I did not know this was a trilogy!!! I love love loved "Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake!" and there are 2 more?! Placing a hold immediately...

That’s better than our tuxie- “unable to hear heart/lung sounds due to nonstop growling”
(He’s a love bug at home and a terror at the vet)

Yeah, he just needed help w/ a financial document (Dad is severely dyslexic). No family members are dead/dying/sick/missing/horrifically mangled in a freak accident. Him adding “I need your help with something before an appointment” to that text would have saved me an adrenaline dump 😵‍💫

To little (undiagnosed) neurodivergent me, it was a revelation understanding how/why all the characters acted the way they did, and the ways they misunderstood each others’ actions and motivations. Plus I identified with Turtle SO HARD.

“The Westing Game” by Ellen Raskin. I read it over & over. Each character had stuff going on that none of the other characters knew, that made them the way they were. Turtle the weird kid, the ignored/dismissed/unfavorite child, solved it all under the radar & won, & nobody even knew she’d won.

Done all but 18- my dictionaries have never been dusty!

Poor babies look like they just feel so sick and miserable.

Ooh lots of good quotes in this training. Re: Underfunding Early Childhood Education:

"It's like saying spinach is really good for you, but we can't afford spinach. But here, I've got this Easter grass. Maybe that will be just as good."
-Dale Farran, Vanderbilt University

Meeeee too.

Can you imagine a world where employers need to work hard to make every job something that people who *don't have to work to live* will actively choose to keep doing? By treating workers well, giving them agency and meaningful work, and/or by paying extremely well for hard/unpleasant work?

(They’ve built parking lots and converted the Circle to angled parking, so today’s students don’t have to develop the same skills.)

Parallel parking is one skill I’m pretty smug about. I spent 8 years at UMBC (student, then staff) where most of the parking was on “Hilltop Circle.” Just parallell parking day in, day out, on a steeply sloping curve. By comparison all straight town/city curbs are cake!

I think wheels. There are just so many different kinds of things that have wheels!

An extra layer for me is that I work for a gov't agency, so my communications & files are subject to FOIA requests. I DO NOT want them intermingled on the same device/accounts as my personal information. Juggling 2 phones is annoying, but way better than using my own device for work stuff!

I am always on the go, so my job provides me a mobile phone. I find it boggling how many employers expect/are ok with employees using personal phones for work. It's a.) exploitive (so par for the course for late-stage capitalism), and b.) a legal/privacy/security nightmare.