Nightingale

This is his junior year. Those drugs take time to get into the system and work, and there's a lot of trial and error involved in finding the right drug, dosage, or combination. If meds are what he needs, you don't have a lot of time to waste. Take him to the doctor, talk it over with him and the doctor, and let him decide.

My mom said the same thing. I spent almost all of high school (six semesters out of eight!) grounded because of my math grades. No phone, no TV, no driving, no friends. It never occurred to my parents that I was trying, and just didn't get it, because my SATs and IQ tests were high, so they thought there wasn't anything I couldn't do academically if I was willing to put in the effort. They were wrong. I was making every effort I knew how, and it wasn't working, because high school requires different tools, and all I had was the hammer that had worked just fine in elementary school. This is a mistake a lot of parents make. If a kid's grades slip, and they know their kid is smart, the grade problems are automatically the kid's fault, and left to the kid to fix. The kid is usually grounded or punished, and no academic help is offered because parents assume their kid can fix it by trying harder. Keep in mind that your kid is smart. That means he's probably been coasting his entire life. He doesn't know how to study, because he's never needed to study. Now that he needs to, he doesn't have the tools he needs to catch up. He doesn't understand why the methods he's used his whole life aren't getting him good grades anymore now that he's in the second half of his high school years. If you want his grades to go up, don't make him do it on his own, because he probably doesn't know how, and that's not his fault. One of the things I learned as a teacher was that kids want to get good grades. They stop caring AFTER they start failing, because they give up and start thinking they're not capable of doing better. You have the chance to get to your kid now, before he gives up. Right now, you are assuming that your kid's lack of effort is causing the problem. Maybe you're right. Maybe you're wrong. Get him a tutor and find out for sure.

http://www.koin.com/content/news/topstories/story.aspx?content_id=c8cdd7ec-23d8-4c3d-8dfd-b3d4851101a4

The ability to focus on sports is completely different from the ability to focus on school, because in sports, while you may be playing the same game for an hour or two, the situation is constantly changing, so it is not as affected by ADD. Elementary and junior high school tends to be more interactive than high school, and therefore, more engaging to kids with ADD. With high school, there are more lectures and more distractions, and it's harder to focus, so grades slip more, and teachers aren't as pro-active about helping students with problems. There have been a ton of advancements in drugs for ADD. It may be worth exploring them and sitting down with your son and his doctor and getting all the information. Like Lisa said, he's already self-medicating, so give him the opportunity to make an informed decision about whether he'd want to try medication that's actually been developed for and treats his condition.

Have you sat down and talked with your kid about drugs and given him the scientific facts about what they can do to your body? Get online together and do some research so he can't say that you're giving him biased info. If his grades are slipping, offer to get him a tutor. Once kids grades slip, it's hard for them to catch up on their own, and it's got nothing to do with intelligence. Take the car away for the drugs for the rest of the school year because driving while high is a bad idea, but don't hold it hostage for his grades, especially not when it's almost April. If you're worried that the drugs will be repeated after your conversation with your son, piss test him once a week, and as long as it comes out clean, he gets to drive the yellow car.

I just spewed coffee all over MY monitor when I read that.

Who knows how long the guy has been looking for the right rig for the student? It may have been a few minutes online, and it may have been hours.

It depends on which surgery they have to do. If it's just the "clean out" surgery, it cost me around $1800. If it's the urethral reroute because of repeated problems, that's $5000-$7000.

I don't know enough about the motorcycle law to offer an opinion. This is my personal opinion. Do not take it as legal advice: With regards to the sobriety checkpoints, personally, I think they're a violation of the 4th amendment (and the justices in the Michigan v. Sitz case pretty much admitted that a checkpoint was a seizure but decided they were going to overlook it!). That's why I avoid them even though I never drink and drive. I'll make a legal turn into a shopping center, gas station, or driveway, and turn around. I have never found myself so bottled in that I couldn't get out.

Nice!

Not to mention sobriety checkpoints. AKA Fourth Amendment Violation Stations. I just drive around the checkpoints. I don't like sitting in traffic.

I try not to weigh myself within a day or two of my "day off" because I have a tendency to blame it all on "it was those six cookies!"if I weigh right after a free day. If I give it a day or two after, it's easier to look at the whole week in perspective. For example, I ate 2100 calories on Saturday (700 or so being one meal at Jack in the Box!), but stayed between 1400-1600 the rest of the week, so I didn't do too badly. The online food diary I've been using has also really helped. It lets me track what I eat, so I'm more aware of what's going into my mouth. I don't sit and snack on candy from a bag anymore. I count out one serving and put the bag away, because if it's not in front of my face, I'm less likely to open it again.

Down 2.5 pounds. =) I only diet during the week... weekends, I eat whatever, which works out better in the long run, because I don't start craving foods. It's easy to put something aside and say "I can have some on Saturday". If I was going to eat 2 cookies every day after dinner, that's 14 cookies/week, but if I just eat them on the weekends, I might have 3/day, but that's only 6 cookies/week as opposed to 14.

Because I have a few new ones in my head, and I didn't want to pick a tune that had already been used.

Sure. I'd give it a read.

I was trying to find the lyrics to some of the Crack Choir songs. What I really found was this: English Title: The "crack choir" and the "cock chorus": the intersection of gender and sexuality in skydiving texts. Personal Authors: Laurendeau, J. Author Affiliation: Department of Sociology, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, T2N 1N4, Canada. Editors: No editors Document Title: Sociology of Sport Journal, 2004 (Vol. 21) (No. 4) 397-417 Abstract: This article undertakes a qualitative exploration of women's and men's songs in the skydiving community in order to explore the intersection of gender and sexuality in this context. It draws on ethnographic methods, including 6 months of participant observation at various western Canadian locations, as well as 37 in-depth interviews with current participants in the sport. Analyses reveal that men's songs constrain the transformative potential of women in skydiving by trivializing, marginalizing, and sexualizing them. Further, they reinforce male hegemony in skydiving through the construction of a hyperheterosexual masculinity. Meanwhile, women's songs resist male hegemony in the sport, laying claim to discursive and physical space. One central strategy in this resistance is the construction of a strong heterosexual femininity, thereby asserting a sexual subjectivity neither defined nor controlled by men. This resistance, however, shores up a particular version of heterosexual femininity that contributes to women's trivialization and sexualization in this setting. http://www.cababstractsplus.org/google/abstract.asp?AcNo=20053021173 _________ Another website offers the whole article, but charges around £20 to get it... I'm curious, but not £20 curious. http://direct.bl.uk/bld/PlaceOrder.do?UIN=161765623&ETOC=RN&from=searchengine Edit: Found this one too... Laurendeau, J. E. and Gibbs-Van Brunschot, E. (2003, Aug) "“Just like the boys”? Gender Negotiation in the Skydiving Community" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Atlanta Hilton Hotel, Atlanta, GA Online Retrieved 2008-02-24 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p107359_index.html Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript Review Method: Peer Reviewed Abstract: This study problematizes gender construction in the context of ‘risk sport’. Specifically, the paper examines the ways in which women and men negotiate femininities and masculinities in and through their participation in skydiving. Despite a rhetoric of gender equality amongst participants, there are important ways in which dominant understandings of gender differences are reproduced in this social setting. Men’s participation is discussed in language that suggests control, assertiveness, and active participation. Women’s participation, conversely, is framed in terms that evoke notions of passivity. Participants also draw on a “gender logic” (Coakley 1998, 233) that exaggerates men’s physical superiority over women and frames it as natural and common sense. Collectively, these discourses naturalize differences between men and women, and contribute to the perpetuation of existing gender hierarchies.

That's what we feed ours. Doesn't help. We've used a formula in a tube from the vet that smells like caramel with a bit of a pasty/wet consistency. You dab a bit on the top of their paw. That's the hard part, but it sure is fun to watch them run around on three legs and shaking the 4th! They'll eventually lick that stuff and it helps. I need to get our cats back on that stuff. I've tried that stuff too. It works, but so does butter. And it's cheaper. Have you tried mineral oil? It doesn't cost much more than butter, and it works really well to help with hair balls.

That's what we feed ours. Doesn't help. We've used a formula in a tube from the vet that smells like caramel with a bit of a pasty/wet consistency. You dab a bit on the top of their paw. That's the hard part, but it sure is fun to watch them run around on three legs and shaking the 4th! They'll eventually lick that stuff and it helps. I need to get our cats back on that stuff. That sounds like Laxatone. Very sticky! As for the fur balls, try Natural Balance cat food, and a regular once-a-day brushing. The Natural Balance improves the strength of the coat to prevent breaking, and the brushing will get rid of the hair that naturally falls out. You can get the food at Petco (not Petsmart). Most of the grocery store brands of pet food are junk food. They've got a lot of fillers in them and can cause problems like urinary tract crystals (this can cost thousands of dollars to fix... it's cheaper in the long run to just buy good quality food).

I thought that one was kinda self-explanatory.

Asimov?

I think so. Being close to the person who holds the job means you learn a lot, whether it's intentional or not.

I keep shout wipes in my gear bag. Those things work great!

Absolutely - I've always said they should have chopped off the First Amendment after the first five words and made the rest into a new amendment... ROFLMAO!

It seems like a lot of trouble to commit suicide... but a .22 may have been all he could get in Australia.

In this forum, who knows?