I’m so glad she’s ok but it’s scary nonetheless!
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Oh no – so sorry! Glad she’s okay, but it’s so unsettling, and then the added cost doesn’t help. Ugh.
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We’re kind of superstitious haha so tend to not. That said, D19 bought a GWU sweatshirt because it was high on the list but not first choice so she didn’t feel she was jinxing anything, lol. We came home from Boulder with a plush Ralphie (the buffalo) though.
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My daughter bought sweatshirts at two of the schools we visited. Penn State and UConn. It was like 8 degrees out when we toured UConn and she still insisted on walking to the bookstore to buy a sweatshirt. That’s how I knew she really liked the school. Penn State she knew she wanted a sweatshirt from to begin with. She seems to like some of the other schools as well, but their colors are less neutral (both PSU and UConn have navy and white), so she opted not to get sweatshirts from them because she figured she probably wouldn’t wear those if she ended up not going to those schools. She’s very practical like that.
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Oh gosh so sorry to hear. Glad she’s ok - it’s still scary.
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Speaking of school colors, the other night we were discussing Pitt’s colors (you know, the important things) – which are blue and gold. Her high school is hunter green and gold, so we were commenting on the differences in the shades of “gold.”
My husband said Pitt’s was vaguely like a mustard, to which D26 retorted, “Actually dad, it’s more like slightly desaturated school bus.”
And that pretty much sums up who she is in a nutshell. 
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They’re using a brighter yellow/gold now and a brighter blue, though. It used to be a duller gold and darker blue.
Wow, your kids are going far for college! I will stop complaining about two-hour flights, lol.
My D26 applied to WPI – we toured there and Clark this summer. She liked WPI’s campus, but I think I liked it a lot more than she did. She’s now leaning against it, but we’ll see. Still awhile before decisions come in – and final decisions are made.
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Yeah I’m not sure which version or picture my kid saw that she was commenting on, although my DH did launch into a long explanation of why it used to be darker blue. (We didn’t listen. If you get him going on a topic, he starts with the creation of the world and eventually gets to his point. Said affectionately of course, lol. 
)
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Penn State shirts are really popular down here – I feel like people wear them even if they have no affiliation with the school.
I have a personal thing about navy blue because it’s so closely associated with school uniforms where I come from. 2 different schools I went to had navy and white. D19 and C26 went to different schools and they both had navy and white too!
C26 doesn’t seem to be fussed too much about colors. Mascots, on the other hand…she’s really creeped out by UMN’s gopher!!!
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My kids love the gopher, oddly enough! S23 bought a lot of swag there when he visited, so we have a lot of silly gopher stuff.
I wonder if maybe they think the gopher is non-creepy because they are used to the much more creepy looking mascot at our local university?
Yeah, I think she figures both Penn State and UConn have big followings due to their football and basketball teams so it wouldn’t seem strange that she was wearing either one of those sweatshirts at other schools, especially given the rather sedate colors.
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I hear you – I had horrible blue polyester skirts with powder blue button-down shirts and navy vests growing up. (And through 6th grade, it was navy jumpers with white blouses underneath.) Bleagh.
My girls’ uniforms are/were better, with navy plaid skorts (or plain khaki) and a couple color choices for polos. They do have to wear white button-downs and navy blazers once a week for chapel.
Color is a big thing here in SEC land – the fans of the schools with red as a color don’t want anything to do with schools who have orange as a color, and vice versa. 
Speaking of creepy mascots, look up UT Dallas. What IS that big-headed thing? His name is "comet” spelled backwards, by the way.
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My D26 did apply – it wasn’t much work for the application because they didn’t require anything extra, but it’s supposed to be rolling admissions, and she applied ages ago and hasn’t heard a thing. The portal was also a PITA to set up, for some reason.
I think she’s mentally crossed it off as well.
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When we visited UMN, our tour guide informed us that the gopher is actually not in fact a gopher but rather a weird looking squirrel. He said the school hired some guy from a different country to design the gopher, but that guy didn’t know what a gopher looked like and he wanted to keep the job so he just made what he thought a gopher looked like. But it’s really a squirrel. I’m not sure he told it that well or that I am remembering it correctly, but that’s sort of the story with the gopher.
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Okay I had to look up this gopher, lol. He doesn’t bother me! But then, we’re used to Buc-ee’s down here. D22 and I got a picture taken with the beaver himself at a new location that had opened when we were driving her back to Houston this summer. 
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I just lifted this from some website: “Although the exact date appears lost to time, that first physical image of Goldy was created by George Grooms, a designer working for a sports merchandising company in the years after World War II. Grooms is known to have designed a very large number of college mascots of that era and Goldy was the result of the lucky combination of chipmunks and poor rodent identification skills. Grooms sketched chipmunks, thinking they were gophers, and came up with the original happy, stripey mascot in the silly cap”. So a chipmunk, not a squirrel. Our (probably hungover) tour guide was not totally off base.
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C26 was quite taken with Ralphie though. Ralphie runners are designated student-athletes. It must be super fun to be in Boulder when they’re running Ralphie with the pearl street mall stampede beforehand.
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D26 & I explored the history department’s list of classes available to choose from for a history minor at 1 of the colleges on her list. It’s a really great department! So many options to choose from. She’s pretty excited.
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