Catching up

Tuesday, 1:38 pm

Mar

18

2008

Yesterday was kind of a lost day. I didn’t get a whole lot accomplished for the amount of time I spent, but I surely strained my brain in the process. I needed to create a couple of spread sheets and, believe it or not, I have never done that before. It’s possible that I may be the last holdout who has never made one.

I have the open source program called OpenOffice, which is virtually the same thing as Microsoft Office, but free. Commands and formulas that work in Excel also work in OpenOffice Calc. The learning curve was kind of steep, but by the end of the day I had a couple of spread sheets that functioned perfectly and looked pretty. Woot!

I am inclined now to want to go find a book about Excel to see what else it can do and how to extract information from the spread sheets into various reports and charts and graphs, etc. The OpenOffice manual is a little thin on details. But, by golly, I have spread sheets!

_____________

On Sunday, the day that Bear Stearns died, I went to my mailbox to collect my mail. There was a letter from the lad’s college president. I figured it was a pitch for more money. It’s not enough that they get all that money for tuition and room and board and all—they also have an aggressive team that is constantly trying to wheedle more contributions out of us for various other programs. All tax deductible, y’know.

So. When I got back in the house, I opened the envelope and it didn’t take the college president long to get the point. In his second paragraph he wrote, “In support of this commitment to academic excellence, the Board of Trustees has approved an increase of 6.75 percent in tuition and required fees and a 7.13 percent increase in total billed expenses for the 2008-2009 academic year.” Holy cow.

It wasn’t, perhaps, the best weekend for these letters to hit our mailboxes. I could be wrong, but, in the current financial environment, this might be the time to begin thinking seriously about how to trim some costs rather than add to them.

_____________

The lad is not home yet. I’m not sure whether he’s arriving tonight or tomorrow night. We haven’t connected since Saturday and I was too distracted yesterday to think about it very much. I have a feeling that I’ll get a call when he’s about 10 minutes away from the house. That’s more or less standard operating procedure. Meanwhile, today is a busy day around here, getting last minute details taken care of. And I just got a fire roaring to start warming the house up. It was m i g h t y brisk in here this morning. It’ll take the better part of the day for all corners to thaw out. It wouldn’t do for the lad to walk into an icebox.