Silas went off to college yesterday, all by his lonesome....



                                                           

Momma cried when he went off to kindergarten...and to first grade....and off to his first day at work...and the first time that he drove solo. 

But she's through crying now : )

I hope that Silas enjoys college as much as I did; he is doing it, to some extent, the way that I did. He's starting off at Glendale Community College until he decides what he is really going to do with his life.

My eldest brother Chuck went off to the University of Alabama and stayed in a dorm and ate canned chili and grew his hair long and came home a communist Democrat, so the rest of us went to local commuter schools. So far, everybody else is still very, very conservative, and nobody can understand a word that Chuck says.

This is because he's smarter than we are - as I said, we went to the commuter schools : ) I myself, after about thirteen years at UCLA (University of Calhoun in Limestone, Alabama) finished up at the University of Alabama, Huntsville. This is actually a school that was founded on a "space grant" rather than a land grant - it's my understanding that NASA decided that they needed more engineers in North Alabama, and fewer cotton farmers. It's not a bad school.

Silas, bless his heart, has decided to at least start off with a computer science major, which does involve a lot of math. I did the same thing, after having failed algebra (or coming close) in high school. However, in college, I learned that math is the only real game for grown-ups, and that programming is just a sort of extension of mathematics. Logic is logic - boolean or algebraic.

Silas is a really bright kid - according to his mother, he's brighter than I am (this is pretty much a QED, since Silas never moved from Utah to Arizona; however, his mother married a short bald guy, so what does she know from smart?) He also has developed a work ethic, and he doesn't get into the trouble that we got into. He may, indeed, go much farther than we ever went - especially if he doesn't take the steps backwards that we took : )

BTW - if you're wondering why this blog hasn't been updated lately - it's because Ethel and I have been up at the Love Grotto. That's our little cabin rental at Pinetop. We've been skiing just about every day, except for the days that we were driving back and forth to Colorado.

And when we haven't been skiing, we've been condo shopping, so as to get me a small piece of snow country. We seem to have found one!...a little 1BR/1BA unit at Cascade Village, near the base of Purgatory (what the neophytes call "Durango Mountain Resort") at close to 9000 feet elevation.

We think that we're going to buy this little place; Ethel is working the offer letter as we speak, and having it reviewed by a Colorado lawyer.

My job has been to walk around and sing "Buy Me A Condo" by Weird Al Yankovic and trying to figure out how we're going to finish the season at Purgatory (skiing is very expensive there, unless you buy your season pass early season, which is what we'll do next year - but I don't want to miss the last two months of this year, so we may just have to take the bite on the full-price ticket. Oh, well - those dogs didn't need to eat anyway) and feeling oddly happy. I'm assuming that that is a side-effect of the lack of oxygen - isn't that what alcohol does? deprives neurons of O2?

Here are panoramics of the living room/dining/kitchen of the place in Purg:



It's fully furnished- right down to the dishes - and is already in property management, so it can be rented out when we're not there.(That's actually the biggest problem that I see with buying this condo - how, exactly, do you LEAVE it? I can just imagine Ethel dragging me, kicking and screaming, down US 550 back towards Durango, with my ankles and wrists duct-taped together).

So, if things go as currently planned, next winter Silas will be holding down the fort at home as a full-time student, and Ethel and I will be telecommuting out of the Love Grotto and getting in as many ski days as is humanly possible.

Not a bad plan.