Yes, in that case I'd be on the phone a fair amount too! I used to call DH at work all the time, and email when possible.

I talk to people online here while working on the computer/printer (we print labels for a living, and there is a lot of sitting next to the printer involved). None of my hobbies involve direct in-time contact with other people, although they do involve not-in-time contact with other people (that is to say, reading, crafts, business, etc.)

Lunch is I think frozen fish filets and frozen vegetables (obviously un-frozen). The GD is hitting me hard right about now and I am tired. Not-quite-cooking is the name of the day. Breakfast was peanut butter on bread and blueberries; dinner might be black eyed peas and more frozen veg. (if I can talk DD12 into making the black eyed peas - you literally just put them in a pot with water and salt).

Some of us are more introverted I think :) The people I have regular contact with, I am physically with all day long. I don't call my sister or my mother or my friends or my kids or my husband. I do look things up on the internet, though - on a desktop. I appreciate the freedom of information that the internet provides, but my kids don't really need it much, or use it to find information - the information they need is largely information I have. But mine are smallish, the oldest is 12. None of the 9 and under crowd needs the internet for anything at all, really. The 12 year old uses it for her online Latin class and it's been great for her but if there were local options she'd be fine. She gets recipes from cookbooks at home; we don't go out to eat so we don't read menus; I don't take a lot of photos of the kids (or really any at all, except on vacation a couple of times a year, and for those we use disposable cameras and get the film developed at wal-mart). I dunno, people are just different I guess.

I'm not Sparkly (obviously) but I don't have a cell phone except for emergencies, and the only thing we use our main phone for (the land line) is the maybe 3x a year that an extended family member calls or to make a doctor's appt (and we almost never go to the doctor). Most communication is between us in person, some (especially business communication or talking to family or whatever) is through email.

Doing nothing is good for you - there's a lot of value to boredom, in that it spurs (imo) brain development and creativity. But too much of anything is not good for you. Obviously solitary confinement is not good for you, but a little more boredom would not hurt most modern kids or adults, imo. There is of course a balance.

Hope you can sleep! I agree about the prescription cough syrup. DH needed it once - just for a couple of days, but without it he was coughing all day and night, which exacerbated the bronchitis, which made for more coughing, etc. He doesn't ever take prescription drugs, but two days of the cough syrup made a huge difference.

I found the moral certainty of the author of The Glass Castle off-putting.

She can answer the questions, but if admission is guaranteed (and merit money is guaranteed) via test scores and GPA, what is the worry really?

My grandmother took opioids regularly for maybe the last 5-7 years of her life after a bout with shingles. I don't know whether she had chronic pain or was just addicted or both; there was no effort made to suggest alternatives to her. It made her unable to live alone and also unable to do a lot of the things she'd done before - she couldn't drive herself much of anywhere so she lost touch with a lot of her normal community, etc. When she did die, of oral cancer, they didn't have a lot to offer her in the way of pain management.

The good bits of the movie, incidentally, were the parts Winston Churchill had already written for them 75 years ago! I can see where the aristocratic nature could put people off, but his mind and especially his oratory were, to me, exceptional enough and in tune with the times enough that I didn't need to see him doing things Winston Churchill would not have done and did not do in order to be interested in him. But I could go on about Churchill, and that is another thread. I will say that the kids saw the new Jumanji recently and liked it okay; I got the old one for them and they thought it was great. I don't remember liking it a bunch as a kid - I was easily frightened, I think - but they loved it. I would like to talk DH into watching Dunkirk but he's uninterested as he says he already knows what happens. Which I guess is true, but doesn't bother me about movies.

Yes, maybe that's why they felt they had to add the stupid not-real stuff; for some reason they couldn't make a compelling movie out of the real person and the real events (which honestly I think is a remarkable failure, as he was a compelling person and it was an exceptionally compelling time), so they added these sort of humanizing, almost Americanizing scenes. They just read as so that-did-not-happen that it took me out of the movie.

And yes, I felt the same way about the eggs! Poirot is not mean-spirited. The egg thing made him seem mean-spirited almost from the beginning. I also didn't see what the set-up scene really did for the frame of the movie (I admit that I turned it off before they ever got on the train, so maybe I missed something). The David Suchet version of Murder on the Orient Express, on the other hand, also had a set-up scene that was not in the book, but it was a very good frame to the plot and theme of the movie and showed Poirot in both his humanity and his righteousness. That is one thing I like very much about the Poirot series - David Suchet makes Poirot a better character than Christie does, I think. He actually adds something to him (without negating anything from the book Poirot); he becomes not only the sometimes self-righteous Poirot of the books but the sometimes righteous Poirot of the tv series. (I've been watching these episodes while working recently and have been rather taken with them. Last time I liked a TV show was Battlestar Galactica, if that's any indication of how pleased I am to find something to watch).

Oooh, I'll try that for sure! We are big Churchill fans here. Darkest Hour was time-limited too, but I wasn't convinced by Gary Oldman and I was pretty appalled at the adding of sort of Americanized touches to make Churchill more, I don't know, personable? Palatable? Man-of-the-people? It wasn't even a movie made by Americans! But just, the anachronisms.

DH and I try to watch a lot of movies - we wait until they're available on Amazon, then rent or more often buy them. I would say we get through the entirety of maybe 15% of them. So recently we watched Darkest Hour - it wasn't terrible terrible, but pretty bad, imo. Why do they have to put stuff in that Definitely Did Not Happen (the king coming to visit him at night, the subway ride with all the "commoners" or whatever and quoting Cicero, etc.)? It just discredits the whole idea. I tried La La Land finally in a fit of boredom and it was indeed so boring that I quit about 1/3 of the way in. Just - nothing had happened! Watched the first 10 minutes of the new Murder on the Orient Express, in which Kenneth Branaugh (Poirot) inexplicably steps in sh#% and then steps in it with the other foot to even it out, or something. Just - no. Did Poirot ever do this? I have only read about half the Poirot books but I feel like he definitely did not. David Suchet was a much, much better Poirot. Watched all of The Star with the kids - DH and I had no idea it was the Christmas story, thought it was just some inspiring tale about an animated donkey. Was not a terrible movie. Watched The Nice Guys, also not terrible. Not particularly poignant or memorable, but watchable. Watched The Foreigner, a Jackie Chan/ Pierce Brosnan movie. Entertaining. Watched The King's Choice, a Norwegian movie about WW2 in Norway. Excellent movie. Watched Fury (WW2 tank movie from 2014). Not like the greatest movie ever, but some good parts, esp. when there is tank fighting. Shia LeBouf, who I normally think of as somewhat stupid and not all there, was good. Tried Apache Warrior, gave up after 10 minutes. Watched The Pirates of Somalia, pretty good. Reasonably genuine, kind-hearted. Tried Wonder Woman, unwatchably stupid. Tried Mad Max-Fury Road, exceptionally stupid. Stylized but not a lot of there there. Watched Mayhem - violent (very violent) but not a bad movie overall. Tried Hangman, gave up after 5 minutes. Nonsensical. Watched Wind River - not particularly remarkable and quite depressing but well made. Tried The Survivalist - do not try this movie. OMG dumb.

We used to have several of the folding mattresses. We are short and light people, so that may be a consideration. I found them more comfortable than real beds. I feel like this is the one we have: https://www.amazon.com/Inches-Solid-Dark-Trifold-White/dp/B00WVLVXFM/ref=sr_1_38?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1520713874&sr=1-38&keywords=japanese+folding+mattress Although mine had a lot more reviews, so it must have been from a different company. But it was 4" thick, smaller than a twin, and about $70. I had I think two blue ones and a red one. They were great.

Possibly they shipped it to the wrong person by mistake, and that person returned it, and the refunded your account?

I used to run the "pitch in when something needs doing" model instead of the regular chore model, but I realized that my less conscientious kids in this model were both displacing the burden towards the more conscientious kids (because if I said "hey, can you go do this for me" it was almost always to the most competent kid who was least likely to whine about it) and they weren't learning how to do a new chore, ever, because for some of them it really takes a long time to learn one. So I could never ask DS9 to do the dishes because he didn't really know how and it took him 2 hours. It only took DD12 30 minutes and she didn't make a fuss, so I always asked her. That's not really fair, though, once DS9 is really old enough to do the dishes in 40 minutes if he just practices at it for a while, so now we are doing fairly regular assigned chores - although of course of DS9 is asleep, or is having a very busy day, someone else will do them and he can do that person's work later, or something. I don't have charts or anything.

My parents never forced me to do chores either - not one time. I learned to cook, clean, use a mop, etc. after I'd left home. It didn't hurt me either, except maybe that cooking took me a few years to learn and DH and I ate a lot of frozen pizzas the first year. But I don't make my kids clean for their development. I do it because otherwise the house would not be clean. When I was a kid it was just me and my little sister (so two girls), and my dad was retired and had time to clean and cook and etc. If I had just two kids and no job, I'd probably do 95% of the housework.

2-3 weeks is not long enough for even conscientious, attentive, good executive function kids to learn to do a new chore well and without complaint, ime. I'd give it 4-6 months at the same task, so they've done it say 150-200 times, before worrying. 2-3 weeks is nothing.

I thought women committed a huge percentage of domestic violence? Like almost half?

And talk about letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. No parent is going to be able to be perfectly demonstrative and loving and have no boundaries of their own; people like that don't exist, and if they do I'm afraid of them. The idea that not being perfectly nurturing in every aspect is equivalent to being unkind (not to mention equivalent to abuse!) is insanity. If that is the standard, they'll have neither foster parents nor real parents left that they find suitable to care for children.

It's like that Kafka book I hated, The Trial. Unreal and so infuriating without any satisfactory recourse to actual justice. I'm so sorry.

That makes sense for writing, it is a very different thing.

Just for anyone reading who runs a small business, I don't know about the writing world so it may be different, but the stats say that you should respond to negative reviews. Obviously not with a chip on your shoulder - that is a bad idea. But it is also a bad idea to leave negative reviews unaddressed. If they are legitimate, (ex: You shipped my labels 3 days late and never responded to my last conversation!!!!), you apologize and explain both how you will/have fixed this customer's issue and how you will avoid making the same mistake(s) in the future (ex: I'm sorry, they did go out a few days late. We've been running behind this week and should have sent you an email to notify you of the delay; I've issued a refund for your shipping cost. We've extended our processing times to leave a little more cushion for busy times in the future). If they are illegitimate (ex: I had to pay import taxes of $15 just to pick up these labels and they were much smaller than I thought they would be and the seller wouldn't put a different value on the customs form so that I wouldn't have to pay the taxes!!!!), you explain calmly and somewhat impersonally why the issue they're complaining about is not legitimate, if possible expressing some sympathy with their disappointment (ex: Unfortunately it is a crime in the US for us to lie on the customs form about the cost of purchase. I wish you didn't have to pay import taxes either :) The size of the labels is something you selected from the first drop-down menu when making the purchase; you did select the smallest size. We can make them at almost any size you like in the future, though, up to 4" wide.)