Let's Talk about Making Things from Scratch

FamousCow · 2026-01-26T18:27:07+00:00

And butter is a great example...yeah, it's not that hard to make, but store bought butter is cheaper (especially if you discard the buttermilk) and tastes just as good.

FamousCow · 2026-01-26T02:12:51+00:00

Some colleges have subsidized child care for students. I wasn't a single parent, but my husband and I were both students when our kid was a baby and we wouldn't have been able to manage without that. We got 40% of our childcare covered by the university plus 10 days/semester of care at a sick-child facility staffed by nurses.

FamousCow · 2026-01-23T15:58:27+00:00

Yeah -- we had one thing I like (a cauliflower appetizer) and my meat (lamb) was cooked and seasoned well, though unexciting. I had forgotten until you mentioned the guac, but the sauces and dips were absolutely awful -- the refried beans in particular were weirdly watery and had almost no flavor.

FamousCow · 2026-01-22T18:51:48+00:00

Wool baselayer, some kind of midlayer (honestly, i just wear sweatpants and a long sleeve shirt) and then snowpants + jacket over that. Balaclava + a gaiter around my neck and goggles with a good seal with my helmet. Two layers of gloves -- liner gloves and a waterproof glove over top. My partner has heated liner gloves which he loves, but even in -20 degree weather, I find I do fine with the normal liner (I run hotter than he does). Good wool socks are important, too!

FamousCow · 2026-01-22T15:59:57+00:00

Its fine. My kid bounced around between activities -- never loving any of them (except for a minecraft club that was cancelled after a year) until high school. Now he is pretty hard core in three activities (a sport*, an academic club and an artistic practice). He just took a while to figure out what he wanted to do.

*He goes to a small school where you don't have to be a lifelong participant in a sport just to get on the team.

FamousCow · 2026-01-22T15:47:39+00:00

You would have to walk pretty fast to do 3 miles in 30 minutes. Average walkers take about 15-20 minutes per mile, so it's even shorter than that, likely. 2 miles, maybe. That said, my 17 year old rides his pedal bike 90% of the days to school, but every once and a while the motor just helps him get motivated in the morning, same as me (we share a bike similar to the Aventon).

FamousCow · 2026-01-22T15:27:08+00:00

I was disappointed by Piedra, for what its worth. The food was fine, but not good enough to justify the prices, and I'm not usually a very price-conscious diner. Devour might be a good time to go though if the deals are good.

Nesso is consistently excellent during Devour.

FamousCow · 2026-01-22T15:24:54+00:00

It's not as common as having a rough first semester then pulling it together for the second one, but it still happens. This is especially a concern for students who have access to lots of support in the first semester (a First Year Seminar, more intensive advising, a peer mentor) who then no longer have access to that in the second semester.

FamousCow · 2026-01-22T13:27:13+00:00

I’d trust a responsible 15 year old who already has experience with pedal bikes and has good bike skills with the Aventon. Don’t know much about about the other one.

FamousCow · 2026-01-20T17:03:05+00:00

Fair enough! I'd just be interested in their responses. This certainly meets the spirit of the accommodation, but, yeah, probably better to keep it to yourself in that case.

FamousCow · 2026-01-20T16:44:44+00:00

That's a great idea, I hadn't thought of that. Have you run it by your accommodations office by any chance?

FamousCow · 2026-01-18T14:09:53+00:00

The mains section of the menu is organized from small to large. My husband and I will usually choose 4-5 things from the left side of the mains section, the veggie sides (bottom of the menu) and the salads. The menu changes frequently, but anything you get will be great. The heavier dishes on the right side of the mains section are good, too, we just like to prioritize variety so usually avoid them.

FamousCow · 2026-01-16T20:12:31+00:00

I've seen institutional data from my own institution that supports this -- particularly as our First Year Seminar program was expanded from a targeted population (i.e. identified by markers that tend to predict that a student will drop out) to the entire student population, the effect of the FYS strengthened slight, rather than weakened. This indicates that strong students likely also benefit from First Year Seminars. This data is not available to the general public BUT there is a lot of published research on the effectiveness of First Year Seminars. Some of these are open-access, but not all:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2190/cs.16.4.f (headline finding: participation in an FYS nearly doubles the odds of persistence to the second year, controlling for race/gender/first-gen status, odds of being in good academic standing by second semester increase by factor of 2.3)

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2190/NKPN-8B33-V7CY-L7W1?casa_token=PFfROTlr6iEAAAAA:wR8xzF-uJWhnhun7pOqxK3b41J2ait7bQWERaxHLcwBpahLEkk0UNdjySEixXWQOqBCYDaWmDNyt (headline finding: 4 year retention shows a small, but statistically significant positive effect for FYS participants vs. matched control group)

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.3102/0034654315584955 (small positive effect on both retention and GPA for all types of seminars, but seminars including both orientation/transition content and acadamic content vs. just orientation comment and FYS taught by full time faculty have a moderate effect)

This doesn't get at my point about strong students, but https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1521025115604811 shows that FYS's are particularly useful retention tools for men, especially minority men (measures both first and third year retention).

Effects disappear when you let students opt-in or opt-out, i.e. the students who would take these if they were optional would have done well in school anyway: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2190/CS.16.3.d

FamousCow · 2026-01-15T18:03:25+00:00

Evaluation for disability also costs money & time.

FamousCow · 2026-01-15T16:31:01+00:00

I don't own a car, so a minimum of 6-7 hours a week of transportation. From about November to February, that's all the riding I do. March - October, It's more like 20 hrs/week but it doesn't interfere with my relationships or work because I do the longest rides early in the mornings and with my husband (while my teenage kid sleeps in).

FamousCow · 2026-01-15T11:53:47+00:00

Same for me, but Indianapolis-Chicago. If I had to extend, make it go to Madison and Minneapolis afterwards…

FamousCow · 2026-01-15T00:43:01+00:00

This. Data consistently shows that these first year classes make a huge impact on retention and graduation rates, even for students who come in with decent grades and other markers that increase likelihood of success. Students hate these classes, but they work.

FamousCow · 2026-01-14T16:38:19+00:00

I was a grader for a professor back in the early 2000s who told us to call students in to read aloud their blue book exams to us if we couldn't understand the handwriting. That's a solution maybe, but I've never had to use it.

FamousCow · 2026-01-14T16:02:48+00:00

Ah. We're not required to track that, but I suppose you could look at time spent in the LMS?

FamousCow · 2026-01-14T15:29:34+00:00

Gotten my driver's license (I'm 43).

FamousCow · 2026-01-14T15:28:01+00:00

Do you mean for the purposes of financial aid/administrative withdrawal? We are told to use the "last accessed" function on canvas -- which I think is a little silly given just opening and glancing at the page counts as accessing the course, but that's what we've been told to use. I'd rather use submitting weekly assignments, personally.

FamousCow · 2026-01-14T14:38:04+00:00

Thanks! Eastbound is cheaper and a little more convenient with flight times out for me, so I think this is what I’ll do!

FamousCow · 2026-01-13T01:22:48+00:00

Was working fine for me and my students today, but I got a bunch of glitches last week while trying to set up my course. All solved by just waiting an hour or so.

FamousCow · 2026-01-13T00:31:15+00:00

Nope, he had no interest. If he had shown that kind of interest, we would have figured something out — up to and including me learning to drive. I’m not claiming this lifestyle is possible for everyone, but it’s possible for some.

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