From Montmil: <<With a daughter in law school and big tuition bills, you're lucky you're not commuting on an air-cooled skateboard!>>
This time around, it won't be a totally free ride for her. We're essentially paying her rent, food, and local transportation costs (in Boston!), and she's signing her name on the line for tuition & books. (We hope to help her pay off the loans ASAP after graduation, but her undergrad college costs crimped both our cash flow and our net worth rather severely.) Expensive as it was, I think her undergrad college was perfect for her. For reasons largely beyond her control, she had been something of an outsider all through elementary & secondary school. She got into a college renowned for four years of academic hell (not a military school—founded by Quakers, in fact), and she bonded as tightly with fellow students as if they had been Marines. She's been out of college since 2006, and she still finds some college friends to hang with, wherever she is.
I'm an old hand with air-cooled skateboards, having in the late '60s ridden one of the early ones with hard wood-composition wheels and a primitive suspension one or two evolutionary steps removed from nailing a steel-wheel roller skate to the bottom of a length of 1x12 board. No such thing as carving a turn; just leaned it into a hopefully controllable 8-wheel drift & hoped the wheels would get enough bite to keep the board under me. The technique for hills was simple: Just go straight down the fall line, trying to make the straightest line possible through turns twisties, and praying to avoid any pavement chinks, gravel, or cracks. No helmet, pads, or even sleeves & jeans; most of the time in shorts & t-shirt. My career ended with a really bad case of road rash from a flippity-flop wipeout. (My Army boss thought I was nuts. Guess he was right.) Somewhere in my stuff is a 1967/68 in-motion photo that I should find, scan, and use here as an avatar.
And a Happy New Year to all! In case anyone should needs it, I'll enclose a more-or-less direct quote of a radio host's acknowledgment last week of the sponsor of a program on the Richmond, VA, NPR station:
Brought to you by the Henrico [bail] Bonding Company, in business since 1954, freeing the Irish for 54 years! If you did a little too much celebrating during the holidays, remember that we don't care what
they say you did. We're there to help you, or your mother. Hell, even your brother-in-law!
(FWIW, half my ancestors were Scots-Irish in the Shenandoah, so I have standing to joke about my heritage.)
