One of my best memories of Christmas was the year we decided not to exchange presents. Ivylad and I talked with the kids, and gave them an option of a normal Christmas with presents, or a three-day, two-night trip to Busch Gardens.
Busch Gardens won, hands down. We had a blast, and probably spent as much as we would have on gifts.
Sorry to expose my ignorance here and hijack further, but doesn’t the definition of “boil” pretty much include steam bubbles escaping from the water? Is there a kind of boil where that doesn’t happen?
Rolling boil is when the water is very hot, enough for the bubbles to “roll” out. Sometimes the water can be barely boiling, with little tiny bubbles escaping.
My mom told me flat out, “Life is hard, and I didn’t want to raise you kids to be too soft to handle it.” My mom was also raised by parents who had just come through the Great Depression as farmers in Saskatchewan* - she could give lessons on “reduce, re-use, recycle.” Maybe the difference in the way kids are being raised is as simple as that - parents raising kids are too far separated from true financial hardship. My mom grew up with it; there was no doubt in her mind that her job as a parent was to prepare us to take on a mean world, not to be nice to us. My sister with the spoiled brats was raised the same as I was, but she has as bad a case of “affluenza” as anyone.
On the plus side, the way things are going in the U.S., we should all be having another Great Depression soon, so a new generation of parents can raise their kids for a hard world. 
*The Great Depression was quite brutal to Saskatchewan farmers.
Tell me about it. My mom was born there; my mother’s parents had emigrated from England to the prairies… in 1928. Oops.
My aunt told me that during the thirties their family and the mayor’s family were the only two families in Weyburn to have regular access to meat. Grampa was the quartermaster for the army, see…
Doubtful. Employment is at a record low, the stock market is rebounding, and there are safeguards in place to prevent a free fall on Wall Street a la 1929.
We tried something like that, this summer. We told the oldest three that instead of spending the usual $400-500 on birthday gifts that would lose their interest in a month or two, we could all spend a week at Myrtle Beach, and us females got new clothes for that week. (The boy didn’t care about clothes.)
Didn’t work. They complained the entire time. Too hot, bored, too much sand, waves are too high, don’t like the menu, nothing to do, my sandwich isn’t very good, sand is sticking between my toes, sun’s too hot, shade’s too cold… That will be the last time I suggest that idea.
Excuse me, ma’am, I think you dropped your “un.”
MissGypsy, that sucks. Sounds like you have some ungrateful children on your hands. I suggest underwear and socks and bedsheets for their next birthday present.
:smack:
Crap…try to make a point, and I fumble the hell out of it. I trust** featherlou ** knew what I meant…or at least got a good laugh out of it.
Also known as a “simmer”.
To continue the boiling water hijack, I think of a rolling boil as being close to bumping. Of course, it’s hard to bump water at atmospheric pressure in a pot, but it’s close to that.
“Bumping”, for you non-chemists out there, is having solvent shoot up out of your flask while reducing pressure on the system. Often see it during rotary evaporation, where you are reducing pressure, heating the system, and spinning the flask simultaneously.
Our Costco got a shipment of Wiis a few weeks ago, and my friend was buying one for her family. A man in line behind her was purchasing two of them. She joked with him about making money on eBay, and he told her no, that he was buying one for each of his kids because they don’t know how to share. :rolleyes:
My dad drives me nuts because he refuses to parent my little brothers. To the point where, growing up, he’d tell me to stop parenting them. (Now he complains that they light fires in the front yard. Of course they do, they’ve been doing it since they were tiny. If you didn’t want them doing that, why did you tell me to stop being such an overprotective girl whenever I stopped them? Why didn’t you stop them yourself? It’s not like I enjoyed trying to keep them out of trouble without getting yelled at for it.)
At this point, they’ve had several years of summer school. They’re intelligent, they just refuse to do any schoolwork. If asked, they say they have no homework. They somehow manage to get grades of 15% in some classes. I don’t even know how that’s possible–I breezed through those classes by doing my homework on the bus. Dad suspects they fail on purpose because it’s not cool for boys to be smart or something. I can’t imagine it’s cool for them to flunk all the time either, but it is hard to imagine accidentally getting a 7% in anything.
They’re even flunking math, and they’ve been doing algebra in exchange for soda for years. (One thing dad cares about: You will know your math.)
I don’t know. Dad just throws his hands up and says “What will I do?” “Punish them!” I say, “Take away their video games and their internet RPGs and their tons of stuff!” “I took away the laptop,” Dad says, “But I don’t think they’re really into the internet RPGs as much anymore … and they just go to their mother’s and get whatever they want. I give up.”
Don’t give up when you haven’t even tried anything yet, Dad. The older one decided to take an extra year of math instead of just going to summer school for it, and Dad just said whatever. They’re teenagers now, and it looks like they’re on their own even though they never had any discipline or any guidance. No idea what to do about it, especially since I don’t live at home anymore.
Sorry for the rant.