August 25

 Good morning on this sunny and wonderfully cool day. I have been busy already. The weekly grocery order has already been delivered and I got it put away without much effort. While I made the coffee in our drip through system I got the dishes done. Whenever I see the ads for dishwashers that promise energy and water savings. Only two of us here so our dishes don't mount up and I wash every other day. We found that using the dishwasher just left us with crusty dishes that didn't get clean. I got the sink area in the kitchen thoroughly scrubbed and both toilets cleaned up. I got out on the patio and emptying one 5 gallon bucket entirely adding the soil to a couple of the containers I am keeping and got most of the soil out of another both went into the trash tote for collection Wednesday. I only got most of the soil out of the second one because the soil at the very bottom is hard and very heavy. It was not worth conserving it. Then I took another unmodified bucket (didn't punch drain holes in it) I started clearing/organizing the shed by collecting all the support poles and trellis pieces into that bucket. By that time my back hated me so I took a couple of Advil. Right now supper is in the works but I can spend a good bit of time sitting at the computer.

I found this GZERO interesting article. When I was young (about 50 years ago) I was told that the road to success ran through college and a degree. I was told that a student loan was a smart way to go because over your working life you would have a significantly higher income. I was told that the interest on that debt was "good debt" because your higher income would let you pay it off more quickly and easily. They lied and I was naïve. None of that happened and I was an early victim of the higher education scam. Along the way I had some faint evidences of how much of a scam was building. I followed the employment and open positions information in the Chronicles of Higher Education and saw numbers article by people who were seeing the market for their skills drying up: new lawyers who had to take paralegal jobs or well published historians not able to get appointments. That continued through the 1990s. In 2001 I was beginning to look for a paralegal position (having gotten the appropriate degree) and watched as the job listing is the Chicago papers shrank from a page to a column. And many specified that they had paralegal positions but wanted a new lawyer to fill them. Every time I zigged the labor market seemed to zag. I have talked to two young grandnephews about what to do after graduating high school. I have given the same advice: no loans, know what you want to do and tailor your education to your goals, don't assume the college is appropriate for you or your goals, and be able to pivot quickly to something related to your program. So far neither will have much, if any, debt. I forget which government secretary in which department told young people 40 or so years ago to "kick the tires" when considering education. I agree.