The Decision Was Made!

Dear Granddaughter will be going to Warren Wilson College!

So she'll be close to home. But I'll guarantee -- you can get lost on your way there. It's a small school, with its own farm. We used to say that it is up a tree and into a squirrel hole. The Homecoming game is soccer!

But she'll love it, because it's beautiful, she knows the weather, and she can get home easily enough if she has any problems.

They All Grow Up

Yesterday was a miserable rainy day. But we were on a mission! Husband and I took the money he'd been stashing in the bank for our granddaughter's education over the mountains to her. She needs to send a deposit to her college of choice Monday.

She was accepted at four great colleges -- MassArt, RISD, SCAD and Warren Wilson. The first three are schools of art, design and related studies. Warren Wilson is a small liberal arts college in North Carolina which has been reported as being one of the great bargains in college education.

Well, Granddaughter has visited all of them at one time or another. SCAD is hugely expensive, although it is very progressive. RISD fell by the wayside last weekend. And unfortunately, I was in the room with Granddaughter when she talked on the phone with someone at MassArt and decided that that wasn't going to work.

It looks like Warren Wilson. (Or maybe not...)

Not only did our daughter, her mom, go to Warrern Wilson, but so did our younger son, and Granddaughter's father's brother and his wife. And then there are close friends of the aforementioned relatives who are in and out of the house. And other people who know her and really want her to go to Warren Wilson.

I was thinking as we came back over the mountains in the driving rain that it's not so much the school you go to, but how much you dedicate yourself to learning what is there to be learned that determines a student's success in life. And I know that it is not always the brightest student who profits most from the work. There's more to college than the classes. There are life-long friendships to be built and sustained. There are new worlds to be explored.

Someday you may go into an environmentally conservative building and marvel at its design and usefulness, and Granddaughter will have been the architect.

I'm Too Mean To Be a Grandmother!

One of the hazards of growing old and having had children is that you somehow acquire grandchildren. Granted, I did it the usual way -- by my daughter having them, not adopting or getting someone else's kids by marriage.

But there's a reason I only have to deal with them occasionally. Oh, my granddaughter is now of an age when she is reasonable -- reasonable enough to be graduating high school this year and going on to college. But the grandson is only eight, and Husband and I have to take care of him over Easter break every spring, then for about ten days in the summer. I get to a breaking point very easily.

I should have known this would happen. I had a lot of trouble adjusting to my own children. Luckily they all reached a point very early when they could be settled down with a book and would not let a peep out for hours on end while I wrote or read.

But what is it with the current crop of kids? They're so noisy and so reliant on entertainment.

It's a good thing we have Harry Potter on DVD!

The Hazard of Answering the Phone

The other day a telemarketer from a telephone company called. Even though we're on the "No-Call" list, we can't block out calls from companies we've done business with.

Our only recourse is, well, to explain to them, and then get RUDE! That's hard for a woman who was raised to be a lady to do.

She wanted me to sign up for five new services. But she only named three. So I told her why I didn't need those three services. I was just getting warmed up when she hung up! Well, that was cheeky of her, wasn't it?

I hope her call was being monitored. Yep, she wasn't going to sell me anything. It's just as well she moved on.

The Polite Term Is Writer's Block

...And what I call it, I won't bother to spell out.

Anyway, every writer gets spells of it -- or non-spells of it. I went out to work in the garden to think about my next scene while I had long-handled tools in my hand. What ideas I got evaporated while I was putting the wheelbarrow and the tools away. By the time I got into the house, I'd forgotten whatever idea I had.

Yesterday. while I was making quilt blocks -- that didn't go all that smoothly, by the way -- I had some thoughts, but nothing to use in the current project. I'm planning to do another quilter-heroine book sometime soon, but not today.

I had an idea while I was in the half-sleep of waking up this morning. You know what happens? One whiff of the coffee and -- poof! -- away it goes.

But I will get back to Chapter Eight. I know I will...

Gizmos

Much as I like progress, new things, easier things, I'm not so comfortable when I have to take my CPU in to get it fixed. Yesterday, we trekked into Knoxville to have a new modem up in. The old one got fried when we had some power surges and the polarity of the phone line got switched. It was all right for the phones but not for the modem.

Now I'm saddled with not only slow connection speeds but a modem that doesn't make a lot of noise when it dials. I have to listen hard for it. No more the loud noise that tells me it's working -- it could be heard all over the house, making it impossible for someone to know that I was going on line during "Dead Hour" -- the time we set aside for people to actually reach us on the phone.

We got a new surge protector, too, but it's just a glorified "pig tail" and some of the old cords won't fit in it without blocking outlets and inlets...I love progress!