catching up

I haven’t been around in a while. My tutoring business has been going well, though I am nervous about the summer. Sent out some mailings and got some kids from that, got other kids via an enthusiastic parent who loves what I did with her ADHD son. I may soon get a student who has “many issues,” according to his highly stressed father who only wants the kid to graduate next month. We’ll see. Hope the boy doesn’t come stoned to the sessions.

Ben’s girlfriend has been staying here with him for the last month or so, which would NOT make my mother happy atall. However, her presence is little felt–and she actually has cleaned Ben’s room a couple of times. She doesn’t drive, owing to an eye problem, and so Ben has had to pick her up from her grandmother’s house over an hour away whenever they got together, which is expensive, so when she got a job across the highway from here and arranged with a friend to share an apartment, I agreed to a temporary visit. The apartment she wants to move into is being remodelled so there’s that delay. (Ben also wants to move into a new place but wisely does not want to move in with her).

Lady K. will not be coming home for the summer after all. Wah. She didn’t get the job with Teaching Across America, which isn’t a catastrophe given how rough it could have been, so she decided not to make her boyfriend quit his job when she didn’t have one herself. They’ve found an apartment for the summer in Saratoga, in a Victorian house, where the landlord will let them keep the cat (a beast A. loathes) if they use a hepa filter and rub her with that stuff that keeps a cat from affecting people who are allergic to cats.

She graduates from college in 3 weeks. My baby girl.

My nephew M. was with us this last week for me to do SAT bootcamp on him. He was a delight. He’s the younger of my sister’s two boys, a red-headed mop-headed quiet observer who, as she puts it, “stays below the radar.” Very dry sense of humor. We enjoyed him, and he enjoyed us. I had him during the day, and Ben took him over at night, so he had a decent vacation, I think. One of the things he wanted to do was learn to drive stick, so I took him out for lessons on the last day. Never thought I’d have to do that a THIRD time. Fortunately, this time the kid knew how to drive, so the experience wasn’t as frightening as it was with Ben and Lady K.

I also took him to a couple colleges. He has been oblivious to school and college things and just woke up, in his junior year, to a low GPA and utter confusion about his future. He’s a very talented artist, but doesn’t know that he wants to major in art as he thinks it would be a good idea to be employed after college. Went to Monmouth University, which has been expanding and building and had good facilities except for art–the art department was due for expansion and redoing, a disgruntled art teacher told us, last year and maybe it would happen this year. What turned us off, though, was the student work. Very infantile.

As a contrast, A. and I took him through the Rutgers Mason Gross fine arts building, which is amazing. M. liked the whole set up–the quality of what the students do, the facilities, the size of the faculty, the fact that the place is in downtown New Brunswick. But, it’s an art school, not a liberal arts school. (Also, it contains a graduate school, and I wonder whether the undergraduates get enough attention).

A has gone off to buy tomato plants (we arrived at the Cook Agricultural Field Day to buy our plants too late yesterday to get any. Plus, the cow with the window in its stomach is gone. I think it finally died, after many years of educating happily grossed out kids, and I think animal activists were getting after them anyway). My task today, other than a couple bouts of teaching, is to break my bedroom into grids and clean it thoroughly in a search for a missing wallet containing my driver’s licence and ATM card.

Wish me luck. (The car has already been cleaned, to its great astonishment).