jh- Just another little dip into the pension fund, and you could be blasting some artificial sun with one of these setups. I have the ballast and the bulb (metal halide) and it rocks... Here is a link that might be useful: ipower mh bulb, ballast and hood

After looking up Alvin Ailey, I really appreciate your kind words, dcarch and everyone. Now, on to Daughter-san. Her year has been consumed with the college application process and with finishing high school. Getting into college is not what it was when I was a kid; it is much harder and more stressful today. Kids seem much better prepared, admissions are more competitive, and college costs are an order of magnitude higher. It is easy for kids and their parents to get sucked into the vortex of expectations, ambition and status. We got pulled partway into that mess, but thanks mostly to Daughter-san's level head, we got through it. She will be attending the Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon. It is a smallish liberal arts honors college of 700 students, with their own building, faculty, advisors, and dorm, in the midst of a 30,000 student university. I think she'll have the best of both worlds - a small school with personal attention, and a big school with a diverse student body and endless things to do. She'll be about two hours from home, which seems to me like a nice distance, and will allow her to come home when she wants to, to have her little brother visit, but keep mom and dad mostly out of her hair. The university has a biology program, which is her science interest, and also a full fine arts program (BFA, MFA, design, etc) which is her non-science interest. There is talk of a double major. Finally, Eugene is one of the most livable towns in Oregon, where a bicycle is accepted and adequate transportation. Naturally, I look forward to fitting out her bike for college duty; any excuse to wrench on bicycles is welcome. Because we'll pay in-state tuition, and she's getting some scholarships by reason of being a National Merit Scholar finalist, the cost is manageable and we'll be able to send her to study abroad as much as she'd like. I've suggested that she brush up on her French! Daughter-san had an interesting high school "career" which is how the kids refer to it. She started as a shy, introverted kid who was very much a study nerd. During high school she did a lot of drawing and photography, had a two-month solo exhibition, took most of her friends' senior portraits, and ended up being voted "best photographer" by her class. Her favorite model was her brother, who was even willing to dress in drag and bite .38SPL cartridges for her senior photography project, which was a photographic interpretation of Truman Capote's "Other Voices Other Rooms". (Unfortunately for him, that project is being kept by the photography teacher as an example for future classes.) She did some interesting things, like embroidering photographic prints. She also got involved in Speech & Debate, went to tournaments, became one of the team's officers and placed second in State in her event. In senior year she started doing theatre and made a whole new set of friends among the "drama kids". During the summers she worked as a cook and later assistant supervisor in the Berkeley camp in Yosemite, which involved responsibility, a lot of hard work - cooking 8 hours in a commercial kitchen during 100 degree heat waves - and, I'm told, some vigorous partying on days off. So Daughter-san is leaving high school as a much more outgoing, confident, social person than she entered. Her high school GPA is perhaps not, err, quite as good as it could have been had she remained less social, but it is pretty good, enough to get her into a good range of colleges. By the time she graduated from high school, she was Miss Popularity, with a whirlwind of parties and outings during the last month. She told me that, while fun, being so social was exhausting and she had started to turn down most invitations. Which was a relief to me, since I would like her to be a serious student in college in addition to having fun. She's back at camp cooking for half of this summer - a different Berkeley camp, after the Yosemite camp was burned to the ground last summer. She'll fly back to Oregon for college orientation in the middle of the summer, then will have the last month of summer free to relax and play with her brother before heading off to college. So there we are, all caught up. SWMBO and I are kid-free for a few weeks and even after DS gets back from his trip, life should be less hectic and I might even be able to do some cooking. Not that we've been starving, but the cooking here hasn't been interesting - just utility cooking. Hoping to change that this summer. Here is a link that might be useful: an online portfolio

Legomom, I think the magnets that are not open to all should be listed separately and ranked separately. Because the scores are are really meaningless relative to schools that must take everyone. Of course the selective schools have better metrics. That does not mean they will do a better job of educating your son. If, let's say for arguments sake, the minimum IQ in the magnet school was 130, then you would want to compare it to those kids in an open enrollment school who were >=130, not to ALL the kids in the school. In our old town, we had a real dichotomy between Wall Street professionals and an urban pocket. My DH used to volunteer in the local High School. He said there were de facto schools within a school. One group of kids was all AP, winning national debate titles and the like, and one group of kids was struggling with the basics. Overall the ranking was still in the top 1% (IIRC Newsweek only ranks the top 1%), but if you had broken the select few off into a magnet, the rankings would have soared. So, long story short, interpret the rankings really carefully. As an aside, my sister had a friend who was locating from PA to AZ, and she wanted her son to go to one of the very highly ranked magnet schools there. She contacted the school and was actually able to find out if he would have a spot before she moved. She had to rent at first due to timing, but it may be possible to move after you find out if he gets in ... Good luck! PS A second vote for the Mass. beaches, although it is a short and cold season esp for swimming.

I'm a former teacher - and I would say, There ARE right and wrong choices, AND there are consequences for each. My daughter had a problem with a bully at school, who was also in the afterschool program, and I had to raise heck, to get someone to do something!!! This bully was focusing on my daughter, but also a problem with other kids. Finally, only after going to the County Superintendent of Schools, and the the County Director of the afterschool programs, would anyone help us. When bullies have more rights than the kids that are behaving appropriately, there is something wrong with the school system. I was a teacher for 4 years at a very low income, minority school in L.A. I loved my job, I loved my kids, and their parents were supportive and respectful, and expected their children to behave respectfully for "la maestra". We moved to the Sacramento area, and I got a job teaching 6th grade in a very low income, minority school. Wow. What an education I got in 2 months. Not only were 17 of my 35 kids horribly disrespectful to me and their classmates, there were fistfights, and things were bad, bad, bad. When I got shoved up against a wall trying to break up the first fight, I told the principal I wanted the two boys suspended from my room for the maximum extent possible. She merely took them out for a couple of hours!!!! When I told her I was shocked that she would not discipline them, she said, "well, if I suspend them, the ACLU will come after us." When I called the mother of one of the main troublemakers, when her son was out of control and egging the class on, she accused me of "picking on her boy" because of his ethnicity. I let her know that there were plenty of kids of the same ethnicity in the classroom, behaving appropriately and trying to learn. How sad for the 18 kids who were behaving well in that classroom. I tried to give them all the perks I could. The librarian even asked me NOT to bring the 17 hooligans to the library. So I let the "good" kids go by themselves, and they at least got 1/2 hour a week of peace and quiet and not having to put up with the kids who had no consequences. The result of that principal's refusal to offer consequences? I'm no longer in the teaching profession. I'm a happy environmental planner, sitting in my cubicle everyday reading scientific journals and applying them to county policy. My husband is a school bus driver and sees this bad attitude among the wealthier parents of students he drives. Luckily for him, at least he can hand out bus citations, and after so many, the kids get kicked off the bus for the school year, as they should be. My daughter is now in a private school, where they won't, and don't have to tolerate bullies. I know that not all parents can do that, and that's why, I support the idea of charter and magnet schools, and school vouchers. Let the bullies terrorize each other in public schools, but let the good kids - like my 18 good kids - be able to go to a school where they feel safe, and can learn. In the best of all worlds, the bullies wouldn't be tolerated in public schools either...they should go to alternative schools, where the style of learning is different, and they get anger management classes, life skills classes, etc, in addition to classes for graduation.