Day 56

The three headline articles on the front page of today's student newspaper:

"Campus Use of Financial Reserves Questioned"
"UC System to Expand Full Tuition Coverage"
"Conference Held at UC Berkeley to Protest Budget Cuts"

The first is about how campus administration is working on moving money around to fill in gaps, and how union representatives don't buy into all of the priorities of this rearrangement. The second is about President Yudoff's recent proposal to the regents that students whose families make $70K or less (the previous figure was $60K) will have a free ride at UC. The third is about the conference held on campus this past weekend where about 600 people from throughout education met to discuss tactics for working toward "free" public education in the state. The Daily Californian is not an economically oriented publication, nor was this a special issue on the UC budget crisis. This is just the daily world that we live in at the moment.

A colleague had some fairly expensive work done on her car a few months ago (a mere week after I'd had to have the exact same expensive work done on my car), but her car broke down again over the weekend and it seems to be because of a similar problem. She of course hopes that this round won't cost another big chunk especially because, as she states, "I'm making $300 less a month than I was when this first happened." My own car's recent nervous breakdown pretty much wiped out my slowly-but-proudly growing emergency savings account, so she and I joked that if either of us have one more problem with either of our cars in the next year, they might as well just take the poor hunk of metal to the impound, because we won't be able to afford to have them fixed again. This sort of leans more on the side of depressing than funny, but what are you gonna do? I'd rather laugh about it now to help balance the pain I'll feel the next time my car stops running while driving up a hill in downtown San Francisco.