, and it's a long haul, and kids (all of us, for that matter!) need LOADS of practice with different / different types of people...

I advise audiobooks. Jim Dale = #Brilliant. You're a very good mom. Chocolate frogs, that's beyond my pay grade, myself... :lol:

re teaching such things at school vs at home Right, and also, it's not as if schools' reinforcement about compassion and conflict resolution takes away from what's happening at home, KWIM? It's not like we're promoting USE VIOLENCE NOT WORDS at home... I agree that some of the techniques in the article being a bit corny and artificial, and as well I have serious doubts about how much sticking power any 12 week program really has... but I do think school culture can do a LOT, positively or negatively, to create a good or poor environment for conflict resolution. My eldest spent most of her primary years in a small Quaker school (we're Jewish), and they were very, impressively, committed to development conflict resolution skills... it was woven throughout the curriculum in very natural and organic ways, and they did use tools that -- if I tried to describe them -- would probably sound pretty corny and artificial, i.e. (from the OP article) I mean, how goofy is that, right? But the underlying idea, that when one person is speaking, particularly about something personal and difficult, the other person should just listen, without interrupting or yeah-but-ing, and truly try to hear the speaker well enough that the listener can summarize even if the listener still disagrees... well, I mean, whole book-length treatises and week-long training seminars are successfully marketed to corporations and non-profits and houses of worship on what amounts to the same skill, the power of active listening... It's not rocket science to say it, but it takes an awful lot of practice -- including with people outside the family dynamic -- actually to get it, so having practice in school contexts, where kids spend so much time and bump up against people with different perspectives and relationships, is IMO a good thing...

Oh, dear. I definitely could NOT do both of those at once! Good luck with that...

Oh that looks lovely. Zentangles are awesome. One of my daughters' friends in enduring an extended hospitalization, and Stella sent her Zentangle supplies early on in the ordeal, and she had gotten really absorbed with it and it's really helped her pass the time. I'll look for that one -- *excellent* gift idea.

Second all of Diane Stanley's books (in addition to the Cleopatra that HomeschoolMom recommended, she's also done Joan of Arc, Leonardo, Queen Elizabeth and Michaelangelo, all terrific). Other wonderful authors who've done a host of picture book biographies is Demi (Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Dalai Lama, Muhammed, Marco Polo, Lao Tzu, Buddha, on and on and on...) Russell Freedman (Confucius, Marco Polo, many others), and Peter Sis (Gallileo, Darwin).

Reading: Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class, by Ian Haney Lopez. Eliana, was this among your MLK Long List? I thought it was (and am not sure how else it might have appeared on my stack?) but nothing came up when I searched. Anyway, much of its two pronged thesis is embedded its title. The first prong, the Reinvention of Racism part, uses key turning points in electoral history to analyze the emergence of what Lopez calls "code", with which racial messages are communicated without racial words being used. This part follows usefully from Coates' and particularly Alexander's books, getting into the "how" of what those authors described, happened. Special shoutout to idnib: Lopez does speak extensively to the different experiences of Latinos / Muslims / other minorities, and how both the coded language and the "line of whiteness" have evolved over time. I found this part quite illuminating. The second prong of his thesis speaks to how the emergence of such code (and how it's been harnessed to specific corporate and high-income interests) has had the effect of gutting the middle class, and in so doing harming millions of white people as well. I tend to react pretty reflexively against any kind of argument that smacks of false consciousness, and this part of his argument IMO does... so I struggled, still am struggling, with this bit. Race and Economic Jeopardy for All: A Framing Paper for Defeating Dog Whistle Politics, by Ian Haney Lopez - so then this is a policy paper that the same author did for the AFL/CIO, which spends a little time upfront laying out the reinvention-of-racism part of the book, but mostly amplifies on the economic effects part, particularly from the union lens. Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems, by Sonia Sanchez. These are very powerful, some of them overwhelming really. Amy: this woman packs more into a haiku than I think I've ever seen! Highly recommended, for a day you're feeling strong... Here are excerpts from her eulogy for Vaclav Havel, Poem for July 4, 1994, which is among the most redemptive and hopeful of the (very often pretty bleak) bund:

I'd like to thank everyone who has participated on this thread. Lots to think about. :grouphug: to all spouses who have dealt / are still living with re-integration difficulties. Holding you in the light.

re: Smile as they Bow by Nu Nu Yi: I think I still have it somewhere; I'll see if I can find it and send it along. It's worth reading just because it's such an unusual peek into a group that is marginalized even by the marginalized in a society that (although making small but important tentative steps in its long lurch toward the light) is still pretty marked by a fairly coercive state. Their existence is pretty perilous. That said, the treatment was a bit thin -- more focus on really mundane details of daily life (which actually aren't so remarkably different than the daily struggles of other poor/precariously housed population) and less about either the Burmese context or the specificities of their particular challenges within it.

I agree that couples should not expect anyone beyond very immediate family (parents and siblings) to incur significant expense/time to make a wedding. That said: there are a lot of reasons why farflung weddings happen. The bride and groom may hail from places far from one another, may themselves live in yet another location, there may be sensitivities about who's doing the financial underwriting and/or party planning logistics work; there may as FaithManor suggest be complications that guests are not (should not be!) privy to. When it's possible, I guess I try to make attending life cycle events a fairly high priority. If it's not possible, so be it, we send a gift and carry on without guilt. (Our family culture is also very OK with divide-and-conquer, so very often our solution is to send either my husband or me, rather than the whole family. Other families have different cultures on this, ymmv...)

Re Passage to India / Part 1 Mosque: Yes -- perhaps my pump was primed by the plumbs with other reading into issues of race and economic exploitation and blind spots that some of us have been doing, but I'm finding (just finished Part 1) that the "setting story" of engagement with character to culture is much more interesting to me than the "surface story" of Adela's engagement or not to the (#SorryNotSorry) just insufferable Ronny... The (painful) insight that I am holding right now is the immense difficulty in truly connecting personally across the Divide -- even though both Aziz and Fielding both want to do so, and as in your quote both recognize one another's humanity and intelligence... still, one can only go so far... so in the scene in which Aziz shows Fielding the picture of his dead wife (and Fielding is culturally aware enough to recognize the depth of this gesture, as if we are brothers now, and how vulnerable it makes Aziz)... still... ... and then they swap notes on their divergent views on the importance of children and carrying on their respective lines, and Aziz marvels at Fielding's professed inclination to remain a bachelor and "travel light"... and when they separate, Fine line, between "kindness" and "patronage"... I'm pleased that they're reaching across the divide, but (no spoilers because I can't remember where the story is going, lol, though I ever-so-vaguely recall having once read it...) I'm not really trusting that their bond will remain strong enough to withstand any real test...

Kathy, :grouphug: . I'm so sorry. re Side Trip to Burma: I did an armchair side trip to Burma a few years ago, in hopes of being able to tag along on a trip Tom was taking... kid logistics ultimately kept me from going in person (some day...) but the books I got through were: Freedom From Fear, by Aung San Suu Kyi (Burma) – September 8, 2013. Response here Everything is Broken: A Tale of Catastrophe in Burma, by Emma Larkin – September 17, 2013. Response here The River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma, by Thant Myint-U – September 22, 2013. Response here Burmese Lessons: A True Love Story, by Karen Connelly – September 24, 2014 From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey, by Pascal Khoo Thwe – September 29, 2013. Response here Burmese Days, by George Orwell – October 3, 2013. Response here Harp of Burma, by Michio Takeyama – October 6, 2013. Response here Smile as they Bow, by Nu Nu Yi – October 11, 2013 re: Orwell's Burmese Days: Orwell is so complicated, isn't he... I actually take a lot of heart from his work-in-progress evolution-over-a-lifetime. I definitely found Burmese Days to be worthwhile, and as you say, intriguing... I just re-read my thoughts from when I finished it and laughed, because he made distinctions between different forms/manifestations of Anglo-Indian racism that very much track to some of the reading a number of us here have been doing closer to home... Jane, I am very much enjoying our Main Excursion into India. I am nearly done with the Mosque section and will check in shortly...

re Oscar Martinez' La Bestia/The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail I have this version, on Kindle, copyright 2014. That's too bad, that your version didn't have the epilogue -- I found it to be quite insightful in laying out that role of "witnessing" that Nan was talking about a couple of weeks ago. I excerpted a little more of it in my blog here. Impressive -- yes.

I dunno, I'm thinking maybe we'd best hold limericks off for another week? Spread the love...

I feel a haiku coming on.

:lol: It really was an exciting moment.

Yeah, I take Laura's and mum's point re: logistics on the other side. It was easy-peasy for Emma to get from the airport into town so we never worried about that bit. Your daughter's end-game will be more complicated. And the cost-of-things really depended. Big things -- health care of course, university fees themselves (even despite how much more non-EU students pay), and apartment rent -- all were substantially cheaper there than their equivalent here. Food to bring home and cook was a little more, food in pub-style restaurants was maybe a little less. Phone service WAY less (and you can easily do it month-to-month rather than long contracts). Sheets and towels, :svengo: , books, sundry items like throw rugs, fabric for curtains, cleaning supplies etc tended to be more.

(((Kathy and son))). I'm so sorry. re: leap year babies -- they really are the coolest. Stella has a friend who is about to turn 3 / 12. Excuse for a BIG celebration.

My daughter spent her first two years of undergraduate at University of Edinburgh (transferred this year back to the US to finish up here). Agree with Laura to start the visa process early -- the long term student visa has several more steps than the tourist or business visas that any of our family members have ever gotten, and the interview appointments back up (at least in NY -- I don't know where your daughter will be going?) in the summer. Get her an unlocked phone so she can get a SIM card there. Don't let any US carrier try to talk you into any kind of "international" plan. Phone service is vastly, vastly cheaper there (most other countries, really) than here. My daughter paid 16 pounds/month for unlimited Europe calls/data/texts, used free Skype on wifi/cellular for her international calls, and her "all-you-can-eat data" still worked here when she was home on vacation. The first year she went I made her limit herself to the 2 bags she could take on her ticket. That turned out to be the wrong call -- things like bed linens and towels are vastly, vastly cheaper here than there, so you're better off going to Target and just paying for the extra bag. As Laura said, she was eligible for an NHS health card. She didn't have any big problems, but was very pleased with the care she got for her sundry little problems. Good outerwear. It really is crazy how much it rains. Congratulations, to you as well as your daughter.