I just listed our house. Realtor had it $10k less than our realtors suggestion and Zillow had it $10k more than our realtor.

I don't know which is more accurate, but I know on Realtor they have a graph that shows 3 or 4 different analysis, which show that particular house value over a period of several months or years. I'd rather use a figure that was an aggregate of several analyses than just one.

At some point I think I think we have to acknowledge that this is the goal for some. There are people for whom the goal really is to stop the vaccine and let deaths do what they do.

While at the same time calling it personal responsibility just to gas light everyone. 🤦‍♀️

I know 1 person who was advised to wait to get the vaccine. After a few months of something improving in blood work (I don’t remember what) they were advised that to go get it and did. But that was only 1 person out of dozens.

The one person I know who was advised to wait on the vaccine was not interested in being cautious. Never locked down, still did gatherings, only masked when absolutely required, even though there were many risk factors that would have made a bad outcome likely in the case of catching COVID. Several family members are at high risk for poor outcomes if they got COVID, but they aren’t interested in being safe or getting the vaccine. It’s a Russian roulette mentality mixed with YouTube expertise that makes them think this is all over blown.

Not until my kids were grown. I’ve always heard that statistically the most dangerous person in a child’s life is an unrelated male in the home, aka moms boyfriend. So nope. Maybe a companion after that but not a marriage.

I pointed her to the local CVS. I can see why she’s put it off. Doing anything with littles is a huge undertaking.

I just had a friend ask on Facebook for where to get the COVID shot. She said she had procrastinated long enough and needed to just get it done already. So that was interesting. Access where we are is easy, but she has 3 kids under 3 and doing anything at all is complicated. She can get it done, but it will take effort and coordination and I guess she’s just been putting off.

I can think of 3 people I know who aren’t yet vaccinated but either plan to get it, or aren’t against it. 1 had Covid and doesn’t think he needs the vaccine He’s waiting for more definitive info showing one way or the other. Doesn’t mask, always thought masks were stupid. 1 is not comfortable getting the vaccine while pregnant but plans to get it once the baby is born. Still masks. 1 was waiting for her doctors to say she was healthy enough to get it. She actually just got the ok and got her first shot. Stopped wearing a mask prior to getting vaccinated. I can think of 10 people easily that have no plan to get vaccinated, think it’s “drinking the kool aid”, dangerous, “only for sheeple”, etc. etc. All of them only masked when required, never did the distancing, and have all stopped masking entirely. So I know 1 unvaccinated person who is still masking and at least 12 who are unvaccinated and are out there unmasked without a care.

In the part where you quoted me I specifically said “those who are against the vaccine” not “all unvaccinated”. If someone is waiting for full approval, or waiting for a good time to get off work, or waiting until they deliver a baby, I wouldn’t consider those people to be against the vaccine, they are just not yet vaccinated. Those who are rabidly against the vaccine are a different group. I do know some of the “not yet vaccinated” who are still masking and being safe. But they pale in comparison to the number of people that I know who are rabidly against the vaccine, are done with masks, think the whole thing was a hoax anyway and are back to life as usual. Pretending those people don’t exists doesn’t make any sense.

I don’t know or care about keeping Fauci or not, but yes, there is no one on the planet that both sides will listen too. And if such a person existed it would take 1 news cycle for that person to be excoriated the minute he or she started saying hey, ya’ll get the darn vaccine already. Mr. Rogers, Dolly Parton, Kermit the Frog. As soon as they said Covid is real and the vaccine is good they would become Fauci 2.0 in a heartbeat. It’s not the messenger, it’s the message. Those against the vaccine do not want to hear that it’s safe and effective. They want to hear their own opinion, that it causes infertility and kills people, and isn’t needed bc Covid is a hoax, come out of the mouth of a National public health official.

I think you are right, but I also think it’s impossible. There are too many people that fear the contact tracing as being nefarious. There’s weird religious stuff mixed up in it, with the mark of the beast stuff. Cooperating with contact tracers is seen as turning people in to the authorities. I don’t know why so many people are like that, but I don’t think it’s fixable in the short to medium term. I also truly do not think there is anyone that could replace Fauci as someone both sides trust, because there is no such person, and if there was, the minute he or she started saying the pro public health things they would be demonized by the same people that hate Fauci. A living apple pie wrapped in an American flag would be demonized in that position. If it were possible for Big Pharma to find a cheap treatment for this, they could always jack the price way up and reap pure profit, like they do with insulin.

Close Reads and The Plays the Thing are ones that I like that I think of as homeschool adjacent. Arts of Language by Andrew Pudwa The Bravewriter podcast. Good Enough Homeschool Those are all ones I listen to regularly.

Fox News has argued in court that no one takes them seriously. So there is that. https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-believe-the-facts-tucker-carlson-tells-you-so-say-fox-s-lawye Now comes the claim that you can't expect to literally believe the words that come out of Carlson's mouth. And that assertion is not coming from Carlson's critics. It's being made by a federal judge in the Southern District of New York and by Fox News's own lawyers in defending Carlson against accusations of slander. It worked, by the way.

Africa. Only 1% of Africa is vaccinated. I must have only half listened to a podcast and got the Africa stat mixed up with the whole world stats. I knew something was only 1%.

That’s better! I knew it was something low. Now I have to figure why 1% is in my brain. 🤦‍♀️

That's a really good point. We have just over 50% of the country vaxed against COVID and only like 1% of the world. The measles and Polio are around 90% of the country. Pertussis is 80%. That's just a world of difference. That's the difference between heard immunity and not.

The difference there is that rubella and measles are one, discrete virus, where as what we call the flu is a category or family of virus. There are dozens of flu viruses. Being vaccinated against 1 gives minimal protection against 2-25. I have learned through all of the COVID stuff that some of the difference is how fast a virus attacks the body. The way I heard it explained is that it takes a certain amount of time for the body to spin up an immune response to a virus and it takes each virus a certain amount of time to make you sick. With measles your immunized body can spin up a response faster than the measles can get a chance to make you sick. The flu virus is faster at attacking than the measles virus, but your body is still working at the same speed. So the flu vaccine is just simply not as effective because of the nature of the virus. I think we tend to think of "virus" as one sort of thing, but that's not right. One virus can be as different from the other as one mammal is from another. You need a different sort of thing to fight off a squirrel than a hippo, than a killer whale, even though all of those are mammals. Same with measles and flu, or Covid, or HIV.

I think that's a misunderstanding of vaccines. I can see where that idea might come from, when you have really high vaccination rates it's very similar to having the disease eliminated. But we've only ever eradicated 1 disease with vaccination, smallpox. We keep coming sooo close with polio, but keep missing it. Vaccines are to prevent serious injury and death, not 100% of infections. Breakthrough infections still happen, that's a known thing. My fully vaccinated child got whooping cough for example. But he survived it and only had what the doctor called a mild case. Medical definitions for "mild" are different than a lay persons definition, because that was a perfectly miserable couple of weeks and it lingered for months. ETA: I think some of the difference is between what vaccines do for an individual and what they do for a community. For the individual the make it far, far less likely that you will personally get the disease, and nearly eliminate the chance of getting so sick that you die from it if you do. If a community is fully vaccinated, enough to reach herd immunity, you have very nearly effectively eliminated the disease in that community. Its a two-fold plan.

I don’t know about racist, I couldn’t get very far into it because it was so dull. So so dry.

Is there a good place to go punch in my zip code and find out?

HR knows for the most part. Really expensive stuff usually needs FMLA leave and that requires documentation. It’s hard to hide a 30 day ICU stay from COVID or time off for heart transplant. Hippa doesn’t prevent anyone from knowing. It prevents them from sharing what they know with outside entities.

I get that. I loved Super Nanny when my oldest was little. I learned a lot. Her time out method worked perfectly for my younger son. Now apparently her time out method is seen as separating the child from the parent too much? Or something? Which, I can kind of see, a little bit, because her time out method was a quick failure with my youngest who is anxious and has separation issues despite being a perfect fit for her brother. But I hate throwing the baby out with the bath water. Super Nanny style timeouts, along with her emphasis on connection and fun outside of those times are soo much better than spanking or yelling or holding arms up. It probably doesn’t work for all kids, but ugh, I don’t see that as a reason to throw the whole thing out.

Thank you! That's interesting about the diffuser, I never understood the point of those, that's helpful.