Category: Life

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Life

Sad story Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa

Reading Time: 2 minutes

(Update 03-09-2025) LA Times – His wife dead, an ailing Gene Hackman was stranded alone in his house for days, authorities believe.

(Update 03-7-2025) Huff Post: Gene Hackman And Wife Betsy Arakawa’s Causes Of Death Released. It seems to me in other words: Mr. Hackman who is in his 90s and has dementia, appears not aware of his wife’s passing and lived one more week on his own after his wife (who is 30 years younger) died suddenly. 用中文来说，有老年痴呆症的老先生好像没有意识到比他的年轻30岁的日本裔太太已经突然去世。虽然平常是他的太太照顾他，他自己一个人生活了一个礼拜。不知道他这一个礼拜是怎么过来的。而且因为他们是非常有钱的人，房子，院子也是巨大无比，我估计邻居一是平常不一定有交流，而是不会很容易看到他们家有啥异样。最后还是打扫院子的工人透过玻璃（窗或是门）发现的。当然类似的事情美国以外也偶尔有发生。

Alzheimer’s Expert Suggests Caregiver Emergency Plans After Deaths of Gene Hackman and Wife Betsy (Exclusive)

(CNN via YT) Actor Gene Hackman and his wife found dead in their New Mexico home || The CNN YT Video showed a lot of Tom Cruise and my memory of Gene Hackman is this move The Quick and the Dead.

(People Mag) All About Gene Hackman’s Wife, Classical Pianist Betsy Arakawa, Who Died Alongside the Actor and Their Dog

Gene Hackman Wikipedia

(Huffington Post) Close Friends Of Gene Hackman, Betsy Arakawa Recall Family’s Last Conversation With Couple

Some of my thoughts

It sounds to me they committed suicide(s): but we will have to wait what the police has to say. Refer to CNN: Actor Gene Hackman and his wife were found dead in their home this week under ‘suspicious’ circumstances. Here’s what we know.

This also exposed one problem that’s hitting our modern society – and my dad (who lives in China) mentioned it in recent years too: that is the loneliness of elder/older people.

Also, I saw a unique problem in America: some people are dependent on, or more precisely, addicted to the prescription drugs and hard drugs such as Fentanyl. This is happening to people of all economy backgrounds: I recall Michael Jackson died from drug over-dose years ago.

For substance abuse, e.g., Fentanyl, Peter Santenello (YouTuber) has a good documentary Inside America’s #1 Epidemic. In St. Louis area in recent years, I saw increasingly some (homeless?) people asked for money at the busy intersections. I hope they are not on drugs. A related problem/issue I see (or I don’t understand) why the states are making cannabis (marijuana) legal in last few years – it seems both Dems and Republicans are supporting that.

References

(YT: Dr. Josef)10 MOST Dangerous Prescription Drugs

Categories
Life Politics

Muskrat, the higher ups’ kids are more precious

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Tom Krause – CEO, Cloud Software Group – finance guy – Princeton U alumni – Now you know not all ivies have high moral standards, because Tom is obviously a #muskrat or a fat cat in the corporate world (ABS News). Quote the ABC news article a bit:

One former Cloud Software Group employee said she hid her pregnancy for fear it could make her a target of layoffs. An ex-manager said they dreaded filing performance reviews of subordinates, knowing some workers may fall victim to the next cycle of cuts. Another former employee said they avoided expressing unease in company emails or in the messaging app Slack out of concern that it could jeopardize their job.

Oligarchs and ordinary people

When I was watching the “Surviving Black Hawk Down” on Netflix last night, I just realized all the US presidents (since I came to the USA) and all the billionaires in America never sent their own kids to the war zone. John McCain is an exception, but he was a multimillionaire.

Meanwhile, how many regular folks’ husband, wife, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters etc. died in Afghanistan and Iraq (thousands, refer to US casualty in Afghanistan, and the Iraq War). As I say this from time to time, the loss of one soldier usually impacts more than one person: because the fallen solider could have parents, wife, kids, siblings, and so on.

This sounds like today’s Russia: obviously they have even higher casualty in the Russia Ukraine war. In the case of Russia, they are so short of soldiers in the now: because they cannot incentive people in the Moscow and St. Peterburg area to fight, so they are getting all the young folks from less developed areas, such as Chechen and Syberia, plus North Korea. Just like the US sent soldiers from Missouri to Afghanistan. I recall in year 2021 a young marine from St. Charles County died during the fanatic Kabul Airport withdrawal. In total 13 marines died in that suicide attack: there are very little mentioning in the US news media 2021 Kabul airport attack – Wikipedia.

PS: I wrote a bluesky thread on the topic above too.

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advice and tips Life Life Tips

Don’t always dwelling on the past 不要总是留恋过去

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对过去的留恋可能是人之常情，尤其是对上了年纪的人（大概过了50岁的人可以说是上了年纪？），还有一些曾经辉煌，现在落魄的人。

有一个例子是鲁迅笔下的祥林嫂。实际生活中其实这种情况不少。我感觉我自己有时候也会说/想：想当年，我年轻的时候，blah blah blah.

最近 formerly executive assistant at square, sorry I could not find her profile on LinkedIn now, as I unfollowed her recently. Due to LinkedIn’s algorithm (or AI), it seems quite hard for me to find her again (refer to my recent blog post re: LinkedIn’s search-ability).

PS (02-09-2025) I gave it more thought: I think self pity (e.g., 祥林嫂) and similarly self victimization are probably traits or characteristics of narcism. I didn’t read the psychology behind it. Pure guess on my part.

(Update 10-28-2025) Self pity is the trait Charlie Munger talked about quite a bit, and he thinks that’s one of the most destructive traits.

Value Trap

This just reminded me of one thing or one phenomenon in the stock market or stock trading: value trap. Sometimes I got into it. The past price of stock just reflects the past. Nothing more. But sometimes, people think it a stock drops suddenly and drops a lot, they will think it’s a deal, and rush to buy it. And I have done that many times too, like today I bought some PayPal stocks. And I quickly realized it could be value trap, just like the Polaris Inc stock that I traded a while ago.

Categories
advice and tips Fun kids Life Software development

Reflections and moments in year 2024

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Travel Mishaps

One of the most memorable moments in 2024, for me at least, we already checked out the hotel in HK and got on the taxi to the airport, then our 14-year-old said, “I left my hoodie in the closet”. We already checked out thus cannot go back to the room directly. Had to use a concierge service. It seems took forever when we waited there. The real time is probably 20 to 30 minutes. We tipped the house clean staff who retrieve the hoodie 100 HKD. Same for the taxi driver. Adding them up it’s probably $20: I think we paid that hoodie a bit over $20 at the Plato’s Closet. But it’s not about money. I remember this because my wife was furious (more than anxious) when she and our 10-year-old waited in the taxi. The younger taxi driver drove fast to the airport (we did make sure we have enough time even with this mishap).

Presidential Volunteer Service Award (PVSA)

One of the proud moments as a dad: our 14 year old Serenity received the Presidential Volunteer Service Award 🥇 on December 31, 2024. Pictured below: she is receiving the certificate, the congrats letter from President Biden, and the Gold award pin from Rick Skinner, who represents the United Way of Greater St. Louis, the verifying org for this award. We (my wife and I) are thankful for all her teachers, from toddler program and pre-schools (pre-K), from Kindergarten to high school at the Ladue School District, her coaches and teachers who helped her in her extra curriculum activities: for teaching her the right things. I know sometimes I didn’t teach her or show her the right thing 🙁 . Her friends over the years too. Thank you all! And we hope she keeps up the attitude and efforts 🙂

My Panic Moment

I had my share of moment at work. One evening, I was acting as the technical lead representing the development team during our production deployment (rollout). I noticed an issue after the system engineer made the server configuration changes and restart. I quickly realized why: instead of adding a few parameters in the middle of the server start configuration, the system engineer did a replacement – in other words, he removed all the parameters from the location where we intend to replace until the end. And he repeated for multiple nodes/servers without confirming any node/server change with me 🙁

This could potentially cause longer outage as we planned, and could drag out our change windows from 2 hours to 4 hours or more. Luckily, the junior system engineer called his colleague who is much more experienced, and he came out and fixed the issue in under 20 to 30 minutes and saved the evening 🙂

The lesson for me here is making sure always backup the server configurations – earlier I did make some backups (not all) after my project manager suggested. Always be open minded and listen to colleagues even when I think it’s probably not necessary at the time – because we never know it could be handy down the road!

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Fun kids Life

Watch “Growing Pains” series again

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I watched a bit of “Growing Pains” on Apple TV last night: the 2nd show that has the Bruce Springsteen show tickets. I purchase the series from Apple, probably in year 2016, when Alan Thicke, who acted as the dad in the screen, Dr. Jason Seave, died.

I recall I watched most of the series in early 1990s at my childhood home, mostly during my summer and winter breaks in college years, which seems match the timing 成长的烦恼 showing time in China – “曾在台湾中华电视公司及中国大陆的上海教育电视台从1990年一直播到1994年中播出。”

I recall I didn’t go back much to my childhood home since summer 1993, the year I graduated from college. My parents also moved away a bit from our childhood home.

I have a few thoughts:

  1. in late 1980s and early 1990s, my adolescent and college years, I recall we were very curious about the outside world. I recall seeing movies such as True Lies, Twister (1996 film), Schindler’s List, and many westerns on Shanghai TV channel 2 (the international channel). The society and the country in general were much more open then too, here is some background (in Chinese) how they started to import those TV series – 文汇世纪 | 《成长的烦恼》《神探亨特》…当年上海电视台如何引进第一批美剧？||【话说上海】那些年我们一起追过的剧集 | 海外影视 This is probably my 1st exposure to the American high school (Michael and Carrol). More recently I learned a bit more about American high schools via Gilmore Girls (Netflix).
  2. Now that I have my own teen, I can sympathize better with the parents. This also ties back to my earlier blog post Summer Break 2024 – little moments. I left it in the draft mode for a while 🙂
  3. Some similar shows I watched recently include Gilmore Girls (available on Netflix), and Modern Family (available on Hulu).
Categories
Fun kids Life Software development

Summer Break 2024 – little moments

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Below moment is likely not isolated to summer. Sometime between March and July this year (year 2024). One day I took MacBook on sofa, and sit about 6 ft from my 14 year old. We were at the two ends of the sofa (couch). Her response: dad, you are not going to sitting here for good, right? She was on her computer and wanted privacy. My sweet 9 year old said: dad, I want to sit with you 🙂

This morning (early June): while I was driving to my 14 year old to Clayton HS, and I got distracted, passed Ladue road while driving on Warson south bound. Basically I went to the Ladue Middle School – made turn at Price & past JBS, and my 14 year old said: it’s 1st time I saw JBS 🙂

Since this summer, I started to play some board game with my 10 year old (was 9 year old before this past July), almost everyday. This continued even when she was in the Children’s Hospital for a few days in September. We played “spot it” during those days. Our most recent favorite game is Montessori Trinomial Cube (we played a ton lately, I am pretty sure she outgrew it. There goes my original plan to sell it on eBay 🙂 “Trash Panda” is probably the most complicated game for me. And I am glad some days we got to play table tennis in the basement.

PS: for anyone reading, please don’t share this with your teen kids – I am worry about the I may have the Bruce Springsteen show/tickets moments as shown in one of the Growing Pains series 🙂

Categories
Life

Avoid toxic people

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One of the life lessons I learned over the years is – avoid toxic people at all cost.

Charlie Munger mentioned it a few times.

This is the latest example as to why: Man arrested, charged in woman’s St. Louis death after Clayton abduction: “Investigators believe that Mosby and the victim, identified as 37-year-old Michelle Hampton, were known to each other.”

More from KDSK.com: 2nd suspect charged in deadly kidnapping of Michelle Hampton “According to documents from the U.S. District Court Eastern District, Mosby was the boyfriend of Michelle Hampton’s twin sister, Samantha Hampton.” Also quote this article here: Samantha said she had recently told Mosby that Michelle was holding a $40,000 settlement on behalf of their brother. My take: unfortunately, there is no drug for stupidity. This is partially the reason her twin sister got killed. Maybe I should add the stupid people in the title too.

Also earlier: ‘If I stop, my sister will be gone’ – Woman says she argued with 911 while following car with kidnapped sister

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advice and tips kids Life Life Tips

Stay in the hospital in America – 在美国住院

Reading Time: 7 minutes

中文翻译（主要是谷歌翻译的，我做了一点修改）在这里。

This is probably the 3rd time we stayed in a hospital in America – if we count the time we spent in the Mercy for our 2 babies delivery (baby number 1 and number 2). Last week in my blog I talked about our little baby got sick. As she didn’t get better, we end up in the St. Louis Children’s hospital ER on Monday 9/9, and followed by inpatient care between 9/12 and yesterday 9/16. She is better and out of hospital now. The main concern was her fever and pneumonia.

Again it’s not the 1st time I go to hospital in America. I have been to ER once myself in year 2006 when I broke my chin at Stacy park and I drove myself to the Mercy ER shortly after. I recall when I was a teen, after watching some TV or movies, and sometimes I sort of romanticize “staying in hospital” (different TV or movies scene than the ER TV series here in the USA). Also probably I hoped for a break of school because my middle school and high school years are not easy.

In recent years especially last year, during my visit to China, I went to hospital everyday to see my mom (she was in the hospital). Also I saw her in IV infusion this year (note IV infusion is much more common in China than int he USA, even for the kids, separate topic); and I did IV infusion last year and a bunch of tests after falling from the ladder (advice: be careful when climbing ladder, using proper technique and safety cautions). I think my attitude towards hospital stay is more rational now: it’s a necessary evil we have to deal with. I am hoping to be away from hospital as much as practical.

Below is something new I noticed this time around.

Rounds

Doctors, nurses and personal care technicians (tech) kept families in the loop most of the time. Also, there are the morning “rounds” in which all the caregivers including the residents (the doctors in training) will have a discussion on the current status, and ask parents if there are any questions. This is somewhat like the “standup” in the agile world. I think it’s good.

Tablet

In year 2010 I recall the Mercy hospital room has traditional phone.

Fast forward 14 years, at the children’s I do notice the SamSung tablet in the room, and it can be used both for ordering meals as well as watching TVs (we didn’t watch this time). It also has some games similar to what we saw on Boeing 737 Max and 787 – our two kids played a bit together, and our little one played some alone too. I remember in the old days the meal is ordered from phone.

Electronic Medical Records

Another new development is Electronic Medical Records (EMR), and BJC (parent org for the Children’s) implemented Epic/MyChart in recent years. Adding my daughter’s EMR proxy access to my account took a few days: I simply requested for it and wait. I got my own MyChart set up at BJC a few years ago when I went there for the Covid vaccine (the Pfizer version). I received the access in about a week or so (thinking they may have manually looked into my relationship with my daughter).

Personally I like the electronic version of medical records much better than papers. Because I am not the best organized person for paperwork, as you can read from my earlier blog post – I need to better organize things.

I noticed our pediatricians office has a patient portal too. TAUC has a much simpler website but I recall once I downloaded the flu vaccine record for work. I also talked about my personal visit experience here last year – after an unexpected fall. Their wait time is quite long recently – the main reason we didn’t take our baby there this time. But I do have past interactions with doc there and I think he is good. This reminds me another thing: I need to look for a PCP again because the PCP I saw earlier this year moved away.

Customer Service etc.

Concierge (Customer Service Specialist): noticed concierge came to us when we were waiting at the ER waiting area on Monday 9/9, and she offered water, snacks etc. We saw customer service specialist during the hospital stay (inpatient) later as well.

Family Center: it’s at the 3rd floor of children’s hospital. I saw volunteers. They have coffee, drink, snacks and laundry services.

Ronald McDonald House

Education (missing school): the education specialist came on Monday 9/16 asked if we need anything school related.

Therapy Dog: this is probably one of the highlights during our little baby’s stay.

Appointment Helper for PCP (Primary Care Physician, or Pediatrician in this case).

Overall they are trying to make the place nice, welcoming etc. More like a hotel, vs a traditional hospital.

Parking, Meals, and Odds and Ends

Parking is free for the parents. One thing: don’t use the parent badge directly if you go in the 1st time using your car, which is more likely in the case of St. Louis metro area parents. The reason is if you come in using parent badge, you won’t have entry ticket – which is handy when you leave the hospital. Another reason is we need to turn in the parent badge when we leave. Today I had to use #lostTicket feature because I gave my entry ticket to my wife. It’s not a big deal, $16 is the cost of the parking fee. I noticed quite a few people (hospital workers?) parked along the Kingshighway Blvd across the street. Probably to save some parking fees.

Meal is included for the patients and two caregivers: it seems breakfast and dinner at the cafeteria, with some limitations; and lunch is available via a phone call. We didn’t order lunch btw. Our baby ordered her meals via the SamSung tablet.

There are some outdoor areas on the rooftop (8th floor) for kids/families to walk around.

The window view from the 10th floor room is also pretty good: we are facing kings highway blvd and can see forest park and nearby buildings in the area. I will attach couple pictures of the window view shortly. I also walked at the forest park once; and went to the shake shack at Euclid road once (I went there often when I was working at Cortex in year 2019 and 2020 before pandemic).

Bills

I just paid all the urgent care and pediatricians’ bills on myuhc.com via the HSA account (and SSO). Personally, I like this electronic version of dashboard/payments better than the good old paper-based approach. Guess how much I paid so far (note this is before the ER/Inpatient bills from the children’s hospital, which I estimate to be in thousands)? I paid about $900 so far.

Lessons learned

One thing I learned from all this, I think, is that choose urgent care place wisely, or try to see pediatrician 1st. On two occasions, Monday Labor Day 9/2 and Sunday 9/8 I took our little one to two urgent care places, and they cost about $300 per trip, and the 1st trip (9/2) didn’t diagnose the pneumonia (or maybe she didn’t have it at the time, but we didn’t do X-ray on 9/2, and she was diagnosed on 9/5 Thursday at Pediatrician office).

Also not all urgent care places are the same. In my old and current neighborhood, I recommend going to the Total Access Urgent Care (TAUC) at Creve Coeur (next to the Noodles co and Walgreens), and the St. Lukes Urgent Care (next to the CVS). The reason I didn’t go to TAUC 1st this time is mainly the wait time: 1st time it suggested about 7 hours wait time, the second time about 2 hours. But again sometimes, maybe a lot of times good things (and good doctors) are worth to wait.

How much will be overall bill cost? I am making a wild guess: between ER and the inpatient at Children’s Hospital, I am guessing I likely need to pay $5000 to $10,000, after the insurance discount. Over the years the US healthcare cost skyrocketed as well as the insurance premium. I recall back probably in year 2001, more than 20 years ago, I only paid about $10 or $15 for the tonsil removal surgery (for my then significant other). The hospital bills for our two babies are about $1,500 for normal delivery and hospital stay (2 nights, if my memory is correct) at Mercy St. Louis. Regarding ER, I mentioned I went to Mercy ER in year 2006, and the bill was about $800 then. The insurance company initially didn’t want to pay: I called them and they paid eventually.

Last but not least, if you like to read more, I talked about American Healthcare systems and hospitals in the past (here are post one, two, and three in a series, also this one).

(Update 09-19-2024) It appears that I got a scammer call yesterday (luckily, I didn’t give you much information). The number is 763 656 5847 (I just did a google search). Anyone the caller claims to be UnitedHealthCare (that’s also from the Caller ID on my iPhone). And the topic is around nurse line or nurse manager (the caller knows my kid’s name and my employer’s name; this leads to me think they are not total 100% scammers). I did some google around this topic too, and here is some of the reddit thread I found (one and two). I just blocked the phone number. Better to err on the cautious side 🙂

(Update 09-25-2024) The 1st batch of bills arrived at myuhc.com, and I paid them all – 9 bills total, and the total is under $1,000 from my side, the insurance company also paid some (after discount).

(Update 10-01-2024) The total for the hospital stay is $1,228.40 so far, per myChart – I paid all via myuhc.com

(Update 10-02-2024) Got the hospital bill, I paid $175.50 via myuhc while the uhc paid more than $1,579.50.

(Update 10-03-2024) I paid hospital $34.06. I think this is likely the tail end of the bills.

(Update 10-05-2024) I summarized my out of pocket expense for the hospital bills: $2,017.16 and the subtotal of pediatrician (3 visits total) and 2 urgent care visits: $959.49. Total is $2,976.65 so far. I believe most bills are created and paid. Again the most important thing is make sure we are healthy.

(Update 10-07-2024) One more bill from the children’s: Plan Paid $28,460.68; You (I) Paid $481.77 => this makes total hospital bill to $2,498.93; also this makes the total out of pocket pay (adding $959.49) to be $3,458.42. I think we may hit a limit or something like that for out of pocket expense for this year.

Categories
kids Life Life Tips

The 3rd week was tough

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Our 10 year old got sick on the 1st day of Labor Day weekend – 8/31 Saturday. She has violin private lesson and we had to do it over the Zoom. Initially we didn’t think too much of it, but on Monday 9/2, as we didn’t see her getting any better we decided to go to urgent care. And now I look back I think I may have chosen the wrong urgent care. The Total Access Urgent Care Creve Coeur has a long wait time, 1st estimate is 6:17 pm when I looked at it at about 11:30 am. Went to the St. Luke’s UC down the road and was told at least one hour wait. So I decided try the new Mercy Go Health at the Dierbergs plaza. The doctor said it’s some sort of viral respiratory infection but didn’t prescribe any medication, we did ruled out Covid and Streps via the tests. The doctor did listen to her lung as well.

Coming home and she wasn’t doing better. On Thursday 9/5 my wife decided taking her to see her normal pediatrician. It turns out to be pneumonia (google: long does child pneumonia last) and antibiotics were prescribed. My wife thought she may get well very quickly. I was not that confident though.

Thursday was also our 14-year-old first cross country meet and I decided to go and provide some support. Friday evening was 14-year-old first pep band performance for the high school’s 1st home football game. We came home exhausted after the game – we had fun.

Today 14 year old decided get some sleep in the morning instead of go to the 8:30 am cross country practice – which I agree. And 10 year old continues her violin lesson via Zoom once more.

Playing Time

Recently 10 year old and I got into a habit of doing some thing together, mainly around board game or something in the evening. On some of the nights I came back home a bit late: mainly because I was picking up my 14 year old. We still try to play something as simple as “spot it” (the game little kids play). Btw, it’s harder to beat the kids on the “Set game” nowadays – for me it’s almost impossible to beat 14 year old. Nowadays I started to appreciate the time spent with my daughters, as I realized my time with them is getting less as they grow up. This is especially true with 14 year old.

I know nowadays we usually want our kids get well soon when they are sick – but sometimes the virus has its own mind, and we just have to be patient 🙂

Reference

Fever or Chills, Age 11 and Younger 

Pneumonia in Children: Care Instructions (alberta.ca)

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advice and tips kids Life Life Tips math-and-edu

We survived two weeks of High School, so far :-)

Reading Time: 2 minutes

This probably should be the series 2 of Ladue high school, we are coming, series I is here and I wrote it about 9 months ago.

Now it’s real – which means, every morning, I have to be patient about the traffic on Warson road. And I am very proud to announce: so far I didn’t lose my cool ha ha 🙂 Though in one morning, I told my 14 year old it’s probably for her to ride bike when we were stuck near the stop sign at Warson and Conway.

Sports and schedule

This whole actually started in the summer, because my 14 year old took two online classes (health and PE), via Launch. Both are fairly intense courses, and more than once in our China and Hong Kong trip, including in Hong Kong, I had to walk with my 14 year old to make sure she gets enough steps or make the Garmin heart rate monitor happy. We actually started from St. Louis in late June 🙂

We encouraged her to sign up varsity sports. And I quickly realized the Cross Country program is more demanding than I thought. Btw, a little fun during the training (instagram :-).

At the same time, she decided (we ok’ed) her not doing the auditioning for YPOP (YPCO and YPSO) this school year at Webster University Community Music School. We don’t want to or try to hit at every pitch, as the old baseball saying goes (and Warren Buffett likes to say it many times).

What’s next

I can see she definitely has more homework. Also due to the Cross Country practice after school, she would feel tired and tended to do “doom scrolling” (I assume it’s TikTok and YT Shorts) instead of working on the homework right away. That would push her bed time to a time that her mom cannot tolerate.

Odds and Ends

There are a lot more of those in High School. One thing is about the volunteering and tracking hours – because it may help the college application/admission down the road. Also clubs and other extra-curriculum activities – I guess there may be implications to college application too, among other things. It basically create more work and put some more pressure on the kids/family.