Friday, November 26, 2010

it's that time again

How can it already be the holiday shopping season? I haven't had time to pay off my credit card bills from the summer! How is it that the older I get, the less Christmas feels like Christmas? And working certainly doesn't help. At least when I worked in New York, there was Christmas everywhere. Somehow, the drive deeper into suburbia just doesn't pack the same punch.

Anyway, I did do a very little shopping online, and Kevin and I are going to take B to his swim practice and jump over to the outlet mall while he's there, hoping that the major crowds will have died down by late afternoon. M went to a friend's house and they were going to go to a mall by her house, before practice. M has opted to forgo her school's homecoming dance this year! Last year she deemed it 'boring' and left with the group she had gone with. I also think she doesn't like to put on a dress because of her hairy legs (it's a swimmer thing.)

The damage is in on the Jetta headlight and it's going to cost me just under $500 to fix. The good news is that Kevin paid for mine and B's plane tickets to Florida with a discounted fare through AMEX's new system so I won't have that $600 to chip away at this year. I could put the deer crash through my insurance, and as a comprehensive claim it "shouldn't" affect my rates. But the rep on the phone couldn't tell me that it was the best thing to do, and the woman at the body shop said she would pay it herself, because if another larger claim came in and they had a look at it, they'd sock it to me then. So we're coughing up an extra $400 to keep it off of the insurance. What a hassle! Insurance is a scam! Hate that deer!

Meanwhile, facing forward to the next month, I'm fixating on the merit aid issue with M and her college acceptance. I have been reading old postings on web forums where people posted how much money they were given, and what their SAT scores and grades were, and most with M's relative stats were given a fair amount of money. But one was given much less, and that was in 2006! So I keep thinking, what if they give her less because they know she already committed to come there? What if they give her less because they think they are not her first choice? (There was no way for her to indicate that they were, as far as I could tell.) And then I panic. It would be unfair of them to give her less because they know she has to attend anyway, since we were counting on this when she signed the letter. But the two awards are really separate, so we took a risk in allowing her to sign without confirmation. We should know in about three weeks.

And in other news,our Thanksgiving was a success. The food was well cooked, and the house weathered the guest without incident. The dogs behaved, no cats puked during dinner, and the dishes almost all fit into one running of the dishwasher (even if the soap dispenser did malfunction, requiring a second cycle to be imposed!) And the next few weeks will bring swim meets - M starts the high school meets on Friday; B's school has an alumni meet tomorrow, so that should be interesting. And M has a big club meet in two weeks, at which point she will finally be allowed to shave her legs!

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