Part of the plan was that we'd all play together and thereby increase our time spent together and our communication, but that never happened, so I stopped buying consoles.
When 2nd son #sonTwo was in college, one of his roommates had a family that his family "inherited" as servants for more than a century. So it appears that some enslaved people still remain.
@simsa04 #sonOne tells me that #GS1 is taking one college class and that he's got a history of walking into relatively decent paying jobs even without training.
He suggests that #GS2 may need a psychiatric evaluation for something like ADHD. But he's living with his grandmother, so there's no one to make sure it happens.
For some reason, I thought it was a couple of years earlier.
Memory says I saw it back when Wednesday was movie day for me and #sonOne, and that we saw it together. For some reason, I thought we'd stopped by that time ( 1998-08-19 ).
I didn't really have friends stay overnight, but one of my brothers frequently did. So much that when some of his friends got kicked out, they came to stay with us.
I did see a change between when #sonOne (1st son) grew up and when #sonTwo (2nd son) came along ten years later, but that pales in comparison to the article.
@simsa04 @lohang I love it when people can disagree, even disagree strongly on important issues, and still remain friends and be kind to one another.
That's one of the things that I really love about #sonTwo. We don't agree about everything, and yet we can disagree without enmity. #sonOne is rather rigid about such things, so one must not speak about such topics. ( And #Daddy_A is just now learning that conflict avoidance is not always desirable, so only now has he started to speak up about such issues. )
Oh, the actress who plays Rey! #TIL, and that's probably the one media-related thing I should have already known.
I'm already used to not knowing who a "famous" performer is because I've essentially been away from the world of media since the 1980s, with exceptions in the 1990s for my weekly movie with #sonOne when he was in high school and a year or two when a friend decided to try to catch me up by recording the best TV shows on VHS to play for me during my weekly visits.
@fu Unfortunately, most families cannot home school because the adult(s) are too busy working and / or not educationally able. And that's even if they can meet their state's requirements for home schooling.
So if they cannot pay for private school, they usually have to rely upon public schools.
In my case, #sonOne got into the public continuation high school and only returned to the regular public high school for the last semester, so he could graduate. #sonTwo and #Daddy_A got into publicly-funded charter schools (and 2nd son also spent one school year doing a home school program through the continuation school when a lung infection prevented attendance). All three had suffered violence at the public schools (high school and middle schools) before getting into alternative programs, so I am definitely in favor of making alternatives available.
And what does some pointy-headed educrat in Washington DC know about the needs of students in a much less urban part of SoCal? Nothing! But because of top-down rules, the local school districts cannot respond to local needs even if they wanted to (hint: they don't want to respond to local needs; they just want to pass the next district and campus administration staff pay raises).
#sonOne graduated from a public high school that was also a continuation school. He had gone there for the continuation program after repeated fights and a couple of medical issues in the main public high school, but once he caught up, he transferred to the regular high school program. (I knew the school wasn't responsive to medical issues, because I had a friend [now deceased] who had attended there while dealing with a life-threatening condition which eventually took his life.)
#sonTwo graduated from a charter school that is funded with public dollars. He also attended a medical home school program through the same continuation school that his older brother attended, but as soon as he recovered, he wanted out because that school had too much homework. Two of his elementary school friends moved out of state partly because of the poor quality of the public middle school he attended.
I remember one time, while he was on home schooling, we went to a local McDonald's for the day. We had breakfast and lunch there, while he did his schoolwork. There was a lady doing the same thing with her little boy. The toilets weren't all that clean, so when I needed to go, I left my kid there with the lady (and a long-time employee whom I knew) watching him, while I went to a nearby store. Later on, the lady needed to go, and I watched her kid while she went to the store. (That McD's now has a sign saying that their dining room is for up to 30 minutes use only.)
#Daddy_A graduated from a different charter school that is partially funded with public dollars. He went there after his public middle school experienced several race-related fights that spread from a nearby public high school.
Despite the public schools failing all three of them, the alternatives they used existed because we have public funding for schools. In each case, for different reasons, completely home schooling the child was not a realistic alternative, nor was getting into one of the area's paid and privately funded church schools. Even so, I did know a woman who was able to get grants and part-time on-campus work to send her three sons to a church school instead of the public middle school after her oldest got mononucleosis and the school demanded that he return to campus despite not having recovered.
In the middle early 1990s, I remember wanting to start a "Desert Launch Project" to build a commercial space launch facility in one of California's desert areas. At the time, I was outside of any urban or even micro-urban municipal boundaries, and the stars were so abundant and so bright that they seemed to be just a little higher than my hands could reach.
I know that #sonTwo, at least, remembers me taking him to have a star night with my mom. #sonOne, being ten years older, had fewer such nights, but he might also remember. (I'm pretty sure that #Daddy_A never got that opportunity.) My mom was a volunteer in a local science program, so she interacted regularly with amateur and professional astronomers. (Years later, I met some people around 1st son's age who told me "Your mom is so cool! She used to teach us about [some aspect of astronomy] and [some software used on Macintosh computers of that time].") Someone even gave her a telescope.
Alas, it was a time of great struggle just to provide basic necessities for myself, so building a team and seeking funding was never going to happen. DLP was an idea that never went beyond "just an idea". I wouldn't even call it still born, as it never even became an embryo.