WF - No LAFFING! Ok - I'm grinning too, but NO LAFFING. It's really NOT FUNNY. I'm trying to be serious here. . . .STOP IT. ..(grin) I get these STUPID calls this time of year - from friends that went shopping - and didn't have ANY form of protection. . . .I just want to hand them my credit card and tell them to throw the machine out the window. I'm serious. . .tis the season. That and the "what should I buy" stuff with those ads - every freakin' ad that comes out in some da*mn newspaper. . .trying to explain to someone NOT to purchase anything with a celeron - an athalon is fine - watch out for this, that and 15 other things. I go into a complete psychosis at this time of year! No laughing! Comonnnnnnnnnn. . . .(grin) I just wanna play in the dirt! Leave me alone! Buy a set of crayons and write your order! (very sarcastic grin) Speaking of . . .I have to go in tomorrow and fix a corrupted profile from someone who can't stop surfin' . .jeez I'd like to slap some people. . . .and then re-write an app that is misbehaving. . .the users won't use the command buttons right so I have to "disable" some of those in the application. Ya know, how many times do you have to tell people not to "crash" out of a shared database? Want me to draw PICTURES FOR YOU?!?!?! I'm gonna disable the red X. Stopped the corruption in the other ones when I disabled it. No laughing - this time of year stinks for some of us. LOL. . .(sigh!)

I am extremely security conscious obviously, I use hard nonsense passwords and rarely ever use the same password for anything , for security sensitive sites I never use the same and always use hardened password. I have one notebook I keep everything written down in, I keep it in a secure locked location, I do NOT put them on my pc and NEVER in my email account if your email is hacked they have access to every single one of your accounts and passwords that is the biggest no no of them all because email accounts are so easily hacked these days. For those doing that I urge you to reconsider!!! If someone manages to break into my house past me and my husband and dogs and our weapons and manage to steal my computers and also find the locked location of my password book and break into that and find that particular notebook then they can have it because I will be cold and dead by then. And I would imagine they will be shedding a little blood too. The only other location is in a lock drawer in a completely separate location, not in my home, in case of a fire or catastrophe here. I never allow the browser to remember passwords and never ever keep any type of password or registration info in my email since email is so insecure.

That is the beauty of our country's secondary education system, there's a fit for everyone and there's really no "right" or "wrong" school scenario for everyone. So, as parents and future college students, you just need to do the best you can to find a school that fits your child's interests and personality. As parents, I think we need to just resist the urge to intervene and make right every adversarial situation a young adult comes into contact with. They are adults at 18 and need to learn how to fend for themselves. That's what I actually like about college - it gives them 4 more years to grow up and mature before they're really on their own. As far as the FASFA, at the schools we applied to, it wasn't necessary for merit based awards - ie awards for grades/test scores. There was a long list of private grants/scholarships if you qualified for specific criteria - ie you had a family member that was a nurse, or an iron worker or a member of a specific union etc. We didn't qualify for any of those $$ although I did read each one carefully looking for a fit! I do believe that you need to complete the FASFA to apply for any of those, even if they stated it was a merit award and not soley need based. At a state public school here in Ohio, the awards are either financially driven (requiring a FASFA) or merit based. My son did get a merit scholarship, but taking into account the money he got from his athletic scholarship, I knew based on our income, he would not get any need based money. I'm sorry, but that form is a PIA and really didn't want to disclose all of our financial situation when I knew we wouldn't qualify. When I went to college a gazillion years ago, my parents filled out the FASFA because my brother and I were both in school and my mother was a school teacher and my dad a bricklayer. We thought while we were definitely not poor, with two kids in college, we were also not feeling flush with money. Of all the things I saved in the college scrapbook, I saved the response I got when I applied. Back then tuition/room& board was about $3300 a year for a state school. My FASFA came back and said my parent could afford $5800 a year for college expenses - and that was with my brother also in college. I truly do not know how they could come up with that number with two parents who had definitely middle class incomes, but again, they had no debt and no mortgage, so if you're financially responsible, you get no help. Granted if I had gone to a private school with a much higher tuition, we may have gotten something but, I was happy going to the state school, so while I did have alot of student loans, they weren't as much as if I had gone to a private school.

You can always try what one of my mother's coworkers did - she was divorced and wanted to feel more secure, but had kids so was concerned that if she had a gun an accident would happen. So she compromised and got a shotgun/rifle/whatever with one of those bolt-actions (do they have shotguns with bolt actions?). Anyway, whatever it was, it was the kind of gun that makes that distinctive click-clunk sound, but she didn't ever get shells/bullets for it. If she thought she heard a noise she'd click-clunk the gun, figuring that if it was a potential intruder she'd heard they weren't going to stick around to find out whether it was really loaded or not. Obviously I am not au courant on my firearms. The only kind of guns I've really ever shot much are flintlock rifles; they're really fun to shoot at the range but wouldn't be very practical for home protection. "Hey, can you hold on a couple minutes while I load this thing? Damn, the powder was damp, wait a minute.... oh crap, now I've got to turn the flint because it's not sparking... Hey, come back with my TV!" :)