Good Day

Four of us went over to a friend's house today to do some cleaning.  Our friend has been really down with a serious illness and just hasn't been able to get the work done but it bothers her. 

It was really very fun.  I brought my trusty Hoover vacuum cleaner, the one that we had refurbished last month.  It works great!  Suction is everything in a vacuum. 

Our friend's house was built by a lumberman.  He used plenty of it in the house too, and it's lovely inside.  Lots of built-ins and nooks and crannies.  Charming. 

So when we left it looked and felt much, much better.  I just had enough time to get to the chapel at church for my 2:00 p.m. holy hour.  Another lady was there, not scheduled, but she'd been there for an hour already.  She was still there when I left at five minutes before 3:00.

Picked up Lauren and we headed home, so it was a long but really good day.

Tomorrow, Saturday, I'll head over to watch Ella play softball in the Canton Challenger League, a league for developmentally disabled kids.  A few kids are in wheelchairs; some use walkers, and some are able-bodied but struggle with cognitive functioning.  They all have smiles on their faces though, and they seem to really get something out of America's game.

What's the deal with the NFL draft?  I just can't get excited about it, honestly.  I know lots of people do, but it just doesn't seem all that meaningful to me.  We don't watch professional football games much anymore either, other than usually the playoffs that lead to the Super Bowl.  As far as college football, I still like that but hope that the players or whomever know better than to unionize the sport.  It's been pushed, prodded, and marketed enough as it is.  It's moved away from students in a classroom to something akin to minor league football, Canadian football. 

So let's see -- what else?  Akron has a new president.  Youngstown has a new president.  I hope it works out for both places.

I was talking to Mary Tohill this morning and she was saying that the ratio of what the state pays towards higher education and what the student pays is now 25% - 75%.  In other words, the student is paying three quarters of the actual cost of a higher education and the state is only coughing up a quarter.  When I was at Kent, that ratio was 33% - 66%.  I was only paying 33%.  Add in the technology costs of labs that didn't exist back then, computer equipment that didn't exist, and so on, it isn't hard to understand why tuition rose so much.  And then in Ohio, we have this thing that hardly anyone ever talks about -- the brain drain.  It means that Ohio kids go to school in Ohio and then leave the state for employment and a future.  The map showing where all of my 1964 high school class went is rather amazing.  They are all over the place.  While more are in Ohio, many moved not only out-of-state, but also out of the country in some instances. 

And once gone, most of them did not come back.

Maybe we're starting to get a grip on that now, with some improvement in good paying jobs in Ohio.  And all the while, the pool from which colleges recruit grows smaller.

Hope I didn't bore you too much on all of this today.

Enjoy your Sunday!  Forget the weather; we can have a good time no matter what.

Karen