I love the idea of sports at all levels in schools. It would be fantastic for all involved. However, it would require a vast change in the coaching staff! At present, most of the coaches I know are frustrated, washed out wanabe jocks (only one recent exception!). I have a son, brilliant boy, rising Sr. He CHOSE to drop out of track giving up pole-vaulting, a sport he loves because the head coach "sucked the life and fun" out of it. The boy volunteered to do any other jump event, offered to run hurdles or sprints if needed by the team; the head coach insisted in running him in the distance events. The boy found no joy in long distance, and the field had plenty of participants. When my son asked why long distance and not the other events he was told "because that is what you want to do and you need to learn I'm in charge". So, he ran the event once, using it as a warm up rather than trying to WIN. The next assult/insult was refusing to allow the boy to attend the study sessions for his 8 AP tests. To this he was told "the commitment to track should be before your academic goals". NO! I must say at this point the jump coach took my son aside and told him to come back next year, coaching staff would be different and he would welcome him back with open arms AND "if you need any assistance with your review or someone to go over any information with, call me". I can honestly say we are all looking forward to the next track season!

Not a panic buyer. The only thing that could send me into panic buying mode is if it were announced that they were going to discontinue the dark chocolate covered dark chocolate oreos. Then I would throw some elbows to get to them. They freeze well. Ask me how I know😏. I prefer to buy things fresh. I am just not good at planning a weeks worth of meals and shopping for it. We are day to day,meal to meal type people. The times I have tried to meal plan and shop for it, we wouldn't want what I had planned when it came time to make it,and I would end up going back out to get stuff to make something else. As for other stuff, like paper products, I buy big packs of those when we run low,and it lasts awhile. I have not tried to buy paper towels or toilet paper since the freak out started. We have enough for the two of us for awhile. I also keep plenty of cleaning supplies on hand because I keep my house clean,so there is no reason to go clear the shelves of cleaning products, i have some already. I went back to publix today on my way to work to get stuff to make a salad with and they had lots of empty shelves in the middle aisles,but still plenty of fresh produce. No bread, no bottled water, and the only eggs left were the very expensive,organic,free range yada yada yada ones. I needed eggs so I got some. I can get eggs from my sister but her very fresh eggs are impossible to peel when boiled. I buy the older eggs in the store for boiling. I did bring a can of lysol from home to work,because my day shift counterpart has called in sick the past 2 days. She is not sick but her poor one year old baby has the flu. And since she doesn't want to use up all her sick days, she will probably come back to work tommorow, bringing her kids flu germs with her. We share a desk and computer. I have never had the flu and would rather keep that streak going. And I will lock my lysol in my locker before I leave so that they wont use it all. My boss has gone waaaaay off the deep end lately. He had a plexiglass barrier installed to separate us from people who come in here. Madness. He would probably use the whole can on one doorknob if left to his own devices.

Marleigh, Any and every garlic variety I've ever planted has performed about the same, so I am not convinced the variety matters other than each of us just picking one that appeals to our individual taste buds. I have grown a lot of the varieties available from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and from Peaceful Valley Farm Supply, including Inchelium Red (which we really liked when I grew it), German Red, Italian Purple, Chesnok Red, and German Extra Hardy. I've even grown the plain old California White type varieties from grocery store garlic. If you want specific varieties, the time to order is now before they sell out, and they'll be shipped to you in the fall. Southern Exposure Seed Exchange has some great mixed packs and samplers (their choice of varieties) that allows you to try more varieties at a lower price. Garlic stores a long time if properly cured, but I say that from the vantage point of someone who usually grows in drought and dry years and I do always grow it in raised beds, so our garlic never is that wet at harvest time. It might not cure well and store as long in those years with persistent rainfall carrying into the summer months. You don't have to store it all fresh. You can chop it and dry it or freeze it for use in cooking later. I do that a lot with onions and garlic, just because it streamlines cooking later on when I can reach into the freezer and pull out pre-chopped frozen onions and garlic. Freeze the garlic in the snack-sized ziplock bags in portions that correlate well to how much you use when cooking and put a ton of those little ziplocks inside a gallon freezer ziplock. I didn't plant any garlic last year because garlic-planting time fell in that time frame after Mom died when we were cleaning out her house and putting it on the market, etc., and I was preoccupied with family matters. Last year is just a blur now..... Be careful working out in the heat, even early in the day. We still have all that dreadful humidity hanging around. My morning work consists of feeding the animals and watering the containers, and I'm usually back indoors before the heat index hits 90 degrees....if I hurry. Jennifer, I had one rule when I was canning and I always stuck to it---I didn't go to bed until every dish was washed and the kitchen was clean. It just made a difference (in a bad way) if I had to wake up to dirty dishes and a dirty kitchen. I was not as obsessive as one of my sisters-in-law who always mopped her kitchen floor every single night before bedtime. Nope. Not that obsessed with a clean floor. Sometimes it seems like I barely fell into bed (lol, but with a clean kitchen) before Tim's alarm was going off to wake him up. One thing I don't miss about growing less and getting off the constant canning treadmill is wiping tomato spatters off the backsplash and countertops. I don't miss that at all. I didn't have a job outside our home though, so staying up late and doing dishes and cleaning was, in that sense, my job and I could stay up half the night if I needed to. It must be so much harder to try to cram all the canning and cleaning into each day when you have to leave home to go to your job too. Sometimes this summer I find myself with too much time on my hands and contemplate thawing out some of the tomatoes in the freezer and making salsa and canning it, and then I stop myself. We still have salsa in jars, so I don't need to make more yet. I can only fit so much food into the pantry and I've been keeping it full of long-term storage goods so I can avoid the stores whenever Covid-19 flares up too much locally. Rebecca, I'm glad you are conserving your energy (as if you have much of a choice) while you await your test results. There's no sense in pushing too hard to do other things when your body needs to have the energy to recover. There is nothing new here. Hot and humid, hot and humid, hot and humid. It doesn't rain here, no matter what we hear from other areas or see on the radar---the storms fall apart before they reach us. Yesterday, just to be clear, our local TV met said several times that there is no rain in the 7-day forecast. I guess he really wanted to drive home that point! lol Now, that is our typical summer forecast so not at all surprising, but also disheartening as a gardener to know that Mother Nature is not sending any relief in the form of rainfall. Dawn

I just finished While Paris Slept by Ruth Druart. 2.0 stars, and that's being generous. I only finished because a friend recommended it and I thought it was worth sticking it out, but it really wasn't. It's a story that goes back and forth between 1944 Paris and 1953 Santa Cruz, CA. A newborn Jewish infant is handed off to a kindly French railway worker as his parents are being herded into a train car headed for Auschwitz. Nine years later the Jewish parents, who survived, want him back. Coincidentally I lived in Santa Cruz at one time and it's not very accurately portrayed, other than being on the coast and having a boardwalk. At one point one of the characters takes a short taxi ride to the airport to fly to Paris and the nearest one at that time would have either been San Jose (only a municipal airport then), but more likely San Francisco, over 70 miles away. It's a lot of reading for not much story. The writer used "ironic" 8 times, enough to make the word go ding-ding. What was "ironic" about what a person said was never explained. The author used "play date" for two kids getting together in 1953. My daughter was born in 1976 and we didn't use that term. Google said it came into being in 1975, but I missed the boat. Anyway, I hate it when authors use anachronistic terms.