Work has been pretty alright. I had a minor miracle with le gout–one of the side effects of a new drug my pusher-i-mean-doctor prescribed me makes 80%+ of the pain go away (chronic pain the last six seven years. When I woke up a few weeks ago and it was mostly gone I may have done a dance).
As for the tussin, I’m just saying I have Whooping Cough (which I might) to make all the smug bay area anti vaxxers uncomfortable. “Yeah, really feeling the pertussis today. Good thing I got vaccinated against it so it’s only really annoying and not life threatening”.
And yes, the joys of detoxing. And not the Gwyneth Paltrow kind. My hands still shake a little, but it will pass. Shoulda seen my handwriting on the 20th, it was bad enough to be posted on the fridge with a gold star and a note that said, " Good try!"
Dunno if this will help or not, but my cat-loving neighbor used to give her kidney-patient cats normal [feline] saline subcutaneously. Yep, a clear plastic bag, hung up on a nail/hook, a tube, a needle, and a cat wrapped up in a towel. Two-person job, IIRC.
She was trained to do this by her very understanding vet. Perhaps you have one of those too. Giving subcu fluids is not hard if the animal is already tired and weak and unlikely to fight off such an effort.
I’ve had some luck with salt-free chicken broth, salt-free beef broth, and a homemade fish broth of simmered fish bones/parts. Good luck.
Doubly confirmed. Did this for the ex’s cat, and it’d get a huge, moderately gross lump of saline solution under the skin, like a fake bewb at the injection site. And that cat…was not nice.
Today is Ivy admissions day. It’s going to be a fuck of a day. My daughter got her heart set on Brown, and I am pretty positive that either:
A) She didn’t get in, or
B) She got in and we can’t afford it.
Sure, they Ivies have cash out the wazoo, but we are consistently getting too little aid to afford any of the private schools she is getting admitted to. We have a couple that are hitting in our ballpark. Right now, I’m sadly praying she does not get into her dream school so we can just avoid the, “You got in but we can’t afford it” conversation.
She has worked her *ss off to make herself appealing to these kinds of schools and it has been a heartbreak to not be able to send her to them. Fortunately, our state schools are excellent and affordable, so she still has great options. She sees the advantage of having mom and dad solvent when she graduates school.
I had my heart set on Brown, too. It was just exactly what she’d dreamed up for a school and I could see it was ideal for her.
Fuck today. Fuck today.
Hopefully there is a silver lining: This weekend the one private school that’s been really excited by her and has been really close with the aid package has a scholarship day where 300 kid come and out of those 2 will get full ride scholarships. Fingers crossed on that one. It’s a good shot at a full ride scholarship. I hope that works out and she can end up at a place that is perfect for her.
So I’ll just keep talking about this because I’m totally stressed today.
My daughter has an actual shot at Brown for one reason: she got a perfect score on her English SAT. If you go through the stats on their website, this is the one thing in the world that will give you a fighting chance at admission - 1 in 5 of the applicants with perfect scores get in, compared with the 8% admission rate overall.
The reason she likely won’t get in: she’s not in the top 10% of her class. This is not due to the fact that she is a slacker. She has taken 8 AP courses; she has mostly all A’s; she has been in all honors. Her school is just SO crazy competitive that even a kid like her who eats and breathes academics doesn’t really stand out in a sea of Intel science award semi-finalists and star Lacrosse players.
You’re probably thinking it’s all about their reputation, but when we visited, what really hit us wasn’t their reputation but just how in love with learning the kids were. We loved how every telephone pole and surface in the whole town was covered with notices for poetry slams and people starting bands and discussion circles. Yeah, the traditions sounded really fun, but the whole vibe just fit her like a glove.
Jebus, one in five with a perfect English SAT? Btw, a perfect SAT (of any kind) goes in the victory thread. That’s something to be damn proud of. But even 20% odds sounds disheartening based on that kind of stellar performance.
Welcome to the wonderful world of college admissions!
@ChickieD, I’m right there with you. Mine got into the top two schools she applied to (both of which are in the top 5, one on the university list and one on the college list), and NONE of the lower ranked schools, not even the one that accepts nearly half of all applicants. And she’s so stressed about what today is going to be like at school because of the tensions and emotions all of her friends are going to be experiencing.
Interesting coincidence: she kept waffling about applying to Brown, because she also thought it was a perfect fit but it has such a drastic acceptance rate (it’s easier to get into Harvard, Princeton, or Yale) that she thought it would be a lesson in futility. She decided against it, and has been second-guessing that decision ever since.
So I guess I’m saying that “'tis better to have loved and lost” than to chicken out and not even try. Also, that where students are accepted and where they are rejected does not seem to make any rational sense, so there’s no reason to take it personally.
Thanks for commiserating. I am so proud of her but her school is so brutally competitive. I used to love her school, but this year I have hated it. It’s made her feel so less than even though she has worked so hard.
My daughter got into some of the top tier schools and not into some of the smaller ones we thought would give her scholarships. The one where she is a quadruple legacy wait listed her. We cannot figure any rhyme or reason to the decisions, but it deflated her as she thought she would get into every one but the two ivies (Brown and Dartmouth).
Right now I’m mad I played the Ivy game. I bet her school today is going to be gruesome.
@japhroaig When she worked with a tutor for her SAT he told her that she would have gotten a plaque on the wall at his school for her perfect score. At the school she goes to, it barely got a mention. And yeah, the Ivy game, you figure it’s like this: Is your dad Obama? No? chances are lower you will get in. Does your mom own a Fortune 500 company? No? chances are lower. Do you play a sport? No? chances are lower. Are you a Jewish girl from Long Island? probably they got a lot of these applicants - too bad you are not a Native American from Montana. So, perfect score is nice but then you factor in all the other little things and it makes you feel like you will never compete.
It’s like I recommend to parents of young children when they’re thinking about what instrument to pick: choose the tuba, French horn, or viola, NOT the violin or piano, for heaven’s sake!
If it makes you feel any better, my kid hits a lot of the diversity markers and that didn’t help AT ALL. In fact, cozy little New England colleges were definitely not interested, even the one where she has a (extended family, but substantial) legacy status.
Apparently the announcements will be at 4:00pm today (don’t know if that means Eastern time or our local Central time). Fingers crossed for your daughter!
Fucking patching compliance.
Oh hey here are yet more servers that if you don’t fix five minutes ago you are going to be on the report for end of month. We just decided to mark them that way this morning. Please drop everything and look into this.
fucking fuckity fuck
ETA one of which was just freaking built just over a week ago which means it should be all up to date because it gets latest patches as part of the new build.
I had to be on phone calls once a month (for 5 years) where I had to explain every discrepancy in results between our product and a competing vendor being used for compliance auditing in a network with over 300,000 seats. Every time I couldn’t figure out the differences from the code, I had to rebuild systems in my lab to simulate the exact vulnerability the report was pointing to, and occasionally dig through the customer network. Not exactly the same thing, but compliance can be a beast.
Oh and even better, the newly built one is a testing box and had a double check push out what is missing update done to it yesterday and now shows up as not compliant for some odd reason.
heck this isn’t even that. just a hey what hot fixes do you have compared to what needs to be installed.
2 of the servers are prod and are getting scheduled updates tomorrow night. I can’t just patch them right away. They got missed last round because of tool scheduling which is OUT OF MY CONTROL and becuase 11/29 and 1/29 look close enough I missed they didn’t get updated. But of course next scheduled update is 4/1 because of the short month.
ETA and it doesn’t matter we told them several times they are scheduled for updates in email. no they gotta IM me at the last minute too.
Ha ha. In her school orchestra, the violins take up like half the orchestra (we have a very large Asian population). I always wonder if they have special arrangements they select for schools with half the strings being violins. She is “last chair” in cello so not sure if she is up for any seats in the Brown orchestra or not.
Thanks!!! Maybe she’ll get in and they’ll give her a giant scholarship! (it could happen)
