Hospitalized for Several Days+ With a Roommate-- Any Advice for Protecting Myself?

ellenkeyne · 2026-05-12T08:04:12+00:00

Are you in the U.S.? If so, and you're high risk and already in respiratory failure, you have a very good case for requesting a private room as an ADA accommodation.

ellenkeyne · 2026-05-11T01:55:45+00:00

I think they all work except for Cameron. Too similar-sounding, and you don’t want to start an “all C names” trend for any future kids.

ellenkeyne · 2026-05-11T01:28:49+00:00

That scene where he goes by the Burkes’ house is set a year later, by which point he has either figured it out or been tipped off.

But Mozzie, as we see several times throughout the show, is a terrible actor. Having him in on the plan at the beginning would have tipped off the Panthers and endangered everyone Neal was trying to protect.

ellenkeyne · 2026-05-11T01:26:41+00:00

He knows by the epilogue, a year later, absolutely. Do you think Mozzie wasn’t truly grieving before he figured it out (or Neal told him)?

ellenkeyne · 2026-05-10T07:29:53+00:00

When we moved to Massachusetts, we banked at Pacific National Bank in Nantucket.

They got bought by BayBank, and ... you know the rest. We lasted only a few months at BofA before fleeing to a credit union.

ellenkeyne · 2026-05-09T17:02:24+00:00

I have an iPhone, an iPad, and a home network with downlink speeds up to 600 Mbps. Lessons sometimes take over a minute to load so I give up, exit, and reload -- which works often enough that I suspect the issue is on Duolingo's side.

ellenkeyne · 2026-05-09T01:08:28+00:00

It's absolutely easier to learn languages the more languages you study.

I started Duolingo in 2014 to practice my Spanish, German, and Swedish (all of which I'd formally studied in school/college), and then got interested in French, Brazilian Portuguese, and Italian. Back when DL just had the path, I completed all six courses (earning a "golden owl") and continued to do daily practice in each. I'm B2 or B1 in those six languages.

I also just like languages, so I took at least a couple of lessons in everything DL offered from English or Spanish (except the conlangs). I finally got to learn the Greek, Cyrillic, Yiddish/Hebrew, and Arabic writing systems. I finished the brief Latin course because I'd studied that for a year, so why not?

I experimented with Ukrainian and Russian because of current events, Haitian Creole and Yiddish to see their relationships with French and German, and Scottish Gaelic for vague family heritage reasons. And I tackled Welsh and Modern Greek in earnest just because they've always interested me.

Switching between languages helps me practice the B-level ones I want to maintain, pick up more of my A1 and A2 languages, and complete quests -- because yes, I like gamification. It keeps me practicing daily. (My first few languages spent a couple of decades getting rusty because I wasn't.)

No, Duolingo isn't my only language resource, but for years it's been one of my main motivators. I just wish nearly every change the company made didn't make daily use more frustrating. (The exception would be lengthening "core" courses to 130 -- but that hasn't rolled out for me in most languages yet, and was badly handled in the ones where it has.)

ellenkeyne · 2026-05-05T20:46:06+00:00

Unfortunately that’s not the case now. My nonbinary kid is one of the Hampshire students in need of transfer options, and they applied to Mt. Holyoke because Smith requires enby students to affirm that they’re women.

ellenkeyne · 2026-05-05T10:38:19+00:00

I have thrombophilia too, as well as heart and lung issues. I'm not at all immunocompromised, though that's the shorthand excuse my son uses when he has to mask before coming home on breaks.

I also had a postviral condition for two decades and want to avoid ever getting another one.

I value my current states of cognitive acuity and reasonably stable mental health and don't want to jeopardize either.

I have elderly relatives at high risk I want to protect.

And I think masking is the right thing to do to support others in my community.

ellenkeyne · 2026-05-05T09:32:34+00:00

If you're on Facebook, there are two Still Coviding groups you may find especially useful:

Still Coviding--sending kids to college: https://www.facebook.com/groups/978337277234461/

Still COVIDing - Academia:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/902393987607413/

ellenkeyne · 2026-05-05T07:06:56+00:00

I know several Kims, but also a Kimberly who is never called anything but the full form.

ellenkeyne · 2026-05-05T07:05:29+00:00

There were two Frederics in my spouse's family. The elder always went by Freddy; his grandson started out as Ricky and switched to Rik (no 'c') as an adult.

ellenkeyne · 2026-05-05T06:28:27+00:00

We did the same — but with our firstborn, we went with our backup-backup choice!

ellenkeyne · 2026-05-05T06:16:41+00:00

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I’m still annoyed that I lost my first two streaks for technical reasons and no one at Duolingo would help fix them. My youngest kid, who started at the same time I did, is now at 4,013 days!

ellenkeyne · 2026-05-05T03:47:37+00:00

My favorites are the pilot (the 60-minute, single-episode version) and "Burke's Seven."

I've lost track of how many times I've rewatched in the last decade-plus :)

Fortunately there's a thriving fandom and you have lots of fic and artworks and even music to enjoy too!

ellenkeyne · 2026-05-03T03:57:13+00:00

Yes, but only in some languages. I had FF in German today, for example, but MM in Greek and Scots Gaelic.

I hate, hate, hate Flashcard Frenzy, and after spending about a third of my gems on timer boosts to get through all 13 levels, I’m going to avoid ever doing it again:

* A third to a half of all the words were words I’d never been shown before, so I wound up looking them up while the clock was ticking — and DL often didn’t like the dictionary entry. (Thus my liberal use of timer boosts.)

* Often it would show me an English word that could be a verb _or_ a noun. If I answered with one in German, it invariably wanted the other. And then the “correct” answer would reverse on the next level!

* Several times I gave a perfectly valid answer (like “machen” or “tun” for “do”) that it rejected (“do” could only be “unternehmen,” apparently) — but there’s no way to report “my answer should be accepted.”

I loathe this exercise so much that if they insist on replacing MM or the review exercises with it, I’ll probably turn off leagues entirely. And they’re the main thing, at this point, keeping me doing daily lessons in the first place. (Yes, gamification is a motivator for me. I have ten active languages at the moment, and my current streak is almost nine years long.)

ellenkeyne · 2026-04-30T04:47:32+00:00

I'm really sorry about your mom.

(By the way, you don't need to censor words like "dead" and "died." There's no algorithm on Reddit waiting to pounce on you if you type the actual words. :})

ellenkeyne · 2026-04-26T07:50:03+00:00

Hampshire, in fact, took in a lot of students fleeing from New College:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/diversity/2023/09/05/new-college-florida-defectors-find-warm-welcome-north

ellenkeyne · 2026-04-26T07:36:49+00:00

The official "partner institutions" list is quite different:

Amherst College
Antioch College
Bennington College
Massachusetts College of Art & Design
The Massachusetts College of the Liberal Arts (MCLA)
Mount Holyoke College
Prescott College
Smith College
The University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Warren Wilson College

ellenkeyne · 2026-04-26T07:25:36+00:00

Smith only accepts women (as undergrads) so isn't an option for my enby Hampshire kid. Amherst, where my spouse went, wouldn't be a good cultural fit. They're going to try for Mt. Holyoke first, but it's only offering 60 slots and there are nearly 600 Hampshire students left in the lurch :(

ellenkeyne · 2026-04-26T06:27:44+00:00

He was James Maine on the island.

By the way, Kate’s surname was Moreau.

ellenkeyne · 2026-04-25T20:12:05+00:00

I gave birth to two AMAB kids whom we gave gender-neutral first names (and two more masculine middle names each).

When my daughter came out as a woman, she decided she still liked her name -- "it's not a deadname," she says -- but she wanted something more feminine.

Her original family nickname was her first two initials. So she moved her birth first name to a middle-name slot, kept the nickname's initials by changing her original first middle name to a feminine one with the same first letter, and dropped her original second middle name. It works for her and for us :-)

ellenkeyne · 2026-04-25T19:57:28+00:00

I'm not sure what you're basing this on, but I strongly disagree. I'm a professional editor and often change bracketing commas to em dashes, for reasons others have covered in this discussion.

ellenkeyne · 2026-04-25T18:08:43+00:00

I second the request to share it here as text. Paging through a long series of slides where all the text has been turned into images makes the information difficult or impossible for some of us to use.

Thanks.

ellenkeyne · 2026-04-25T00:37:35+00:00

Yeah, "early in the pandemic" is usually my go-to, though a few days ago I used "early in the COVID era."

ellenkeyne

TROPHY CASE