u/CK1277

We lost our long term meeting space (a church basement) and just wrapped our first year at the new meeting space. It’s a different church basement and they have been lovely.

When we first met with them to work out the details, the conversation about whether they were going to charge us to use the space was a little awkward. I got the impression that they could probably use the money, but didn’t want to ask the Girl Scouts to pay and the facilities guy joked that his wife had told him he had better not make the Girl Scouts pay. We agreed to do a community service project for them (we did) and called it good.

Fast forward 9 months, we did a lot better with cookies than we usually do and the girls are in a position to make a donation, but I’m not sure how much to suggest to them. So I’m doing market research into how much we probably saved by them generously allowing us to meet there for free all year.

I noticed when I logged my dessert, my fiber macro jumped. Turns out Halo Lite salted Carmel ice cream has 6g of fiber. You know what else has 6g of fiber? A serving of steel cut oats (1/3 c pre cooking).

There’s a lot more that goes into what makes a particular food item nutrient dense or not, but I just found that surprising.

I am a Girl Scout leader. I enjoy/am indifferent about 95% of my parents. The 5% of my parents who I don’t enjoy, make me want to beat my head against a wall. Or their head. Either way.

If I tell you when/where something is in three ways (hard copy, email, calendar invite) and you start a text message to me “I know it’s in an email somewhere but….” to ask me information you already know but are too lazy to look for, just know that I am picking out a place to hide your body the next time we go camping.

Sometimes I pretend to be out of cell phone range but really I’m intentionally ignoring people who ask questions they could answer for themselves if they put some fucking effort into it and stopped treating me like I’m their own personal Alexa.

To the extent that it matters, this question is US specific.

Question: If you were picking a college degree with no career field in mind, what would you pick?

Context: My son (14M) attends a grades 6-12 school that is an “early colleges” school. Which basically means that dual enrollment is standard and in order to graduate from high school, you need to have completed either (1) 60 college credit hours, or (2) a professional certificate of some sort. All of the college courses are free and they’re through state universities.

My son started college classes early which puts him on pace to easily complete about 90 credit hours while still in high school. He’s academically exactly where he needs to be, he’s doing well socially, this is all a great fit. The issue is that he has no idea whatsoever what he wants to be when he grows up. He’s ruled out doctor and lawyer, but beyond that, he can’t even narrow it down.

His advisor has him taking general studies type classes and is basically trying to keep his options open because she thinks he’s going to eventually come up with a major. His primary ADHD symptom is indecisiveness. He struggles to decide which donut he wants, I can’t see him picking a major within the next two years.

If he was 18 and looking at paying for a college degree to do something he couldn’t identify, I would tell him to take a gap year (or 2 or 3) and figure it out first. But he has the chance for 3 free years of college, so there’s no real downside here.

I am not a gym person and I think I’ve narrowed the why down to two things: (1) gyms are designed by and for people who actually like being at the gym. They’re not for people who want to get it all over with as quickly as possible, ideally without speaking to anyone more than is absolutely mandatory. (2) It’s decision overload if you don’t know what you’re doing, but figuring out what to do is also decision overload because there are too many options and I’m not especially motivated to learn how to do something I hate.

I think I can probably talk myself into doing circuit training because you start at point A and work your way around the room until you’re done and you don’t have to wait or make decisions or even actually know why you’re doing what you’re doing.

There are lots of circuit training classes, but I don’t want a class because what happens is either (1) the class I can make work with my schedule fills up or (2) I‘m running late and rather than be 10 minutes late to class, I just skip it entirely and don’t go and my life is really unpredictable.

There was a kickboxing circuit training studio near me, but they closed.

This style of fitness seems to have gone out of fashion.

I own a small business with a few other partners. We have 23 employees, so things like FMLA don’t apply to us, but we have always complied voluntarily anyway. (This is in the US)

I have an employee who is getting ready to return from maternity leave (12 weeks, paid). She was a “good enough to not be worth firing but not particularly high performing” employee before she went on maternity leave. In order to return, she is asking for (1) a reduced schedule from 5 days to 4 days, 2 WFH without childcare and 2 in office bringing her baby without childcare, (2) a raise so that she makes the same money working 32 hours as she did 40 (she’s an hourly employee), and (3) for us to cover her baby’s health insurance premiums 100% (we cover the employee 75% and dependents 50%).

She said nothing about what she would deliver in terms of productivity, but her role is customer facing so a 4 day week can never be the same as a 5 day week.

I am sympathetic to her situation. She can’t afford to stop working and she can’t afford daycare, but I feel like this proposal is beyond the pale.

I have a DBJCS troop with 40-plus girls in it. We all meet together, but then we break into Daisies, Brownies, Juniors, and CSAs. Because we’re a big troop, there’s more diversity of interests but there are enough people that we can form affinity groups. For example, there’s a travel group and there’s a group who competes in an annual outdoor skills competition, etc.

I was game planning with one of my co-leads and we were looking at the new leadership awards. One of the struggles with highest awards has always been getting in the pre-requisite and the highest award in the same year because every year you have an incoming group of girls. So this year’s J1/J2’s could do a leadership award as the pre-requisite, but if they save the Bronze for the next year, the new J1‘s (current B2’s) won’t have the pre-req. And we only have regular meetings twice a month for 90 minutes (of which about an hour is spent on badge work).

We have two thoughts:

(1) form a leadership awards/highest awards affinity group that meets on it’s own day (regular meetings are 2 Fridays per month, the camping competition affinity group meets on another Friday, so there’s 1 Friday left) and the girls who want to pursue the awards opt in.

(2) Do a leadership award retreat each year to get the prerequisite completed and then just use meetings to complete the Bronze every other year, the Silver every third year, and the Gold on your own (or during meetings because my high schoolers are apparently allergic to badges).

If anyone else has any other strategies that have worked for them, I’d love to hear what’s worked for you.