Family ties

Vincent finished up a big project for his Western Civilization class - in which he tied a number of different themes of the class together - in his case, via a short story. For review, he's been taking the first semester of Algebra 1 on-line (having taken it in the classroom already), and today he finished up the class and got a 90% on the final and a B on the class. Hopefully, he'll take the second semester of the class over the next six weeks and hopefully his regular math grades will be at least that good. Just a few minutes after Vincent completed the final, we connected with Vincent's father, who had driven down from Ohio, and Vincent headed into the downtown Louisville White Castle (pictured above) for lunch, and then off to Ohio for the second half of spring break with his father (first time in at least ten years they've spent part of spring break together).

Last night I got to use my expertise with two family members: talking about taxes with my sister and about how to search for books on-line - mainly in libraries - through WorldCat - which Stephanie's father let us know is now available to everyone, on-line, recently. Penny and Serge had just finished doing their taxes - their first time as homewners - and my father is doing research for the explanatory footnotes for his English translation of letters written in Korean from Catholic Korean martyrs of the 1700s and 1800s (a project that I've helped him with a little). Stephanie has also done some research about her mother's condition: It turns out it's not unheard of for colon cancer to spread to the liver. There are a range of treatments. The liver actually can rebound, but it's dangerous nevertheless operating on the liver, because of its proximity to the heart. (Later today Stephanie found out that three of the 12 lymph nodes that her mother had removed were cancerous, and tomorrow Nancy's doctors will install a "port" in her so that her chemotherapy drugs can go straight to her veins.) In other medical news, my mother has already scheduled her conventional knee surgery for Wednesday, June 4.

In the news today, more KY news about budget cuts around the state, including cuts that will likely decrease resources at Vincent's school and raise tuition at the public universities we will look at. In addition, over in Indiana, at a neighboring school district to Vincent's, Greater Clark, the school district talking early retiring or laying off more than 50 teachers, which will hurt Stephanie's teachers' union's bargaining position and put lots more potential schoolteachers out there in the job market to compete with Stephanie and her colleagues. The new Greater Clark superintendent came from Stephanie's school district. That Clark County school district was more blunt that usual about wanting to replace experienced teachers with inexperienced teachers to save money.

Stephanie and I confirmed today that with one more monthly payment to Consumer Credit Counseling Service of Central Florida and the Florida Gulf Coast - this month - with help from family members - we will have finished an eight-year process of paying off all of our credit card bills and legal bills via Consumer Credit Counseling. This month's official check - a monthly ritual for me for the past eight years - will be the last one I need to generate and mail. Our student loan lenders are already busy reeling in monthly payments, as our economic forbearances expire, but it'll be nice to have made that last $1,280 payment and to be rid - hopefully for good - of debt to credit card companies and lawyers. The last three or four creditors we have been paying off have been those that never gave us a break for participating in the program - so some of them were still charging 10-21% interest rates - even while the other creditors had lowered their rates, just to help us pay off (instead of declaring bankruptcy).