Grumpitude

You ever have those weeks where you're just grumpy with people?
I may be having one of those months... or years.
Maybe I could blame it on impending menopause. I hear that makes women grumpy. But I don't want to cop out. Even if I have raging hormones, I'm going to be responsible for my actions -- emails and telephone calls.
I could blame it on the college bills. If you don't live in the United States, you may not be aware of the cost of college. For most state schools, the bill is around $20,000 per year if a kid lives on campus.
My kids both go to private schools, but they provide grants and financial aid to get the cost down to about $20,000 each. That means $40,000 per year with two kids in school. That is bound to make anyone grumpy, right?

I was pretty grumpy here, but because I  needed
chocolate, not because of menopause or college bills.

Actually, being grumpy has helped some.
I appealed to one of the kids' colleges for more financial aid and the director responded that we should see how much we could get in parent loans first. I didn't even think about it so that I could write a measured response to her. I just fired back that of course, we could take out thousands of dollars in parent loans, but we weren't really willing to do that, and then I threatened that we really hoped our kid could continue to attend her college.
I didn't hear from her for 6 days and I felt pretty sheepish about my snippy (bitchy?) attitude.
Today, she emailed that we had an extra $1500 grant. See, $1500 for a college isn't that much. $1500 for us off a kid's college bill is huge.
So I got serious about our budget and looked for places to cut monthly costs. I decided we are spending too much on internet and cable TV services. I hate to change my email address, so I called Time Warner to see how much it would cost for Internet only. I hoped they might give us a better deal on internet and TV so I wouldn't have to deal with changing it. But I got sidetracked by a woman who said I couldn't change my service because I was in a contract with Time Warner.
"Wait!" I said. "My contract ended in March."
"But we sent you a letter and if you didn't reply then you entered into another contract," the woman said.
"I'm pretty sure that's not a binding contract," I said. "You can't have the opt-out or you enter a new contract."
And that was pretty much the end of me getting anything accomplished. I asked for a manager. I was shuffled from place to place. I made a complaint with the Ohio Attorney General's office to make sure others didn't get caught in the non opt-out contract.
But I never got my internet and cable TV bill lowered. I kind of backed myself into a corner where all I can do now is switch everything to another company.
Again, by the end of the day, I felt kind of bitchy.
Yesterday, before the humidity got too bad, I ran 6 miles. That helped me blow off some steam. Today, I only went 3 miles.
So far today, I haven't been mean to anyone, but I still have to go teach tonight. I'll try to shove the grump monster back in its place.

Innovative Thinking

I've always thought of inventors as people who create things, but I'm starting to understand how ideas can change concepts of things that aren't tangible -- held in our hands.

Two recent innovations that wowed me, I heard about on NPR -- where else?

One new idea is the coffee shop where customers pay for their time rather than their coffee or tea. What a great idea for people who go and hang out forever.

According to the story on NPR, they pay for the minutes that they are sitting in the coffee shop, maybe using the internet, maybe using electricity. The coffee and tea, along with cookies, are free. The Clockface Cafe in Moscow, Russia was started by a 28-year-old entrepreneur who figured people weren't that interested in the coffee but in a place to gather with others and get work done. It costs a little less than $4 for the first hour and about half that for each hour afterward. 

The only thing that worries me is whether I'd be able to get my specialty coffee. Maybe they have a barista who will make me a mocha and I get a free hour of table time since I pay big bucks for my mocha. I think this idea could work and could solve problems for small shops who don't know how to get hanger-ons to vacate tables.  

Another idea which really bowled me over was a new way to pay for college. With two kids in college and another one racing there quickly, this story on NPR really caught my attention. Some students at UC Riverside proposed that students not pay tuition up front. Instead, they attend college for free and once they graduate, they pay the college 5 percent of their income for 20 years to cover the cost of that free college.

I love this idea. I don't see any drawbacks. It might get a little complicated if people drop out or transfer colleges, but since my kids' college tuition was over $90,000 this year, I'm thinking it might be a workable alternative.

Repaying the college only 5 percent is not enough to discourage people from getting good jobs. They won't feel like they're working to see their paychecks disappear in college costs.

I'd love to see both of these ideas incorporated in my life.

How bout you?

Do you have any ideas that would make life better?

Worry Lines

Last February, when I had my birthday, I got a facial at the local Aveda shop. Pattie, the woman who does facials at Aveda, has seen me about once a year for the past 10 years, so we always catch up.
This year, as she smoothed my hair off my forehead and attached a velcro headband to hold it in place she asked me my secret.
"How have you avoided worry lines between your eyebrows?" she asked, pointing to her own parentheses just above the bridge of her nose.
I shrugged. I hadn't really thought about it.
Until Friday, when I looked in the car mirror and yikes! I didn't have two parentheses between my eyebrows, I had parentheses plus a dash. That space above my nose, right before my forehead begins is now crowded with punctuation marks.

How has this happened in seven months?

I know I've been juggling funds recently with two kids in college, and, face it, money worries make some of the biggest impacts on our beauty.

Also, this whole teenager, young adult thing is having a huge impact. I used to think if I could just get a full night's sleep that everything would be wonderful. Now I know that bigger worries awaited me than getting the kids to sleep through the night.

But, with two kids away in college, my day-to-day worries about them should lessen. The one child left at home goes to school each day, works out three days a week, picks his girlfriend up from college to spend the evening at our house, and gets home by his curfew on weekends.

Okay, he did have a minor fender bender Thursday night, the night before I noticed these new marks. No damage to our car and nothing to the other car, except a loose bolt on the license plate. But the young man he bumped blew up at Tucker and made the whole scenario worse.

I'm hopeful that these parentheses will fade rather than deepen, as the year of college payments reaches its end in March, and maybe I'll have two months of a line free forehead, before the payments begin again.

Teetering Ego

I'm in the middle of a perfect storm -- for me. A triage of circumstances have gathered to increase my stress.
The first prong in my perfect storm consists of being annoyed and snapping at everyone -- friends, family, students. I'm beginning to suspect menopause, although I haven't had any of the other outward physical signs.
The second edge to my perfect storm comes from the fact that I can't run right now. Running is obviously a stress reliever.

The third corner to my triangle of stress comes from watching a second kid getting ready to go to college -- but it isn't the departure that worries me; it's the bills that have already started piling up -- senior pictures, senior grad party, college deposit, college payments. If I wake up in the middle of the night, I have to avoid thinking about money or I'll never get back to sleep.
I'm so vulnerable right now to falling over the precipice, that when I received an observation report from work, I didn't open it. I just feel like any "constructive criticism" might be too much for me. I'll wait til I'm in a better place.
So, already feeling at risk, I opened my email yesterday and found a rejection from an agent. Gulp. But this was such a positive rejection. (Is that possible?) Here's the part that assuaged my prickly emotions:

You appear to be a talented writer and I admire the dedication and energy I could sense from your letter.

And this was just a query letter, not even my novel. Yes, in the end she didn't accept my novel, but I appreciate that she took the time to build me up a little first.
I got another ego-building email from a man I met at the writing conference this weekend. My husband would probably say I'm naive and the guy was flirting with me, but I like to think his flattery was genuine.
As we ate lunch at the writing conference, he told me he was a retired psychologist and wrote thrillers. He asked for advice on query letters -- those are letters that writers send to agents seeking representation. I told him I had some notes from a previous conference that I would send him, so he gave me his email. After I sent the information, he emailed back a thanks along with these kind words:

I hope you get to do a pitch face-to-face; you come across so great in person: winsome, so likeable, but quick-witted and assertive. I'm terribly curious about your book and wish you could write full-time!

I don't think I've ever been described as "winsome." It seems young -- like anything is possible. So maybe I'll forget about the whole menopause thing and concentrate on being winsome, even if it's only retired psychologists who think so.

Paying for College

Of course it happened. Spencer fell in love with a college and it happens to be the most expensive. Not the most expensive overall, but the most expensive as far as what they've offered us.
Paying for college is complicated. For a middle class family like us, a public university is going to give us no financial aid help, but the students can take out about $6000 in loans each year. They don't have to start paying until they are finished with college.
So here in Ohio, the public universities cost about $20,000 per year with tuition, room and board. Take off the $6000 loan and we have to pay $14,000 per year for a public university.
The private universities cost a lot more on paper. The two that Spencer is looking at cost $47,000 or $43,000 per year. (Grace's private university is up to $54,000.) They offer Dean Scholarships and President Grants, reducing the cost. But they also take into account the $6000 loan. So our total cost with one of the colleges is $18,000 and with Spencer's favorite it is $19,999.50. Could they just round it up to $20,000? I mean, really!
Sigh.
Maybe, if we scrimped a lot, we could pay $20,000 a year for Spencer's college. But, we already have another kid in college and we don't get to cut her off to pay for Spencer's college.
There's a form families fill out -- FAFSA. It's the government Financial Aid form. The form takes into account how much we make and how many kids we have in college.
The form says that we should pay $9053 per year for Grace and $8000 for Spencer. But colleges use that as a guide. They're happy to suggest we take out a parent loan for the remainder.
The problem with the parent loan, of course, is that the parents have to start paying on that right away, so parents are trying to pay for their kids' college plus trying to stay on top of their loan payments, plus trying to live life with the other kid at home.
I'm already working two jobs, so it gets a little discouraging.
Maybe I'll follow Stephen Colbert's example and start a SuperPac -- "Creating a better tomorrow, tomorrow for Spencer" so that I can collect money to pay for his college.