I've been dithering for weeks about trying to visit my dad for a couple of days in mid-May, between the end of my spring semester and beginning of my summer term. I need to find a few outstanding tax documents (from both 2019 and 2020 tax years) I'm sure he has in his house (I have the rest) and get those finally filed. I want to see for myself ( Read more... )

So, I'm already seeing holiday gift suggestions popping up everywhere, from store-specific to "Best 25 gifts for her" or whatever. And I know that we will probably have to act earlier than usual for deliveries to arrive in time, at least in the US, where our postal system is currently floundering. But never, in the history of ever, have I seen a ( Read more... )

It just so happened that I had to add gas/petrol to my car today. While I was doing that, I remembered that many years ago, gas/petrol had been roughly 4x as expensive in Europe as it was here in the US. Is it still that approx ratio? What about other locations in the world ( Read more... )

Prompted by a random thought as I was driving by one of the numerous horse farms in our area today, one which, in this case, offered therapeutic horse riding ( Read more... )

Could somebody British (or otherwise better informed than I am) explain the Brexit mess to me? I keep reading about how Parliament keeps rejecting deals. But nobody has said what the deals involve and why they're being rejected. If there are no deals, what is the implication? Brexit doesn't happen? It still happens but the EU will refuse to ( Read more... )

Thank you SO MUCH, all of you who offered suggestions for my mom's birthday. Some of them I knew would probably not work for her, for various reasons, and some had definite potential but I was unsure how to go about them, or was still on the fence as to whether or not she'd appreciate them as much as I hoped. But all of the ideas were well- ( Read more... )

A friend of mine has a daughter at the Univ of Maryland. Apparently she's taking a government class that is practicing political analysis of various sorts. Her class has created a survey to help them with this project. If you have a spare 5-10 mins, would you be willing to participate? It's completely anonymous. I suspect that US residents are ( Read more... )

( Inside the mind of the adolescent brain )

FOOD QUESTION: I have a billion cherry tomatoes from our garden. What can I do with them? If they were regular tomatoes, I'd skin them, seed them, and make tomato sauce, but there's no way I'm doing that with a zillion tiny buggers. What else can I make ( Read more... )

All right, people. Without using Google, Siri, or any other form of cheating research, can you tell me: Who is Sonia Sotomayor? (Yes, I know who she is.) But there's a reference to her in a currently popular movie, and it couldn't be more obvious, from the lack of audience reaction, that nobody knows who she is. And to that, all I can say is ( Read more... )