<p>Bwahahaha! I can’t believe I did that! My apologies to ML’s amazing Grandmother.</p>
<p>Although it does give me a new way to tease my Longhorn friends. “So you’re the Texas Leghorns, right? The foghorn leghorns?”</p>
<p>RUMBLE! A 5.0 earthquake along the Newport-Inglewood fault, shallow at 8.5 miles per CalTech, just hit about 30 minutes ago. It’s the strongest along the N-I fault line since 1925. Epicenter is at Lennox, due east of LAX airport. We definitely felt it here, jerks up and down, not the gentle roll like some of them. </p>
<p>1 in 20 chance it’s a foreshock. I hope not. We’re now all settled again, including the dogs.</p>
<p>Sending ‘earth-steadying’ vibes (sorry, bad choice of words…how about anti-vibes) your way, FAP!</p>
<p>The two things I do not miss about California are the traffic and the earthquakes. I hope all is steady now.</p>
<p>So far, so good. LOTS of humor going on with area Facebook pals. One friend said he wanted his LA martini stirred, not shaken. I said I’d second the motion … oops, in this situation, maybe not. Someone else was in the theater and said there was hardly any reaction. (Imagine being in a dark room with a bunch of strangers during an EQ.) Another friend said they probably thought it was special effects. TO which I said I’d normally reply ROFLOL except she’d think the EQ knocked me over.</p>
<p>Ah yes, we do have gallows humor about our rumblers, which are a fact of life here.</p>
<p>So VP, your choice of wording fit right in!</p>
<p>The USGS website allows you to file a report on what you felt. It asks a series of questions, including a question about your reaction. One of the options is “excitement.”
We take it stride until things really fall down. My class of 2012 daughter was born the day after the Northridge quake. I remember sharing stories later with another mom who had a C-section just hours before the quake at a different hospital that was badly damaged. She had to evacuate herself from a badly damaged hospital, while the nurses ran to save the babies.</p>
<p>IloveLA:</p>
<p>This EQ wasn’t excited but it was enough to grab attention for a bit.</p>
<p>Wow. My S, had he been born on the predicted date, would have been born the day of the LA riots and my hospital was Good Samaritan in downtown LA. Luckily for the family, he decided to pop out three weeks early. So on riot day, I got to stand on a hill that overlooks LA, holding him in my arms as I watched the smoke clouds from various fires, wondering what kind of world he had recently entered.</p>
<p>We were in Death Valley when the Northridge EQ hit. So we had a long drive back, wondering if we’d have a tough time getting back and what we’d find. Luckily, only two small, inexpensive knick knacks took the plunge off the shelf.</p>
<p>I keep hoping to stumble across the answer to this question but no luck. So here it is…there is the COA and the EFC. If a student gets merit aid, can that be put towards the EFC or does the EFC stay the same? </p>
<p>In otherwords, if a family has an EFC of 10K and the student gets 10K in merit aid, does the family still have to pay the EFC of 10K?</p>
<p>I hope my question makes sense. If not, I’ll try to clear it up.</p>
<p>Wow, FindAPlace, I’m glad everything appears to be OK! I’ll be thinking about you guys today.</p>
<p>pugmadkate, I’m not sure what DS will do if he doesn’t go to Texas. We’ve looked at some schools up here, but we need to do more searching. He’s just so tired from school and running at the moment that I’m not bugging him about it. What schools are you looking at in the northeast? Bates is about 30 minutes from us, and Bowdoin is about the same. Colby is a little over an hour away. You’re right, trading kids makes sense! Maine would be a fun place to go to school, if you could stand the snowy, icy winter. The ice is worse than the snow and cold, I think. There are some weeks I can’t even walk to my mailbox! No one told me about that before we moved here!</p>
<p>Yes, my grandmother was amazing. Definitely one of my role models. She taught high school algebra. I wonder what she would have done if she’d gotten her master’s degree! She had some hard times - after getting through the Depression and WWII, my mom’s older sister passed away at 16 from kidney problems (probably the same recurring UTIs that I get, but take care of easily with antibiotics - scary to think about). </p>
<p>There were so many kids in her family when she came along that they just called her “Babe” until she was six and her mother, Kate, passed away. At that point they named her “Kate” also. I always knew if we had a daughter, she would be called Kate (although her official name is “Kathryn”). We had two boys first, so we were thrilled when the ultrasound showed the third was definitely a girl! She is 11 now and the sunshine in our house, too (I realize that may change shortly, lol).</p>
<p>Time to push DS out of bed!</p>
<p>PMK - If a school is generous, merit aid will cover aid in this order: loans, work-study, grants, EFC. If the school is not generous, it may reduce grants before loans/work-study. Either way, if a student has an EFC of 10k at a 40k COA school, s/he will need a 35k merit aid to cover half of the EFC. You begin to see how merit aid helps the upper middle class much more than those with need.</p>
<p>Hi everyone, This is a short school week here, and I will be taking DD to see Union and Skidmore on Thursday. Please feel free to PM me if you are interested in our impressions of these schools. We are going to spend 2 days in Saratoga Springs.</p>
<p>Dh spent 5 years in grad school with hardly a tremor, but managed to be at a conference in the LA area for the Northridge quake. They lost electricity for at least a day, which kind of made it difficult to proceed. </p>
<p>We sent our older son off to CA yesterday for his summer internship - we worried about all sorts of things, but forgot to worry about earthquakes. I really didn’t need to be reminded!</p>
<p>Psychmom, I’d be interested - Skidmore is a possible for younger son. My best friend from high school lives in Saratoga Springs, I haven’t seen her though since my son was up at CTY camp nearby at Siena College.</p>
<p>Final AP/IB exam today! S2 is in Spanish SL right now…he never cracked a book, so we’ll see how it goes. On the other hand, prom was wonderful, they looked fabulous and had a good time (though were not crazy about all the booty dancing).</p>
<p>jackie, I asked ds for clarification about how Latin Lit/Vergil works. Turns out everyone’s transcript is the same, so this year juniors and seniors took Lit. Next year, juniors and seniors will take Vergil. No idea what will happen the year after that. Maybe seniors won’t have a class to take? Or the teacher will fashion some kind of non-AP elective? I asked him whether College Board cares that some people got Lit first and some people got Vergil first. He said if it did, they’ve never told us. :)</p>
<p>In good news, ds made summa cum laude on the Natl Latin Exam!</p>
<p>Earthquakes scare me. Hope everyone is ok!</p>
<p>An '09 mom here. Next fall your kids will be filling out merit aid applications and some of them will ask for family income information. Some people say to leave that part of the form blank, but some on line forms won’t let you leave things blank. </p>
<p>My Son applied for three different merit scholarships at his state safety, all on the same non-detailed, check the box online form. We included our family income (which we knew was too high to qualify him for need based aid.) He finally got the “thanks but no thanks” letter yesterday. The letter said that there was only enough money to give scholarships to a third of the applicants.</p>
<p>There is NO WAY that Son was not among the top third of the scholarship applicants. The median SAT score at the school is 900 to 1100 and Son’s was 1430. He demonstrated a strong interest in the school by putting down a housing deposit, visiting, and applying to and being admitted to the honors college (which required rec letters and essays.) The only reason he could have been denied was family income. I wish I’d had twins - I would have put our income on one and not on the other, just as final proof.</p>
<p>Son isn’t attending that school after all, so it’s no big deal. But next year when your kids are filling out merit aid applications, try to leave the “family income” part blank, unless you think it’s low enough to help your student.</p>
<p>YDS: Congrats to your son, that is fantastic!</p>
<p>YDS that is great, we don’t do the Nat Lat exam although I mentioned it to the teacher I forgot the reason. It also makes sense that the transcript would say AP Latin Lit or AP Latin Vergil, as that’s what the class actually is. Hopefully they will offer some class in the future to allow the kids to continue through sr year.</p>
<p>thanks for the tip missypie.</p>
<p>The 1989 San Francisco quake was my big CA earthquake experience. I was at Candlestick park, awaiting the start of the world series with my wife who was pregnant with DS.</p>
<p>Took us 4 hours to get home (a normally 45 minute drive), all the while wondering if there would be a home when we got there - at the time we were living in Fremont, about 200 yards from the Hayward fault.</p>
<p>Got home to an essentially undamaged house - other than the area next to the pool being soaking wet and the pool level being down a foot. All that water went sloshing out during the quake!!!</p>
<p>All of the pictures in the house were crooked, and we lost one water glass that had been left on the drain board and fell into the sink.</p>
<p>We spent the next 4 days at home counting our blessings. A memory that will last a lifetime for sure.</p>
<p>YDS: “In good news, ds made summa cum laude on the Natl Latin Exam!” </p>
<p>Fantastic Achievement! Is your chest bursting!!! (Should be…)</p>
<p>Great news, YDS! Congratulations to your DS.</p>