Will you let Casper walk on her own at any point?

Charles Dickens 'gave characters a secret queer side'

Stephen Fry's first novel The Liar features a "lost" Dickens story with a gay plot line.

With the CTA cutbacks I'll be able to take the bus to get downtown, but I'll have to take the red line home. Evening on the red line in winter is often smelly. I'm not looking forward to it.

I'd like to - especially to get a group of kids to walk together from my end of the neighborhood. My target age for that is 8 - it's only 4 blocks but there's a 5-lane road to cross (with a crossing guard) and the turn in to the school is a bit dodgy, traffic-wise.

At least as big an issue as safety is actually getting to school on time, though - walking with her is 15 minutes, and she's not a morning person.

Yeah, I was just curious -- when I went to a neighborhood school, most kids walked, but now apparently at least many get dropped off. (My best friend always got a ride, but only to a block away -- they were lazy, so took the ride, but getting driven was Not Cool....)

My sister used to carpool to school and I used to bus it, back when we were going to the same school.

There was also a point where we were up for chauffeuring to school. I seem to recall she was okay with it and I opted for public transportation.

Often Dickens' male characters "conveniently" fall in love with the sister of their best friend, which she read as further evidence that he had woven the suggestion of homosexual relationships into his plots.

That's an extremely common occurrence in 19th century fiction, in part because women of some classes had so few socially acceptable ways to meet men. I hardly think that they're all veiled homosexual relations.

My K-8 schools were on busy roads and had buses, which I believe all of the students took; I don't remember anyone getting dropped off by their parents. Even though there was a subdivision right across the street from the junior high, they even had a bus pick up the kids there because there was no crosswalk for the four-lane road dividing it from the school. One kid from that subdivision did decide to walk home after school one day when I was in 8th grade, and he was struck by a car and killed.

During the summer, there were no buses provided for those of us who had to attend band practice (we had to be ready for the parade season in the fall), so I walked the mile or so from my house. It was a bit scary because not only was the road busy, but there were no sidewalks so I had to walk on the shoulder. I remember one summer, someone had hit a cat which had died on the shoulder, and I watched it slowly decompose over the three months--quite interesting!

My self-evaluation is still refusing to write itself.

My parents were both employed by the school system when I lived in MI. A couple of times one or the other was working at the same school I went to, so I got a ride then. Otherwise it was all buses, bikes, or walking. It was a small town, though, and I rarely had to deal with really busy streets.