<p>I knew owlice was the right one for the job!</p>
<p>My home-for-spring-break college son and I just had a good stress relieving laugh (for me) over the attention to detail and generally yumminess of the divine menus.</p>
<p>2blue, I’m not a caterer, just an advanced eater. 
</p>
<p>The first menu is actually from my wedding reception (last year); excellent caterer, from the UMD food service! (She packed us leftovers; we ate tenderloin – the best I have ever ever had – for a week solid.)</p>
<p>The second is just an excuse to have my H make satay and pesto salad. Both of these are so good, they’re like dying and going to food heaven.</p>
<p>Let me hasten to add that the catering from UMD bears no resemblance to anything I ever got in a student dining facility when I was on campus…</p>
<p>Aargh-- another waitlist for my S, at his top choice school, Oberlin. That’s three waitlists. My experience is that this is indeed The Year of the Waitlist, as some other thread on this site has proclaimed.</p>
<p>Well, shoot me now…Vanderbilt’s admitted students SAT middle 50% went up 100 points from their website…my d has gone from being at the top of the range to barely the middle…there is no way this is going to be pretty…</p>
<p>This needs to be over…</p>
<p>I hear that, rodney! Whoever said there should be a ban on the extraneous (i.e., non-collegiate) use of big white envelopes at this time of year was right on! Came home today to two big fat, white envelopes in the mailbox . . . and neither one was for D. Her two flush letters of the week (Rice and CMC) were the only college mail she got. Both are just the paper echoes of previous online rejections, but still, not exactly fun.</p>
<p>Has anyone else gone to the USPS website to look for some kind of calculator that would estimate delivery time of letters from one zip code to another? I didn’t find anything, but wouldn’t that be a good idea? I am assuming that letters mailed yesterday in DC won’t make it to the midwestern hinterlands by tomorrow . . . <em>sigh</em></p>
<p>My heart was racing on the ride home; left work early to pack to go away for the weekend. NOTHING from the colleges! I asked H if he “dropped” something on his walk from the mailbox, and he said, “Will you please stop obsessing and pack?” This, coming from someone who toyed with the idea of steaming a college letter with an iron yesterday. Hah.</p>
<p>Good luck to all. I’ll be back late tomorrow afternoon and hyperventilating as we get closer to our mailbox. And…I’m not packing my laptop…:)</p>
<p>knitmom - I feel much better now. I went looking for that non-existent calculator too. If you’re waiting on Georgetown, our EA experience was to add two days to the day that they said the letters were going out.</p>
<p>
COAs are not realistic. They haven’t been realistic for decades. The colleges appear to be stuck with formulas, and latitude is very small. There is SOME latitude, but they seem to be wary of setting precedent.</p>
<p>I’m on D3 (and there was also an S1). We tried the FA route on D1 and S1. Unfortunately, we actually saved some money for the 4 kids, before there were 529s. What they expected us to do was spend down the savings on the first kid, and then they expected the other colleges to pick up a bigger percentage.</p>
<p>They also won’t do the math. 4 kids, 4 years each (with some overlap), and I’ll be 62 when D3 graduates. They want to give us loans. Just when, we ask, are we supposed to pay back the loans?</p>
<p>Not part of the formula. The formula says we have such and such income, such and such savings, and they get to take some percentage of each.</p>
<p>No willingness to look at the real situation. D1 went to a LAC, S1 went to an out of state flagship. Same deal both places.</p>
<p>Basically, all we ever got was a loan package, and a small one at that. </p>
<p>We’re paying cash (and doling out the savings pro rata, at least we have 529s to work with now). It’s a killer, but they end up with no debt, and neither do we. Our gift to the kiddos.</p>
<p>Don’t expect FAs to be realistic. Nothing in regard to college costs is reasonable.</p>
<p>We’re still stressed. D3 is good enough for HYP. So are 10,000 others. All the lesser schools want her, she is 7 for 7 on them. We’ll know Monday.</p>
<p>there is a calculator on the USPS site:</p>
<p>Click on Mailing Products and Services, then
Domestic Mailing Letters and Cards, then
More information about First class mail, then
click on the Calculate Postage box that appears in the upper right and continue making selections as if you wanted to estimate postage for a letter from the school’s zip cod to yours. Eventually it will show you a price, and more importantly a number of days in transit. (You will have to adjust the mailing date to Thursday of next week if you want an estimate for one of the schools that mailed yesterday.)</p>
<p>S got the Big Envelope from Bowdoin today. So far we have two FA offers, and our expected contribution ranges from about 3 to 5 times our EFC.</p>
<p>Wow, Consolation - you’re good! You’re either a Private Investigator or a Postal Service employee!</p>
<p>Holy cow, Consolation! I’m off to the site now . . .</p>
<p>Just a former technical writer with a liberal arts education! <g></g></p>
<p>Here’s something to keep everyone amused. This is one of the most hilarious web sites I’ve ever seen. It has reduced my son and I to tears. I posted it on another thread, but I figure folks here could use the laugh!</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.notwithoutmyhandbag.com/babynames/[/url]”>http://www.notwithoutmyhandbag.com/babynames/</a></p>
<p>This thread is bad for my waistline! Not really, it is the nervous waiting that made me polish off a bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream and some brownie bites from Costco. knitmom, I am there with you, expecting that letter from the DC area tomorrow.</p>
<p>Consolation: I hope you’re not a Postal Service employee, cause I’m not feeling too friendly toward them at the moment. Arrgh. On my way home from the grocery this morning, I had to pass by the post office. I thought what could it hurt—I’ll stop in and check whether they have any mail for us. Big mistake. I was told in no uncertain terms that I could not pick up my mail that way. I could, if I wished, put a hold on my mail and then pick it up from the post office, but otherwise, I should get lost. … Whoa. Now I really do fear that they’re going to hide D’s letters!!!</p>
<p>Two days, it says. Not sure if Saturday is a real day or not in PO parlance, but we’ll certainly see it by Monday.</p>
<p>The FA package that I thought would take a week to get here ARRIVED TODAY. I got home from errands (and french fries) to find it, BUT GET THIS—my son is taking a nap and I don’t want to wake him up. He gets up super early in am, so he enjoys the chance to take a nap while on break. So it sits there, and I can’t see it yet. Soon, though!</p>
<p>Never fear, Peabodie. I’m a chocolatier.</p>
<p>You would not believe this - it is SNOWING hard in my neck of the woods! I have an inch of white stuff on my deck!!! I do not recall that it ever snowed so hard in Seattle this time of the year!</p>
<p>And it snowed white fat envelopes in our mailbox, too. D got 2 today. Whitman says “Congratulations” on the bottom of the packet, and Scripps… Well, it is big. :)</p>
<p>Goodness, how did this child manage to get into 7 colleges?! We are celebrating this Saturday! She has 2 high reaches to hear from, but I think she is not going to cry if the spaghetti she had thrown did not stick to those walls :D</p>
<p>Gladmom, doesn’t your floor need vacuuming? Or <em>oops,</em> could you have something that thunks loudly when it slips from hands and hits the floor, somehow slip from your hands and thunk loudly on your floor?</p>
<p>Congratulations to your dd, BunsenBurner! Those both sound like great schools. </p>
<p>No FA packets for us today. S should get an online notification later today. Here’s hoping it is good news.</p>