Hil, have you tried "think, pair, share"? You give the class a question that they all think about (you could probably send it via email ahead of time), then you pair up the students to discuss it, then one (or both) of them reports out on their conclusions/ideas. If you pair up the two talkers, the others will have more pressure to step up.

Timelies all!

Mr. S's school is using a hybrid model(3 days in person, 2 virtual), but it is a private school with small classes. Also, they are keeping track of COVID status of students and staff, and adjusting the plan as needed. We're lucky.

One of my friends in Cincinnati still has no clue what her kids are doing for school next week. They're in elementary school, and she doesn't feel it's safe for them to go back to school in person (there's a high-risk person in the house, and they're really too little to trust that they and all their classmates will be taking proper precautions, or to put that kind of pressure on them), so they're supposed to enroll in an online school, but she's been saying that the online school enrollment thing is so screwed up that she's not sure if the older one got enrolled even though she submitted the form, and she wasn't even able to submit the form for the younger one.

T that is bullshit. They can give the person more time if they need more time. Having coworkers donate is BS. Ugh.

Rory refused to even walk down the block, several times today (kept just sitting and refusing to go) whether in his cone or his onesie...and then as soon as we got inside ran downstairs and apparently (I didn’t realize until the smell wafted upstairs) shot ALLL OVER the room. Like, how was there that much poop in one dog, I do not know. Why he couldn’t do that on hardwood (or outdoors!) instead of carpet, I do not know. He hasn’t had an accident indoors for a long time but yikes, that was quite the surprise.

Oh no, meara! How unpleasant.

I listened to a panel of academics talk about the insurrection of January 6th and What It All Means, and it was not encouraging, I'll tell you what.

Oh, Rory. That is not the way.

Not encouraging how, Jesse? Like, society is fucked? Or something else?

Seconding -t, Jesse. Though I feel simultaneously certain that I need more info and that, if you answer, I will regret having asked.

There was a time when I had a glimmer of hope that this terrible year would at the very least push some transformations in things that already weren't working well. It fills like more and more of that is slipping away.

This. And also what ND said. And Volans. There were so many options, over the course of all those terrible months, we could have explored but we as a culture were utterly uninterested in rethinking anything.

Up in Reno, getting ready for bed because my mom has to check in at the ENT center at 5:30 tomorrow morning. The second vaccine dose really knocked me on my ass: chills and fever last night, and today I was so worn out that I lay down and took three separate naps. My mom is stressing out but also firmly focusing on the fact that by this time tomorrow it'll all be over and done and she'll be home again, resting and being fussed over and sternly telling the cat to stop walking on her chest.

Our dad's house is sold, as of about an hour ago, to one of the developers of The Sims and his wife, who used to live in San Francisco and drove up yesterday and walked around the property and fell in love with the land and the view. They have at least one kid and it'll be wonderful to have the place occupied by a whole family, but it also feels deeply strange. I know there are many, many Buffistas who've been through selling or outright losing a family home full of history, good and bad, and what a mess of feelings it brings up. There's definitely a huge dose of pure relief here--settling out the estate has dragged on and on with no end in sight, and one of my brothers especially has been almost totally ground down to a nubbin by it all. It's so good to have one huge piece of it off his plate.

Though I feel simultaneously certain that I need more info and that, if you answer, I will regret having asked.

Less spicy brains, but I am as JZ in this.

I'm glad that the house is sold and not a drain any longer. So hard trying to take care of everything.

Ghost (in the Snow) was a) not a fan of the actual snow we had Sunday and Monday and b) just booted all over her bed in the sunroom-type patio. Said room is not exactly indoors so I cleaned up the still kibble remains of her just eated dinner and will clean more deeply tomorrow. She seems fine otherwise. Could be a lot worse.

Buffista puppers, your humans love you so much; please don't have so many digestive issues indoors. Poor noodles.

And it's yet another Jewish holiday that our community can't celebrate together. Blah. (This one is a relatively low-key holiday, and it actually could pretty easily be done with an outdoor celebration -- it's a holiday for trees, so outdoors is actually on-brand for this -- but really, nobody at this point has the energy to plan something like that.) And I didn't plan ahead well enough to even get some almonds and dates, which are the foods that we're supposed to have.