It may be different in other colleges, but if you're in Humanities and Fine Arts, you'll be prompted via email to make a remote/zoom advising appointment during the transfer advising period (June 17- July 18). Those appointments are 90 minutes and you really need to be in a place where you've got good internet and a quiet environment (I had one advisee try to do it while actively at work in a customer service type position... it wasn't great). Oh, and I believe you must do some online trainings before you're eligible to do that advising (Guide to the U, ready for the U, maybe one other). Keep an eye on your email and do those things as soon as you're asked to. I'm not sure if it does to your personal email, so start checking your umass email regularly.

I strongly recommend doing it as early in that range of dates as you can, and also suggest signing up for a time early in the week. You only get the power to add/ drop courses during your meeting, and it only lasts until the end of the week your appointment happens during, so if you sign up for say a Thursday, you'll only have until end of Friday to make course choices. Then, you have to wait until a couple weeks before the semester starts to make other changes.

I'd guess part of the answer is quantity relative to container. It takes a lot of milk to make cheese, so much if it is water that you're removing as you turn the proteins and fats into cheese. If that bucket started full of milk that spontaneously cheesified, it wouldn't be full of cheese at the end. It would have a bit at the bottom.

There's no indication of abuse or anything here. People are, by and large, responsible for their choices. It's part of the whole "oh no consequences" concept we're in this sub to enjoy.

I've got limited sympathy for him. He knows what she's like and chooses to be with her anyway.

Contact your academic advisor.

The new grade, if higher than the original, overwrites the old grade. However, one thing to know is that you only earn credits as if you took the class one time. Some folks don't realize that and end up being short on credits as a result.

To be clear, you have not technically already graduated, you've walked at commencement. Grades weren't due until yesterday and we're just starting to clear people for really graduating today. I'm one of the folks who does so for my department. Diplomas aren't even issued until like a month from now.

It's a stupid and weird way to go, but it's how umass does it. I have a student who was convinced that if he was able to walk he must be guaranteed to have passed his spring classes and to be graduating. But it doesn't work that way. Walking means you were scheduled to graduate, not that you have finished your requirements and are genuinely graduating.

I agree with the comment that mentions your advisor should have noticed during a meeting with you, but with the ARR in SPIRE, there's an expectation that students pay attention to these details as well. If you have fewer than 120 units/ credits on your ARR right now (edit, actually by late this afternoon i think, there's a lag between entry and your arr showing the final grades/ credits), you will not be cleared to graduate and will not receive your diploma.

You can take a summer class either through U+/UWW or a community college to make up the credits and formally graduate in September as a summer grad.

Yeah, I didn't really think it was a cub, but it's much more of a possibility where I'm living now (western MA) than it was when I was growing up just outside Boston. Thanks for weighing in!

Would love that Mediterranean marinade recipe if you didn't mind...

Please don't get a dog unless you're planning to pay for a professional dog walker every day you work. It's cruel to leave a dog alone indoors, even at the 'reduced' hours you claim are coming.

Dog ownership requires a village in a similar way to having kids. There will be days work runs late. There will be times you're ill. There will be times you want to go out for drinks after work or something. If it's only you in the home, plus the doggo, you're going to end up neglecting them to some extent. Don't do that to a living, loving creature unless you've got a plan to create that village by way of paying professionals. And since you seem to prioritize cheapness over safety and quality, I'm not sure I trust you to make good choices on that front.

I understand wanting a dog. I wish I could get one myself. But it wouldn't be kind to the animal. They don't just exist to give you the warm fuzzies when you have a minute and feel like it, and to be relegated to conditions that would be cruel to humans (left alone without access to food or a bathroom until you're available to do it) when you don't.

Wanting doesn't mean you're an appropriate candidate for a dog.

Those aren't ticks. They look six legged (ticks have 8), the shape is wrong. The person above you thought lone star ticks but they're wrong, amblyomma americanum is reddish brown with a white spot on the back (the 'lone star' of the common name), these are glossy black and too small.

Source: I worked at a tick testing lab for two years.

It would have to be a cub, but it's not impossible. There's a black bear who has denned about a mile away, and she's has cubs most years.

OP talking about oneself in the third person using their OP account is a.... choice? Especially criticizing themselves.

While I agree with everyone saying this is lovely and your "mistake" doesn't look like a mistake, but rather, to those who aren't you, looks perfect or just right or however you want to describe it, I want to acknowledge that this isn't the way you intended the piece to look, and I'm sorry you made what feels to you like a grievous error. It sucks when what we are trying to do is not ultimately what gets done.

That said, there are cultures wherein even the most accomplished artists intentionally include errors, because to create something perfect is an insult to the gods (or something along those lines). So, this could be that, for you, if you wanted.

Or it could be the universe joining you in the act of creation. I'm not saying a specific deity or anything took over your hands (I don't really believe in gods, but I do hope that something greater than our daily experiences exists), but so much of life happens in ways that we do not plan it. Sometimes that means bad outcomes, but many times it means different or better outcomes than we planned for or anticipated.

Here, and I mean this sincerely, it has turned out so beautifully that you're getting a lot of "what? that's amazing" responses, and if you can, I would consider trying to embrace that.

Not everything is beautiful because it was created precisely as the artist envisioned. Sometimes beauty comes from mistakes. Sometimes innovation isn't the result of years of hard work, but a happy accident.

From this piece, I am sure the rest of your work is also lovely and worthy of praise, as you are yourself as an individual. Try, if you can, to be kinder to yourself and this little twist of fate. It's easy for us to see the errors we made, or the things we didn't mean to do, or forgot to do, but to those outside our heads, most of those things are either straight up invisible, or they add rather than detract.

This piece would still have been beautiful if it came out the way you'd planned. But it is, as it is now, something I am grateful to have seen. Thank you for sharing it, even if you thought you were sharing a disaster. This is the prettiest disaster I've seen recently.

There's what looks like blue paint sprayed on the branches it's on, too.

You'd have much more luck talking about this with folks who are interested in intentional community, rather than folks who explicitly identify as homesteaders. Both interests are valid, but folks who ID as homesteaders are much less likely to be interested in the admin/bureaucracy of intentional communities.

Not all intentional communities have the farming qualities you're looking for (in fact, few probably do, but ecovillage style communities would be one area of research for you), and they come in all varieties of structure and social organization (from communal living and income sharing populations that can look quite cult-like, to basically being condominium communities designed by the residents, where everyone owns their own unit/section of land but also owns a share of the communal resources). But folks interested in ICs will not have the same hard no response that you're getting here.

Also, just to push back against the HOA phobia many in these comments have, most ICs have some form of governance, often fashioned after an HOA, but it's not quite the same deal as when you move into an otherwise disconnected community that happens to have an HOA (typically run by busybodies who get a lot of pleasure out of controlling everyone around them). They're often run on consensus principles (so no one can tell you what to do, but you do have to be able to compromise and come to middle grounds on some stuff), or via something called sociocracy that I don't fully comprehend myself. But the idea is organization without the awfulness that the classic HOA seems unable to avoid. So again, know your audience. Talking about HOA structures is likely to put people off, frame it otherwise.

Also, not for nothing, but I do think that saying things like "no one can have grass" isn't helping your case. Even if many folks agree that lawns are wasteful and harmful, you severely limit the population of folks who might be interested by starting from a place of what people cannot do, rather than what the community might enable people to do. So think of more yesses and fewer nos, when trying to share your vision of how this could be great (you could have access to a community library of tools, so that you can use a jigsaw when you want it, but don't have to buy it personally and have it sit unused much of the time! the community could organize around harvest time and help one another! you could be the chicken keeper and provide the community eggs, and someone else could manage the orchards, or something like that). And be prepared to work with folks who are interested to develop your vision and mission, rather than trying to impose exactly what you think would be best and recruiting only those who agree. These groups only work if folks are willing to discuss and come to a shared agreement about what is valued by the community.

Yep, us wimmins have a massive conspiracy to get you. There's a global group chat and everything. It takes a remarkable amount of admin and coordination, but it's worth it to frustrate you and OP specifically.

Yeesh. It's the folks who most need therapy who declare they don't need it and everyone is out to get them.

Consider: you're the common denominator in all these issues. The call is coming from inside the house. And to be clear, it's you.

....because the spiders are eating them...

If you've got spiders, you've got the bugs the spiders are eating. Kill the spiders and get even more bugs inside. Which should bother you if the spiders do. Spiders help you keep other things contained.

If you can avoid it, stay away from service industries generally and restaurants in particular, they tend to be the most variable in terms of schedule from what I understand. You want to work for an institution with set hours, such that your hours are also set.

But here's the thing, setting those boundaries DOES make sense even if you are not doing this with purposeful intent. Because they need to protect themselves. It's not really about you, exactly, it's about how engaging with you affects their lives. For them, even if it's not purposeful, it meaningfully affects the quality of their lives. They are allowed to make the best choices they feel they can make, even if those choices are not the ones you would prefer.

Think of it this way (though I want to be clear your lateness is not equivalent in terms of impact as the following example): we punish people for involuntary manslaughter in this country. If you did something that results in someone else's death, even if you didn't mean to, you can be held accountable for those actions and that result. The conviction would not mean you were inherently a bad person, but that your actions had consequences regardless of your intent. You are responsible for the outcomes, even if you didn't set out to create them. This is how we operate, as a society.

There's an old spanish proverb that says "Take what you want, and pay for it, says god." While I am an atheist, I like the sense this gives. You can do what you want, be what you want, choose what you want, but you cannot do so without also experiencing the consequences of those actions/choices/etc, be they good or ill. (Edit, before you say you don't WANT to be late, the point is that no matter what, you engage in actions and you experience the consequences, good or bad. None of us gets to escape this fact.)

You can want lateness without consequences, because it doesn't feel fair to you to experience consequences for something you didn't set out to do, but happened anyway, but that doesn't mean you get to have it. I understand and sympathize with wanting it. But wanting doesn't make it so.

And not for nothing, but I would like to believe I have not personally been nasty in the way I have communicated with you (though if you would like to point to something in my comments specifically, I would be happy to reflect on my choices). You do, however, seem to be in the grips of RSD right now, given how you are reacting to folks who are trying to help you (but that help doesn't involve saying you're right and we all agree, so you're reacting very badly, because that feels like rejection and you're already all wired up about this).

You might want to take a step back and breathe for a while.

No, I mean overall. You titled your post about your lateness not being defiance, but I've seen you use it in ways that mean disrespect (not defiance), actual defiance (as in, you can't make me I'm gonna do what I wanna do), a lack of care about others, and a variety of other meanings that are not defiance.

The comment you replied to (and then I replied to your comment) was talking about resentment on your part, not defiance (though resentment could lead someone to act in a way that is characterized as defiant).

I think some of your issues in the comments on this post and in life more generally might be issues founded in communication challenges, rather than lateness.

But you also seem to interpret what everyone says as in direct conflict with you, rather than trying to offer you other perspectives that help you contextualize the response your lateness garners. If you do that more generally, being on time isn't going to help much. You have to be willing to believe that the people choosing to engage with you are trying their best (you want everyone to believe you're trying your best, but it really doesn't seem like you reciprocate that, you assume conflict and negativity). If your first interpretation of anything is that someone is telling you you're bad and wrong, or 'defiant', then it's very hard for the conversation or the relationship to move forward.

By and large, people are not acting towards you out of malicious intent. Both on this post and in life. Mostly, people are not out there cackling about how they're going to show other people. Yes, folks like that do exist, but you will have a much smoother path in life if you start from the assumption that folks either aren't thinking about you much at all (hard to imagine, for many, since of course we're in our own heads and everything seems specifically aimed at us), or are generally thinking neutral to positive things.

Folks who are annoyed you are late don't think you're a horrific unredeemable person. But they do likely think that you have tools and strategies you could use to reduce your lateness, at a minimum, but that you are not choosing to do so. Everyone has a calculus of how much they're willing to give vs. take on pretty much every relationship dynamic. They can understand your difficulties and still not want to invest more in a relationship with you if they consistently lose hours of their lives they can't get back waiting for you. Even if you end the meetup at the scheduled time and don't expect to hang out longer. There's still the loss of their time while they were waiting. That time could have been invested in work (money), in play (relaxation and pleasure are important to mental wellbeing), in art or other forms of creation (this feeds the soul), or a myriad of other ways. But they were waiting. For you. And you seem to be wanting to be able to say "this is me, love me as I am, you're not allowed to be frustrated because of my disability" but that's just not how human relationships work.

There are only 24 hours in a day. 16 if you're getting 8 hours of sleep, which not everyone does, but back of the envelope math requires assumptions. People need time to eat, bathe, otherwise refresh themselves, have quiet personal time if they need it or do other restorative things privately, to work and to commute.

There are precious few hours that can be devoted to things like hanging out. If you waste (for them) an hour of that time, it can't be gotten back. It can't be replaced or made up for.

It can be true BOTH that you have a legitimate difficulty with being on time and that that fact isn't going to fix what your friend has lost waiting for you. Or your employer, or your therapist, or other professional whose services you engage, and so forth.

Approaching that fact with humility, with a willingness to express to others that you are sorry and that you are trying to do better (because even with the disability, you have options to improve your time-related performance and it's not clear to me whether you engage with those at all), then that will go a long way to helping reduce the friction your lateness causes.

You are being quite defiant in the true sense of the word in this post, suggesting that people just have to deal with it, with you, and shouldn't have feelings that are less than positive about how your lateness affects them. That their reasons for upset are not reasonable.

If you want grace from others, you have to offer it in return.

I'm curious, how do you define "defiant"? Because the way you use it here is odd.