Monthly Archives: January 2007

11 January 2007

What is it about college-aged kids?

By Nicki

 What is it about college-aged kids? I realize that they are similar to what we use to call pre-teens. They are adults. Most are on their own in some small way, but they are still children.

My freshman daughter announced last Sunday, while watching her team play in a wild card game, that she was not going back to university. Not going to any college or university is an absolute no go so she must have been thinking this over for a while as she had decided to register for the local community college.

I guess I should have pushed for her to go back for one more semester. My logic in not doing so was two-fold. One was economics. It would be far less expensive for her to go to the community college – about half the cost without financial aid in the picture – than to go back to university. Of course, that is just tuition costs. I didn’t figure in the increase in my food budget or in gas costs as she will commute and we live about 15 miles from the college. I looked at raw costs – what she owed at the university she had already spent a semester at for spring semester would be a little over $3300 and the cost for the community college would be $1721.

The other factor in my decision is that it will be easier to help her look for a four year school if she is at home. She has already formed a list of them. The art classes she will take at the community college will help with her portfolio to get into a design program.

I guess hindsight will be 20/20 on this decision. Sometimes diapers and bottles do seem easier than teenagers.

Leave a comment | posted in Family, Just my Thoughts

2 January 2007

Day Late, Dollar Short…LOL

By Nicki

 Happy New Year!

I know, as the title says, a day late and a dollar short. I had to get my thoughts about history down. I had been thinking them in my mind for several days but was going through a “no computer” time so didn’t get them down. Actually picked up a journal and wrote some of it down but decided I wanted it here so stopped.

What is it about January 1 – other than possibly the new calendar, which never goes up without writing on it so even that confuses me a bit – that makes people think that it is time to wipe the slate clean? I am sure there is something other than the obvious things – the different year, the new calendar,etc – that cause people to think they need to put to pen the things that will change this year.

Resolutions make me queasy. I like to say I set goals for my life, not resolutions at the beginning of a new year. Something about setting and reaching goals sounds better in my psyche than resolutions, which are actually closer to aspirations than goals, which don’t get kept. Goals tend to be smaller. Resolutions, in my mind, tend to be larger than life. Aspirations tend to be lofty aims that goals may or may not take us to.

And what is it about resolutions that require us to set them once a year? Actually, there may be people out there that set them more frequently but I don’t know any of them. Goals are set and reached, evaluated and reset. They are an ongoing process so, in my mind, more healthy for our mental, physical and spiritual well-being.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , | posted in Just my Thoughts

1 January 2007

History

By Nicki

 You know the old saying – greatly paraphrased here – that you need to know history or you are doomed to repeat it. That having been said, “How do you get kids to want to watch history as it happens?”

I am not talking the huge things like 9/11 which was basically force-fed to children on television. I am talking the everyday history like the passing of a president. I have had this thought since my children, ages 12 – 22, all told me I was nuts to be watching parts of the funeral of Gerald R. Ford. I truly don’t understand why they don’t think watching this part of their country’s history is important. On top of a funeral service, they would have received bits and pieces of history, the types of things that are not in the history books when talking about Nixon, Agnew, Ford and their meshed times in office.

Maybe one is born with the desire to be a “history” or “news” junkie. My children all know that I love to watch the news, that rather than music most of the day in the background as I work there is news. I can remember, as a 12 year old, watching the ever depressing news about Vietnam. I remember the break-in to programming about the trial of Lt. Calley. I remember history that my children now read about in books and watching it unravel in front of my eyes. My children do not seem to want to have these memories.

Maybe it is a case of the two spectrums of life – the young and the old. My mother and stepfather live near Palm Desert, California. They go to tennis matches at the tennis center where people were parking to go to the California viewing of Gerald R. Ford at St. Margaret’s in Palm Desert. When asked if they would go, my mother thought I was crazy also. But she has seen history in the making – more than I have – so it is not a total disregard like the youth of this age have.

How do we get children – and I use the term losely – to watch history as it happens?

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , | posted in Just my Thoughts, Politics

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 2,000 other followers