Great!! Delighted for all our parents of college bound kids.
Get ready to shed some not so secret tears as these fledglings happily hop out of their nests.
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Great!! Delighted for all our parents of college bound kids.
Get ready to shed some not so secret tears as these fledglings happily hop out of their nests.
This weekend, I'm sitting down with Number 2 son who is going through the application process for a second time. He's applying as a transfer student. He's got his anxiety disorder under control. He's been living on his own this year, working at a part time job, and taking a class at the Harvard Extension School. He's taken classes there for 4 semesters now and has straight A's. We'll see if that balances out his mixed high school record and the disaster that was his one semester at Michigan State. He's only applying to schools withing a 3 hour drive from home and Duke. Because, of course he's applying to Duke. My mother will do his laundry too. Only thing though - dorm life is never going to work for him. No matter where he goes, he will be living off campus in his own apartment.
Good luck BosDev. Sending very positive vibes.
No power today out here in the boonies. It's definitely an extremely strong windstorm barreling through here.
weezie over and out to conserve phone power.
The wind has arrived here today.
Things that I have learned do not mix well with bomb cyclone high winds:
- trash day, whether the bins are empty (and thus half a block down the road and/or in neighboring yards) or full (yikes)
- home construction sites (specifically, shingle paper and silt fencing fabric)
- 30+ year old wooden fences
- plastic playhouse roofs
- umbrella-topped patio furniture, whether the umbrella is open or closed.
Hoping not to add "old trees from neighboring properties" to the list before this thing blows itself out.
Also - I just made my sons go grab the trash bins before they blew down the street. They were not amused.
Thank you for the kind welcome - I have enjoyed reading the LTE for quite a while, but you may be right, this may be my first post in it.
Also, literally as I typed, my wife confirmed that the neighbor's tree came down, so it appears I should start the Off-Topic, LTE anti-jinx thread . . . .
Things I've received a free day off for in 6 years as a teacher:
- actual snow
- the threat of snow
- extreme cold
- threat of power outage due to hurricane winds
- ice
- today we can add wind
I enjoyed sleeping in this morning while my roommates got up to go to work. :D
In Virginia, unless you get a waiver from the state, you can't start school before Labor Day. My county has applied for and received a waiver for the last 2 years so we start the week before. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before the AC goes out somewhere and they get a day off but since my school is one of the newer ones (opened 7 years ago) I doubt it will be us.
Yeah - so this is about a mile from where I live. It's also the street I have to drive down to get to rehearsal tonight. Rehearsal has been cancelled. Whew.
http://www.universalhub.com/2018/wat...e-down-cascade
So SWMBO and older kid went up to Rutgers for the admitted-student thingie today. Coming home, the Tydings bridge on 95 over the Susquehanna and its old-school mate, the Hatem bridge, were both closed for wind (and still are). They're working their way up to the Conowingo dam with everyone else trying to get somewhere...
Also, here in MoCo, about a third of all Pepco customers lost power today. Oddly, a nearby, newish townhome community (with buried feeds) was among them. So far, we've just lost cable/internet (at about 9am, alas - VZW keeping us going!). Our trashcans have been roaming around our (fenced) back yard all day. Around one corner, a neighbor's tree came down on their sunroom, and around the other a power line was pulled off a house along with some siding. Couldn't see what did the pulling.
Still blowing!
-jk
So, apparently the Zit Kala Sha Lodge merged with the Tseyedin Lodge to form the Talligewi Lodge way back in '95. Who knew?
Nah - I think it's OK to mention the Boy Scouts.
The Boy Scouts of America was chartered in 1916 by President Woodrow Wilson. Fact.
Thanks for your concern! It just dodged our property, but did minor damage to the house of our neighbors, who were not home at the time - thankfully, since the tree landed on top of their eight year old’s room, which would have been pretty scary even with only minor damage.
Not to mention the second of their trees that went down or their fence that was just blown flat. Tough day for some folks here in Northern Virginia, and we are grateful to have come out relatively unscathed.
Hope everyone made it through the wind safely and that the only gusts tonight were from 3 pointers ripping through the nets...
It just fečls like to me that while we may suffer a loss in the ACC Tourney that this team will go into the NCAAs with seven losses and then match the '91 team by winning the title but best them by getting to 33 wins. And in a surprise move, some folks who many expected to go actually stay another year, helping lay the foundation for a strong run to repeat.
I did have an overly ripe banana for breakfast...
Holy samoleans. Just confirmed that our section of the county is going to be without power for at least a week. All the wires and poles need replacement. Heading home to empty the fridge and freezer. Who's got a spare room for the weez?
That's no fun. We never lost power but the school where I work, which is 4 miles away, is still without power and there's a good chance we won't have it back in time for school tomorrow. I currently have 3 roommates, 2 cats, 2 dogs, and 4 family members who are also without power, full house over here, but there might be an empty recliner or patch of floor you can grab ;)
With kind thanks to all of the above who graciously offered some truly heart-warming and deeply touching accommodations (yes, well, beggars can't be choosers) I am happy to report that an incredible effort by Pike Utility company got us up and running about an hour ago.
We stopped up on the road and brought them out some sodas and cookies. It was an epic mess we left and I am stunned at how hard those guys worked.
Wow. Big East women’s basketball tournament halftime score:
#1 seed UConn - 43
#4 seed Cincinnati - 5
Do not tune in if you like close games.
What's the Big East?
Oops. UConn is in the AAC. My bad. The score is still impressive.
Slow day at the LTE.
Yes. I think it's the misery of tax prep time.
I've decided to drive to the beach tomorrow, regardless of the rainy weather. Going to be a nice weekend. husband-of-weezie has been invited to join me on Friday and take me out to dinner and a movie.
Lucky fella.
What exactly is the obsession with The Bachelor tv show? All day on the car radio it was a huge topic of conversation. Even NPR had a bit on it.
Who the heck watches it?
No TV watching at 3 AM my time...
Only if you need crepey arm skin cream or that guy's best pillows ever, Ymo. Then 3am tv is a great idea!
Is 2 AM TV any better than 3 AM TV? Orare they about the same?
Yeah, it all kind of blends together. Sort of like many of the losses. The issues are usually the same but next year they’ll shift as all the interior presence we have this year will be gone. But the real takeaway, don’t have Pop Tarts on Gameday.
I'm hungover without having had a drop. :(
I've bčn trying to stay away as much as possible.
And I still haven't bought Final 4 tickets yet.
For the first time in my life, I'm wondering why we follow this daylight savings time lunacy.
A nice rundown of life without DST
I don't need sunrise before 5:00 am!
-jk
8:30am sunrise in January!!! Wanker that. Getting up in the dark is way, way, way more depressing than driving home from work in the dark. Plus - school children waiting for the school bus in the dark? Nope.
I can't imagine it happening anytime soon, but, I think UTC is the answer.
I'm gonna guess your morning routing does not involve dragging teenagers out of bed. Either way, the safety aspects of having elementary school-aged children waiting in the dark for the school bus makes a complete switch to DST impractical. And all of that is before we mention those with religious practices determined by the sun.
In our corner of paradise, we drag our teenagers out of bed at 6AM. And DST has been pushed later in the fall, and starts earlier in the spring, that we're almost there anyway. In the rust belt, there will always be some point in the year when kids will be waiting in the dark in the morning - that's what streetlights are for!
I think I'd like to try year-round DST and see if it would be better than the current system. Abolishing DST would be even worse. There would be a splurge of adding lights (and lots of NIMBY arguments) to fields and ballparks for baseball, lax, soccer, softball, etc. Coaches would have to be bailing out of work at 2 or 3PM for games / practices before it got dark; it was hard enough for me as it was.
First of all, you switch to the 24 hour clock. 2 o'clock is 2 o'clock. What that means to you depends on where you live. It wouldn't necessarily be in the middle of the night. If it were near sunrise (at least part of the year), then you would come to associate 2 o'clock with time to get up. We didn't have clocks until the 1300s - prior to that, people did try to measure time intervals, but our concept of "what time is it" didn't really exist. Granted we need some kind of common time keeping in our global economy, but we could divorce our notion of what time is it from where is the sun if we tried and it would solve many of the problems associated with switching from one time zone to another. Alas, it would also take some of the fun out of New Year's Eve.
In my world, it’s always Hammer time.
Eagles came to Indy last night and I caught the show. Vince Gill was a good addition.
Anyone else got a peaceful easy feeling on the brink of the tournament today?
Doing a job fair for folks over 50 today. Employers were supposed to show up between 9 and 9:30 to set up. So far, I'm the only one set up in this room...and it's 9:33.
Right.
Filling in now...
And about 4 different people from the facility have popped in to tell me about the coffee and pastries in the room accros the hall. As if the big bowl of candy isn't enough temptation for a guy trying to lose a little weight.
I'm not trying to lose wieght, I'm just trying to misplace it for 40-50 years.
Nice rain, washing all the pollen off for a day.
Geez. That is why you don't only watch ten hours of basketball instead of twelve.
I only watched 4 hours yesterday. But two + of those were memorable.
Happy St. Patrick's Day!
Or, as my Dad used to call it, "Amateur Night"
I always look forward to this long weekend of basketball games. And then, by Sunday morning, I am just about ready for it to be over.
I'm glad our games this weekend were done yesterday. Too many other things to do today, probably won't watch a thing. I am glad I got to see the big upset live.
Carolina lost.
In the second round.
:)
I watched the last 2 minutes of the game.
I neglected my yard, my car and my other car. But I did get to see both UVA and UNC lose, so time well spent.
Heck, Ymo, I just watched the second half of the Retriever victory against the hoo in the Tournament Replay show. I'm really worthless.
Well, no basketball on tonight. I was able to get the lawn mowed.
I'm getting more interference tonight...
I'm definitely pulling for the Wildcats tonight.
So far, the Classics scholar is into UMass, UVM, and Dickinson BUT he just got rejected by his co first choice, William & Mary. He's been turned down by Bowdoin and UVA as well. He's having a rough afternoon. Still have a few schools to hear from, including Duke, but they are all reaches. Nothing wrong with UMass, particularly for the Classics/Linguistics combo, but he was hoping for a smaller school. I'm feeling particularly guilty because I thought he would get into W&M and have been talking it up for the past 6 months at least.
C'mon Duke and Cornell!!
Ahh, bummer BD. You want the best for these kids and it hurts to see them get dinged.
He sounds like a resilient young man and no doubt will soar wherever he ends up.
These late games are killing me...
Ugh.
It's too cold to go out and resume my quest to pick up sticks and branches from the four week past windstorm.
But pretty sure my husband needs the brisk exercise.
While weezie is cutting down the Bradford pears, I'm getting ready to fertilize my oak trees. None of them is very old, but the one in my neighbor's yard has to be 100 years at least.
Looks like I won't be needing your restaurant recommendations in SA next weekend, Ymo.
Bummed also that now I have no excuse to break the Lenten no booze pledge. I could use a sip tonight...
Now what?
Read the entire post-game thread. Wish I hadn't.
Anyone have suggestions for third party flight itinerary websites? I've always used Expedia in the past, but there are better deals through Cheap Tickets and Travelocity for the trip I am planning. Should I just go through the airline (s) instead?
I've looked at Kayak too and found some good deals. Do you know if they offer cancellations up to a reasonable time before your trip? I'm afraid to book now for a trip in May because I don't want to be screwed out of a couple grand in the case of an emergency or sickness.
That's up to the airline or who you book through. In my experience, they mostly pull all the data and prices and let you pick. You don't actually book your flight through Kayak.
For instance, I bought my wife tickets to California three weeks out from Kayak, but the transaction was still through United.
Does anyone have any experience with Onejet? I'm considering booking my trip to Pittsburgh for graduation with them. It is the only direct flight between MCI and PIT.
Although they appear to use some 8 passenger corporate type jets - so those may only have 1 jet. They have added Embraer 135s with seats for 30 passengers. The former CEO of Midwest is part of the organization. They fly routes that used to be served by the major airlines but are no longer direct flights by those airlines. The business traveler is their key demographic so they have early morning and late afternoon flights, weekdays only.
I take it from your responses that you have no experience with them. :-D
I mock things with which I am familiar. I have taken a corporate jet a few times now, definitely a good experience. Midwest Express was a great airline, onejet must be focused on service.
The sky is falling. Quite literally it is raining here in San Antonio. I’m not worried about losing Coach Capel at all.
I threw my name in the hat for the UNC-Asheville head coaching job.
Seriosuly. They posted an application link to Twitter...
@mountaindevil...
You are the man.
I randomly checked Kayak again just now and found tickets for my trip that saved me over $400 AND cut the traveling time in half.
I seriously owe you a beer. Lunch Friday?
Nearly 23 hours without a post. I guess that TV show about nothing had to end also.
Thought the Roseanne remake was kind of lame.
Watch "The Zen of Garry Shandling"!!
It's beyond terrific. Repeating on HBO now. Poignant and hilarious at the same time. All the comedy greats participated and the love is palpable.
Watch it!
Geez, meant to type "The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling"
That's what happens when your fingers type faster than your mind and your mind is slow and your fingers really can't type that well I guess.
Sigh. It's a no from Duke. Not surprised, but still disappointed.
Ugh....sorry to hear this news and I know it is disappointing.
From the Duke Today website, they said that they received over 33,000 applications for regular admission (over 37,000 in total if you include early decision applicants) and they accepted only 6.4% of the regular decision applicants. If my math is right, I believe that is about 1 out of 16 applicants were accepted in the regular decision process. Just on a purely statistical basis, very long odds for any candidate. I'm also guessing that for many applicants, the odds of admission are even much higher, when you consider that a substantial percentage of the incoming class is made up of certain "favored" applicants - varsity athletes, affirmative action candidates, "special" admittees (legacy kids whose parents or grandparents, etc. have been very generous donors to Duke or otherwise heavily involved in the university; so-called celebrity kids, etc.), geographically-diverse applicants (it helps if you're from North Dakota). For any applicant that doesn't fall into one of those favored groups, I'm sure the odds are much higher than the 1 in 16 gross numbers. As always, it will be interesting to see if the "yield" has increased. I think that Duke is still below a 50% yield for admitted students (regular decision).
Yeah, I know. I know the numbers and I'm a statistician so I knew it was highly unlikely even if my kid is probably the only applicant whose passion for historical linguistics has lead him to study on his own time everything that is known about the grammatical structure of the proto Indo-European language. To quote the kid himself, "It's not so much not getting in, it's that the reason I don't get to study linguistics is because I can't get A's in biology." I have been a reasonably active alumna and a reasonably frequent donor. (Donations went down when my oldest was a student there because, c'mon, I was giving them 60k a year already!) I still love Duke and I'll still come back for Homecoming when I can, but I'm not giving the general scholarship fund another dime. I'm through with supporting other people's kids at Duke.
He did get into UMass which has excellent programs in both Classics and linguistics. Once he was in we spent time looking into the program in more depth and honestly, in terms of the whole historical linguistics thing, it's probably a better place for him than Duke. I fully believe he will be just fine. But, having been through the college admissions game 3+ times now, it just leaves an awful taste in my mouth. Kids like my son, not straight A students who had a passion for one subject, used to have a chance. They don't anymore. In chasing one kind of diversity, we're giving up another. He's also into UVM, Union College, and Dickinson College (although they dropped their linguistics program, so, he's not going there.) We're going to the accepted student days at the top 3 and then he'll pick. My money is on UMass at this point. He got big scholarship offers from both Union and UVM. Not enough to make them cheaper than UMass but enough to make it so he wouldn't need to take any loans, so, completely his choice from those 3.
I understand how you feel. I've gone through the process only once with my daughter and it definitely left a bad taste in my mouth (although she ended up at the college where she wanted to go, once she was accepted and looked at it and she has been happy there). Hell, I couldn't even get her to apply to Duke. At the most highly selective schools, it is definitely a crapshoot and there are a lot of factors that go into who is accepted or not accepted. I would advise any kid not to take the whole process too seriously.
Those are three good choices for your son. Really can't go wrong at any of them. Just a question of the quality of the departments and whether he wants to be at a larger university or a smaller college. Good luck with the decision process!
I’m an educator, and this is a current conversation that many of us are struggling with. On the one hand, it’s generally unwise to advice any adolescent not to take things too seriously...for the most part, they’re already good enough at that. On the other hand, though, y’all are absolutely right that the admissions process is an inscrutable one, packed with all manner of arbitrary processes and motivations. Furthermore, one’s college alma mater usually means rather little with regard to career prospects and long-term success. It’s quite a challenge to find the balancing point between “try hard and aim high” and “don’t worry; you’ll end up someplace good, and for the most part people won’t care where you went anyway.”
Yea, maybe I misspoke....I should have said that kids should not take the decision from any one school too personally (rather than "seriously"). The whole process is somewhat arbitrary and, by no means, a definitive judgment on their worth as a human being or their future success.
My son only aimed high because he had to.
He wants to double major in Classics and linguistics. His first thought was to go to a small liberal arts school in New England where he could that. We started a list. Bowdoin College. Complete list. He didn't get in. We continued down the East Coast, added Colgate and Dickinson. Colgate only offers a certificate in linguistics. He wasn't against going to school in a smallish place but the middle of nowhere was not appealing, so, Colgate dropped from the list. Perhaps we should have kept it on the list but, oh well. Dickinson, as I believe I said up thread, dropped their linguistics department. I talked him into applying to Union even though it doesn't have linguistics because I was sure he would get in. I said if you want an almost New England small liberal arts school, this one has good Classics and based on what I know about it might be a good fit. He applied to the New England state universities that have linguistics - UVM and UMass. Added issue - he really wants to study Sanskrit and Old English in addition to Ancient Greek. UMass. And Cornell and Harvard and Duke - but they don't let kids in just because they can't get what they offer elsewhere. He's already proficient in Latin, he doesn't need to take more and considering how many other languages he's thinking about studying, he probably won't. Modern languages he'd like to study: Lithuanian, Icelandic, Georgian, and if he has to learn an East Asian language for the degree - Japanese. Lithuanian is the most similar to what we know of proto Indo-European, Icelandic to Old Norse, and Georgian because it's nearly a language isolate and he thinks the phonology of the Kartevelian (sic) languages is cool. Japanese - I have no idea.
But yeah, Duke needed another 4.0 high schooler who wants to work in the financial services industry upon graduation.
At the end of the day, what I truly believe these highly competitive schools should do is grow the sizes of their student bodies by 2-5%, maybe more, but that level feels about right to me. Increasing access to these schools to groups that have traditionally been shut out is a worthy goal but increasing access should be just that, an increase in access. What is happening now is a shift in access. There will be some unintended consequences of this shift - can't predict what yet, but the landscape can't change this much without consequences. One prediction I will make - the Ivy League will drop football within 10 years.
The Final Four is in town and I'm not going. :(
Has anyone ever been so tired you can't stop laughing?
I'm worried that I need to self-commit to a kook rest home for the hysteria that overtakes me when I throw my husband's hoarded stuff out. I think he enjoys me laughing so much that he's distracted enough not to notice what's actually going on.
Frankly, I don't see us shouldering up our many old duffel bags and hitchhiking across Europe looking for the cheapest hostel.
That ship has sailed.
The Final Four is stress free for me since Duke isn't in it.
I would much rather be stressing.
Watched about an entire sixty seconds total both games.
Looked a bit dull.
Enjoyed my clean attic more.
Overseas and in a very different time zone, forgot all about it.
Attachment 8277
(Yes, I am on the side of the Earth. Hanging with Kyrie)
Oh wow. Hmmm, without going PPB, I'm going to guess her remarks brought race into the conversation. For the record, I do not believe that any of the students accepted to Duke's class of 2022 do not belong there. That's the problem, of course, there are more kids that can do the work than there are slots. It's been that way for a long time, but the pressure is increasing and the slots are not. Duke is, in fact, building a brand new state of the art 21st century dorm - they should increase the size of their student body. If my previous comments sounded anything like I thought other kids did not deserve to be there and my son did - I apologize, that was not the point I was intending to make. I did disparage graduates who go on to work in the financial services industry. I will admit that I value scholarly achievement more than making money. Many would view that as a failing on my part and I accept the criticism even though I do not plan to change my mind. I love that my kid wants to double major in Classics and linguistics. I will never ask him "what do you plan to do with that?" He's smart, he'll figure something out. I'll still love him if he goes to work on Wall Street someday but I'm hoping for college professor.
Enrollment at top colleges has been kept artificially low. I'm not saying these places should double in size, but I do believe that the current environment is not sustainable. I suggested an increase of 2-5%. If the Ivies plus Stanford and Duke did that, we would have around 3000 more kids per year going to those schools. That would ease pressure by a lot. It might even lead to a less widespread cheating problem at high schools like the one where my kids go. And yeah, I believe that all the Ivies plus Duke and Stanford could, relatively easily, increase their enrollment by 200-500 kids (over 4 years, so 50-125 per class). I'll repeat, I'm arguing for increasing access by, you know, increasing access. That mom who got fired is railing against a system that is stacked against an awful lot of people. If I'm right about the nature of her comments, she's blaming the wrong people, but still, we're not going to keep going the way we are now without some kind of a breaking point being reached.
I'll tell you one thing that will reach a breaking point - how expensive it is just to apply. My son applied to 11 schools, between application fees, taking the SATs, taking a couple of AP exams, and paying to send the scores to all the schools, it cost about $2000 to just apply. Wanker that. And that's just for this kid. He's my third. The oldest applied to 10 and the second one applied to 13. I've got one more. I plan to steer him towards schools that don't require the SAT. I will also keep tabs on admissions statistics. We're not throwing a lot of money at schools that accept less than 10% of applicants. That's no longer a gamble worth taking.
OK, changing the subject. I'm tired of thinking about college admissions. It's consuming. Number 2 son is applying as a transfer student this year. We'll start hearing from all of those schools in about a month. Ugh.
But I just closed one show last night after having a production meeting for my next show, Othello, yesterday morning. Anybody in the Boston area - we'll be playing in Cambridge parks in June.
Warning - braggy pants here - but I got a nice mention in this review (I played Eurydice) - https://www.rabbitreviewsboston.com/...-earth-theatre
^^^ That's great BD! You are a talented woman!
Hot and humid here in the SA.
It seems everyone was in mourning in the OT.
So, that's over.
My brother, an Aviation Mechanic in the USMC, is currently in El Centro, CA for training exercises. Needless to say, I was terrified when I read the news of the USMC helicopter crash in El Centro this morning.
Luckily he was not involved, but he texted me this morning saying the crew was from a squadron that shares a hangar with them on the base. Incredibly sad situation.
I understand your panic - felt the same when a sub was reported missing and Nephew Sam was on a sub (new report didn't mention nationality of the sub until halfway through their report.
Although I'm saddened by the loss of the four Marines, I'm glad your brother is ok. Thank your brother for his service, please.
Oh wow, glad your brother is OK. My father went through something similar when he heard about Sandy Hook. He heard Newton instead of Newtown, tried to call me, got no answer, called my mother in a panic and she reminded him that my youngest was in surgery that day anyway.
Anybody got any good news?
Happy to report that my college bound son has worked through his disappointment and is excited to visit the schools that accepted him.
And now we start hearing from the places that my number 2 son applied as a transfer student. What a fun spring! I'll be down to one kid at home come September. What will that be like, I wonder? My oldest just got an apartment so he's moving out, probably for good this time. He has a real job now and is planning to apply to graduate school for Fall 2019. (I got nothing to do with that, all him. Whew.)
I have an engine build that is now complete and gores to the dyno on Tuesday. Another engine should be dumped this week.
I will be in Europe for 5 weeks starting in late August :)