Oh no! We lost power for several days a month ago (? My sense of time is seriously off with anything going on to reference). We had a freak wind storm blow through that took out some 100 year old trees around us, but nothing that bad. Sorry about the car, but the house would have been much worse. Still, the car makes me sad. Can’t tell from the rear whether it will run, but body work is going to be the problem because it seems to have bent all the roof structure and multiple side panels. I haven’t had a tree fall on one, but have had one poor car rear ended and hit a deer at separate times - the electrical was also never the same after being hit in the rear - that car was cursed. Stay safe especially with the generator and a dangling power line. I will definitely be praying for your power to be back on soon!

Now that I look at the center for lit description more closely, do you think it is enough to be a credit in us history? Some of the books are long, but there is only two hours of discussion a month.

Thanks! Not sure why my email from them only seemed to bring up the middle school class as I had a high schooler enrolled last year. It does look very interesting.

I was excited to see this, but then disappointed when I realized it was targeted at the middle school level.

Th bolded is so very true! My good friend jokes that all our mistakes are just giving our kids something to talk about in therapy. With limited knowledge and limited time there is always something that doesn’t get done or could have been done differently/better.

My daughter just said that should be on a t shirt

Madame Bovary and Candide - my semester of French lit did not inspire me to read it again ever in my life. The Russian literature was better, but I was not mature enough for Anna Karenina especially cramming it in over Christmas vacation. I have been meaning to read that again. my high school AP Physics text - not worth the paper it was written on and it was written on a lot of paper. Poor trees...

In general, I have tried to avoid made in China for decades, but have doubled down since the pandemic. Not keen that most of the fabric comes from China, but sewn here is a step in the right direction. I have a mix of homemade by my mom and purchased Made in USA masks. No one is going to call me an environmental activist, but I don’t think disposable masks for everyone are the answer. The ones showing up here are super thin and I find them out everywhere littering the ground.

Any neighbor with a big dog that needs walking? Like a German Shepard?

I don’t think anyone is saying people are printing fake ballots. The bigger issue is mailing unrequested ballots to every single voter who may or may not still be living at that address or living at all gives plenty of extra real ballots floating around - Chicago has a long standing reputation for voter fraud on a large scale, dead people voting and such shenanigans. Add in the fact that the post office can barely get the regular mail delivered on time and without losing it - how are they suddenly going to be able to handle a massive influx of time sensitive material? I requested a petition by mail and it showed up a month after it was supposed to arrive...a month! The outcry will be that we found more ballots at the post office or they arrived late and it will just feed the fire of whether the election results for any office is valid. At a minimum, massive mail in voting will certainly delay the election results.

This is my 14th year of homeschooling and I have my first senior. Yikes! That alone makes me feel like a newbie. Especially when you have taught the child since birth, this college admissions process feels like a personal critique of both parent and child for a homeschool mom. Still, I feel like I ceased to be a newbie when I quit having to decide every year if we were going to continue and just assumed we were continuing unless something big changed (like approaching high school). If I went by not tweaking and changing then I would still be a newbie...I get bored with the same thing every time I teach a grade. I don’t know how PS teachers deal with the same curriculum every.single.year.

When you spoke to admissions did you mention that she is dual enrolled and already taking college level classes? I would think that might put her in a slightly different category than a homeschool student with no outside grading.

My daughter took two years to finish the algebra 2 & trig text. I have looked at several places that use the text and there doesn’t seem to be one single way to treat it. MWOB strongly suggests the precalculus book (quoted above). Veritas Press Online uses the text over two years for a credit of Algebra 2 and a credit of Precalculus. Kolbe awards a credit of algebra 2 for finishing a portion of the book and a credit of honors algebra 2 for finishing the whole book. Kolbe also offers a precalculus course, but they do state if you received and A in honors algebra 2 you can skip precalculus. My very long ago experiences with high school math are blurry, but I did intentionally opt out of honors math (my dad wasn’t a fan of things that were “harder than they needed to be” and he put honors stuff into that category). I remember about 4 things from precalculus- an exchange student from Barcelona sat next to me, the senior sitting in front of me wanted to be a forensic scientist (this was before CSI and I had never heard of it before), trigonometry was cool, and I didn’t care for the class. Except for some of the trig, everything was review and since we weren’t allowed to use a calculator and had never even seen a graphing calculator, the class was SO VERY tedious...look up trig functions in the table, plot points by hand for every.single.function...it took forever. I didn’t like it at the time and then I was super offended when I got to Calculus and realized with not too much effort we could have looked at the equation and sketched the graphs of all those functions that I had spent so much busywork plotting the year before. It was like reading the instruction manual after doing the work and realizing there was a much easier way. With a younger kid, I would be very likely to do a year of precalculus. If a student struggled at all in the Algebra 2 & trig book, I would do a year of precalculus. If you didn’t actually finish the whole book, I would do a year of precalculus. If you did the whole book and the student did well and you did it diligently over two years, I think there is enough material there to designate it as algebra 2 and precalculus.

I really like my kitchen aid tilt head mixer that I purchased before I got married and I haven’t tried others. The problem is the tilt head style I have is probably a smaller capacity than you are looking for. I don’t particularly like the larger sizes where the bowl sits on the arms.. For one thing it won’t store under an upper cabinet.

I think a lot of it has to be, I am home now so what could be so hard about chickens? I know I don’t have much generational knowledge about poultry except I do know they belong outside and aren’t cuddly pets like a puppy dog. Not that I want one of those either on a suburban lot.

On the transcript and course description, what do those of us do who aren’t super sure what our exact plan is? My daughter is considering taking a couple of DE classes in the winter term, but hasn’t decided for sure. Can we just say calculus and then for the final transcript possibly label it differently? I assume it is always ok to do more than was stated in the fall.

Erase my memory all you want if I can come home with blue bell ice cream with snickers on top! I miss blue bell from college as it isn’t sold up north...boo.

No help here, but it is something I would love to do!

Never seen them before, but they are very pretty! I would need to learn how to write as beautifully as the example pages to do it justice.

Jesus and an open church where we can celebrate Mass My husband and children My husband on has to go into work 2days/week, every other week and there is almost no one there - maybe 200 people in the size of a shopping mall. No talk at all yet about sending more people back. Homeschooling - so glad that we already do it and like a previous poster said I don’t have to be involved in the back to school drama Air conditioning My dishwasher/washer/dryer Electricity - our power went out a few weeks ago

I like lemon tea or some of the tevana flavors like youth berry in the afternoon. My pick me up of choice in college when working all night on lab reports was a Route 44 (the big one) cherry lime-aid from sonic. Sugar!!! I actually don’t have to drink it, just thinking about it makes me jump. I believe much of it is the action of drinking it and attitude. Caffeine never kept me up except when pregnant, but my cup of coffee in the morning makes me happy mostly because of the routine created around it.

I would agree with AirBnB in most situations, but she said SIL broke a leg and is in a wheelchair. I think most house rentals are not going to be set up for that as well as a hotel. I would go with rooms 2 and 3 if you can afford it. As you said, it is your vacation and you are taking on a lot as tour director. You need your sleep!

Yet we also need to remember that those countries who supposedly have it under control probably really don’t unless they want to stay in isolation for a long time. Also, most European countries as I assume you are referring to are about the size of a state in the US with the ability to control their borders.

Here on my side of the state they keep talking about “spikes”, but the hospitals are all advertising for people to please come back and schedule all the stuff they put off back in March/April. Flattening the curve was never elimination, but postponement. Some people seem confused and want to change the definition.

Well, when you have two viable parties and many, many millions of voters in this country, the odds that you are going to agree with either side completely are pretty darn slim. I have some non-negotiable items and I vote accordingly. The candidate does not have to be someone I “like”, that I would want to have dinner with, or even be around. For the most part, very few of the presidents were probably people I would have wanted for a friend or neighbor....the people I like would rarely make effective politicians. I agree about voting for who will uphold the Constitution and would add maintain the rule of law.