Granny’s Mid-Summer Vacation

Live-in daughter and #1 grandson left for Florida just over a week ago. She’s signed on to help an old friend near Gainesville undergoing radiation and chemo for cancer, he’s working for his Dad to earn money for college and maybe a car. They’ll go to Oklahoma from there at the end of August to visit great-grandma, he’s put off enrollment until January.

Which is actually a good thing, I hear. College can be incredibly expensive, and often high school grads don’t do well if they start with just two months’ worth of break. Spending two years in academic transfer courses at the community college (all just basic requirements, straight transfer Junior year to UNC) can be a mellower introduction to college life and save a bundle.

The way it works here is that the community college is geared to cost a few hundred dollars less than the basic available Pell Grant for full-timers. Those few hundred dollars can be used for books and fees and supplies. Now, you can’t get your Pell Grant until after you’re accepted and registered, and you can’t register until you pay tuition. So to get started we and his Mom are somehow going to have to come up with the thousand or so dollars it’ll take for him to start. The grant will come in about the time his first semester is over, to be used to pay for his next semester. And we figure it’ll be January before we’ve saved that much.

We all know it’s very expensive to go to college. Daughter is still repaying her own student loans! So we’re hoping that once grandson’s on track in the system, grants and scholarships will cover the bulk of costs. Of course, in the current free-falling economy a college degree isn’t worth much (daughter has been working retail for peanuts these last few years because that’s all the jobs available). It’s just that in ANY sort of stratified economy a college degree is better than no college degree. The world - and this “artsy” region - simply doesn’t need another starving artist.

At any rate, Grandma’s just now bid so long to company that arrived just hours after the kids left, so this is Day-1 of MY vacation! No bad B Zombie movies too loud day and night in the background, no ten tons of laundry to do every day (I think they just throw clean clothes back because they’re too lazy to re-fold them), no big meals to prepare, no constant worrying about who’s coming, who’s going and who’s lost in the woods somewhere. Aaaaahhhhh… now if I only had a hot tub…

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Filed under Family Life, Grandma Time, Musings, Vacations |