Waxing Waiver: Fill & Download for Free

In the United States, there was a boom of new school construction in the 1950s and 1960s. You know, with the Baby Boomers needing schools and all.Fire prevention in schools is important. The last thing you want is a repeat of the Our Lady of Angels fire, which happened in Chicago in 1958. Ninety-two young students and three nuns died in that fire.Photos: Tragedy at Our Lady of the Angels SchoolSo, what do you do if you’re building a school in the 1950s and 1960s, and you want to make it as fireproof as possible? You add lots of asbestos to the construction material, of course.Fast-forward to the 1970s and 1980s, and asbestos is banned, because it causes a lot of health problems, but now there’s not as much money to build new schools. Getting rid of asbestos is very expensive. Fortunately, asbestos is only bad for you if you inhale it. Covering the asbestos so it can’t get airborne keeps you from breathing it in.How do you cover asbestos in a school, when it’s in the tiles and walls? Paint the walls, put chalkboards over the walls, keep the floors well-waxed, and paint the ceiling or add a drop-down ceiling.According to this website, Asbestos in Schools - Exposure Risks, Regulations & Policies:I’m not sure how they do this in other places, but around here, teachers have to sign a waiver when they’re hired saying that they’ve been informed of the asbestos in the school, and they will:Not tape anything to the walls (it could peel the paint that’s holding down the asbestos).Report any cracked or damaged floor tiles.Not remove their chalkboards or anything else that’s attached to the walls.That last one annoys me, because all of the chalkboards at every school I’ve worked at have been too short for me to use properly. When I asked to get them raised at the first school, I got the “it’s the only thing keeping the asbestos down” talk from the maintenance guy.On a related note, you know all of those drapes and curtains at your school, particularly if your school has an auditorium? Those have to be fire-proofed with a special chemical every three years. It costs thousands of dollars for an outside company to come in, take down all of the curtains and drapes, and fire-proof them.

I’ve told this story before, but …I was away at grad school at the University of Illinois and developed a cough. I’m an allergic person, so I took antihistamines and sucked cough drops all day.Finally, after three months, I went to Student Health. I told them I usually needed a steroid shot. They wouldn’t give me one. I left, unhappily. The cough remained, waning and waxing, through winter, spring, and summer.Just before classes began for my second year at U. of I., went back to Student Health; they gave me cough syrup that helped a little, but left me queasy. By the end of the year (December), I went back and demanded a chest X-ray to rule out pneumonia. They told me nothing was found and that I was “just a California girl who couldn’t handle Illinois winters.” Never mind that I’d had the cough for well over a year.As time went on, I also started feeling extremely fatigued. With limited energy, I ended up prioritizing my “Intro to Psych” teaching duties over progress toward my MS/PhD.I was feeling so bad I went home for the summer. I saw my regular doctor who gave me a steroid shot which cleared up the cough. Just before I was about to fly back for my third year, I was told that, since I wasn’t making progress in my degree, I could continue my studies but wouldn’t get the out-of-state tuition waiver, would have to pay out-of-state tuition, and had lost my teaching position.I flew back with my mother, rented a U-Haul, packed up my apartment, and drove home. The cough recurred, but the oral and injected steroids would knock it down. The steroids were a combination of an immediate release and a long-acting type which, together, should give relief for three months.Then, I got the cough, got the steroids, and the cough returned in less than a week. My doctor took a chest X-ray (he had one in his office). There was a mass the size of an orange in the middle of my chest. By the time I could get a CT scan (it was 1984 and the machine was moved from hospital to hospital on a semi-trailer) 10 days later, it had grown by 50%.I had Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. When my oncologist requested my records — especially the X-ray — he was told that there were none. [My cynicism tells me that they reviewed the X-ray and found what they had missed and made the records “disappear.”]One of the chemotherapy agents was prednisone, one of the steroids my doctor had been using, which is why it would get better temporarily. As fast as it was growing, the tumor responded extremely well to chemo — my whole body was affected — so after the chemo, I had five weeks of radiation. No further problems (until I developed a different, unrelated cancer in 2018).tldr: Student Health at grad school missed my cancer, thinking it was anxiety.

Car Journalist Crashes New Alpine A110 S, Still Writes Review | Man of ManyBecause there is nowhere to do it legally if you don’t live near a race track.Because there are often limitations placed upon the lending agreement we sign with the manufacturer when they lend us cars. Limitiations that mean we get to pay for whatever damage we do due to idiocy not allowed by or covered by the agreement.Because if or when we don’t pay for doing stupid shit, unless we’re Jeremy Fudging Clarkson, we’re likely to get blacklisted and never see a car from them again.Or we’re forced to wax eloquent on “how nice this lovely car was” and “how comfortable it was to drive before I slid it off the road and into the bushes.” At which point, we lose credibility with the public as objective reviewers and credibility with our peers as capable drivers.This is not to say that reviewers don’t destroy or abuse press cars. But if you do make it a habit, you become persona non grata really quickly.That said, driving at high speed is something reviewers definitely do. But many won’t admit to outright breaking the law. Especially not if their publication or its advertisers frown upon such tomfoolery. And many of us won’t do it without a waiver from the manufacturer that they’re not just allowing us to do this, but asking us to do it, in an official on-track test. If I ain’t getting paid to drive the car flat out on the racetrack on their insurance, I am not driving the car flat out on mine. And I want that in writing.Honestly, once you’ve been over 150–160 mph (250+++ km/h) a few times, it becomes rather… pointless? I mean, I love driving fast, but doing speeds like that on straight as an arrow public roads is hardly as thrilling as bombing around an actual racing track. And there’s not really much you can say about that in the review that would be useful to the common consumer. “The Hyubaron Gemaro is pretty stable at up to 150 mph, but the wind whistling past the mirrors is deafening. Also, the rear suspension sashays like Shakira when you get hit by a crosswind.”(*crash*)“But it was a lovely experience until I slid off the road and into the bushes.”*Kids don’t narrate and drive on the racetrack unless you’re intimately familiar with both car and track and know what the hell you’re doing.*