Dillo is usually too rambunctious to eat enough dinner at dinnertime, so sometimes he really is hungry. Also, he plays his daddy by asking for snacks at bedtime and dilly-dallying.

Oh my. This is my son to a T. The latest is that if you go to bed hungry because you refuse to eat at dinner, so be it. I guess you'll be hungry. It's the natural consequence of not eating. The downside is that hungry is also the natural impetus to being up at 4:00 AM bothering mom.

In some ways, Grace's g-tube is a blessing. She eats so quickly and on schedule and her full meal without one of us begging her to please sit down and eat. Ditto for meds. No coaxing, just a push into the stomach.

Tommy, I thought there was still plenty of oil, it's just not sitting in convenient pools that can be extracted with a a pipe and a pump. Isn't there a lot of oil still in shale and stuff?

::hugs new hybrid::

Tommy, I thought there was still plenty of oil, it's just not sitting in convenient pools that can be extracted with a a pipe and a pump. Isn't there a lot of oil still in shale and stuff?

Well, there's still plenty of oil; it's just that we've used up the easy-to-get-to stuff. What remains is hard and expensive to get to, and we just can't pump it out of the ground fast enough to meet the current level of demand.

Most of the world's oil fields are experiencing declines in production, even as they adopt more extreme measures to get the remaining oil out of those oil fields. It's the nature of the business.

There is a whole bunch of potential oil in oil-shale. It's expensive and environmentally harmful to convert to petroleum, but when the price of conventional oil gets high enough those concerns will fall away.

When oil-shale derived petroleum becomes cost-competitive, then suddenly the USA becomes one of the countries with a huge reserve of oil.

From what I've read, they won't be able to ramp up oil shale production fast enough to compensate for the declines in production of existing oil fields. I mean, most major projects to increase oil production would take about ten years to ramp up.

From what I've read, they won't be able to ramp up oil shale production fast enough to compensate for the declines in production of existing oil fields.

But that would imply that oil companies are more interested in short-term profit versus long-term stability. What are the odds of that happening?

Random question for well-travelled ladies: I'm reading this info I just got about the Greece/Turkey trip I'm taking, and it says that women should wear "long skirts or slacks to cover their legs" for some of the religious places. How long is long? Covering the knees or longer than that? Is it different for churches v. mosques?

"long skirts or slacks to cover their legs" for some of the religious places

My experience has been "cover your ankles". But I'm sure others have more recent info.

I would say ankle length if slacks would cover as well.

I wore things to my ankles and long sleeves in Ethiopia, also a shawl to cover my head. I remember places in Germany in the 80s and some places in Italy in the early 00s that would not allow tank tops and shorts. I carried a cardigan in Italy.