Not a rant...just some potentially exciting news

My daughter transferred to North Central College this year after having spent the last year and a half at Harper (community) college after returning home form a semester at University of Kentucky.  She was originally an Elementary Education major with a minor in French.  They didn't have French high enough for her at Harper, so last semester she took Spanish and LOVED it.  My avatar is a picture of her in Ecuador over the summer.  So after taking/loving Spanish, she decided to change her major to French with a minor in Spanish.  She plans to be a high school foreign language teacher.  After she graduates college, her plan is to go to Paris for up to 3 years to teach English, before coming back to start her career.  Well, last Thursday, she got an e-mail from her speech coach from Harper with a job offer to move to Paris to be a live-in nanny to 3 kids and teach them English.  Her speech coach's mother is a French teacher who lives in Paris for two months a year, and the daughter/son-in-law of friends of hers are looking for someone to teach their kids English.  The parents both speak English at their jobs, but when they get home they're too tired so they end up speaking French.  Gab talked to her French teacher at North Central to see what she should do, and she said "GO!!!!"  She's not sure how it will work with school, because the North Central study abroad school isn't near Paris, but she might be able to take on-line courses and stay enrolled.  OR she may just go to a different university where her credits will transfer to North Central.  If she can't make it work this year, the family will wait for her, so the job is hers whether now or later.  So she will be living her dream to live in Paris and teach English.  And she will have FREE room and board AND will get paid!

Fuckin A right she ought to go.  Go and don't think twice about it.  Good for her and for you.  Excellent.

I swear I thought that Avatar was Gab standing next to Crater Lake in Oregon.

SoxIlliniRob wrote:Fuckin A right she ought to go.  Go and don't think twice about it.  Good for her and for you.  Excellent.

I swear I thought that Avatar was Gab standing next to Crater Lake in Oregon.

Nope.  Somewhere in the Amazon.

alohafri wrote:Sounds like a great opportunity! Congratulations! (Of course it does mean she has to live among the French, so there are drawbacks.  )

We live among the Trumpites.  Ain't no day at the beach here.  Gimme Macron and the French and their universal healthcare and tuition free college.  Only drawback to France, as far as I can tell, is the smoking.

sharpy wrote:I thought the Avatar was you 

Nope.  This is Gab and me.

'spose it makes sense for me to post this here.  Today we dropped our daughter at the airport, and she is now on her way to France (by way of Dublin, which is where she currently is) where she will be going to college for a full year.  She has opted for an all-French curriculum, so none of her classes will be taught in English.   We will not be able to visit her in France due to the fact that we exceeded the threshold by a hair for needs based MAP grants, so that's $15,000 grant money that we are losing...$5,000/kid.  Until we learned that we would be losing that much funding, we had plans to visit Gab during her time abroad, but that won't be happening, so we won't see her again until next summer.

Coming up with $15,000 has been no easy task.  We just really need to get to our next tax refund.  I will be taking out a loan or withdrawal from my 401(k), I will be withdrawing funds from our HSA (so I won't have healthcare next year), and in perhaps my most creative solution, after 6 years since my last reconstructive surgery, I'll be going under the knife again 2 to 3 times this year.  The copay is $100, but Aflac pays me $625 for each surgery, so I will have an additional $1575 for tuition.  

I'm hoping we're able to swing this (thanks Trump!).