Quiches, kugels, and couscous : my search for Jewish cooking in France-- Joan Nathan (Appropriate for both Paris and Rosh Hashanah, which starts tonight)

HARRIS TWEED: From Land To Street by Lara Platman ( double whammy here :0)

BE IN A TREEHOUSE by Pete Nelson ( that's the Treehouse Masters program guy.......I love watching him create those marvelous things and always want one of my own !! )

You probably know that a BS or BA takes four years in the US, and sometimes five if the college is overcrowded and classes are hard to get, but that is because you must take a certain number of classes outside your major - liberal arts if you are a tech/science major, or math and science if you are a liberal arts person. It is considered that this will help to make you a well-rounded member of society. To some extent, I think it is true. We are also seeing the rise of the master's degree as the standard of a well educated person. My husband, one daughter, and I all have one, as does my brother. It has become fairly common. My other daughter has two bachelor's degrees (career change), and my non-academic son completed a certificate program at a community college. It is unusual for anyone to stop at high school and expect much of a career, very different from a generation ago. And a generation before that, my grandfather stopped at eighth grade, which was considered perfectly adequate. He was educated in Canada where he grew up, but the same was true in the United States. (I do want to add a side comment here. It is my personal belief that a person who did not go beyond high school but continues to read all his life long is apt to be a far better educated person than someone who gets a degree but never opens another book for the rest of his life.) Equal pay is an iffy thing, addressed differently in different places. In areas where the cost of living is higher, pay also tends to be higher, the Boston-NYC-Washington corridor being one region with a notoriously high cost of living. Hawaii is also a very expensive place to live, and Los Angeles and the Bay Area (including Silicon Valley) is just as expensive. Government job pay scales are mandated by regulation, and union jobs by contract. The business sector is free to pay what the market will bear. There is a set federal minimum wage, though some areas have set their own higher minimum wage, much disputed by business which says that it will mean higher unemployment or the failure of small businesses. As for pay for women, in my area the pay ranges can be different for two reasons (at least). One is that pay is generally negotiated, and women tend to be less assertive in asking for more money, more inclined to wait until their value is recognized and spontaneously rewarded. The other is that if there are children involved, mothers are employed full time are more likely to work only 40-50 hours a week (I did) while fathers feel free to stay at the office 50-60 or more hours. Long hours are highly valued here in Silicon Valley, and they do tend to be financially rewarded. Then there is the fact, still true, that many women choose traditional female careers (teaching, nursing, library work) where pay lags unless there is a union to increase it. Stop me before I go on even longer! I keep coming back to edit typos and explain more and more.