It's worth noting that while the Mystic girls are getting most of the coverage, several other small towns across the state have been completely wiped, death toll still to be determined.

A pair of siblings at our summer camp this week lost their grandmother in flooding less than 30 minutes outside Austin.

I'm so sorry for what your family is going through, Dana. I'm glad he has you there for him.

If monster leaves her house at 10:15am traveling east at 40mph, how many of her 247 cans...

Have you been watching the new series? Jason Mantzoukas is in it, being chaotic as one would expect.

Now it'll be even more like Slow Horses!

Worse than that, when an OT (or speech therapist, or physical therapist, etc.) is operating through the school district, they can't even realistically assign exercises to do at home, or communicate with parents about more that could be done, because those actions imply an awareness that the kid "needs" the additional exercises, which legally means that the school should be providing them.

Back when my daughter was in a half-day of special ed preschool, our school at the time was willing to have the school bus drop her off at a daycare center for the rest of the afternoon, but NOT at the therapy clinic that was literally next door, because even dropping her off at a clinic that I was already paying for could be seen as an acknowledgement that they knew she needed it.

I dislike it when people describe their pets' death as "crossing the rainbow bridge." Always makes me think the dog came out as gay.

Banana lady was Beest's mom.

Yeah, my general thoughts are he's a bad spokesman for solid research, mixed in with a few much less valid beliefs he holds. I had to mute several key words on social media right after his recent speech, because I kept getting angry at all the "neurodiversity" proponents acting like he'd personally insulted them by talking about severely affected, fully dependent people on the spectrum. There's a lot of quirked-up computer nerds out there who got diagnosed in their 30s and want to act like they're representative of everyone on the spectrum, and it's frankly infuriating.

glatt wrote:

Even gold is taking a beating. I don't understand that one.

A lot of gold trading is back-and-forth overseas. At least one major trading show in Germany has just officially been postponed because a lot of attendees (both buyers and sellers) would have been coming from the US. They're expecting more shows will follow suit. It's a huge deal, partly because this is a thing people do for a living so they secure their plane tickets and accommodations for big shows months in advance, but also because, as you implied, usually when stock markets are down, gold is up. People who deal in gold--who tend toward the libertarian/anti-establishment/paranoid side of the political spectrum--don't mind if Trump fucks the stock market, but they very much mind if he fucks the gold market.

(My dad is retired now, but he was a professional gold coin dealer for 40+ years, so I know more than I should about this.)

Best of luck, fargon. Hopefully they just go ahead and remove it, and the testing is just for information purposes afterward.

For Griff

glatt wrote:

Measles.  WTF?

I'm getting an MMR vaccine tomorrow because I don't have copies of my records and I am of an age where I might have received the measles vaccine that doesn't work.

So maybe you saw that over the weekend, someone with active measles flew into Dulles and took the Metro home.  Went to the doctor a day or two later and learned it was measles.  They must have exposed thousands of people from this region.

Maybe the shot tomorrow will be too late.  On the other hand, maybe I don't even need the shot because I might have received one of the booster shots for older kids who got the worthless shots when they were younger.  Hell if I know.

Show of hands, how many of you have actual records of your childhood vaccinations?
 

Another option, if you're not sure you need it (and perhaps want to save the shots for those who do, if they end up in short supply in the future,) is you can ask your doctor for a measles titer test, which will measure the level of antibodies in your blood. That will definitively tell you whether you're currently immune.