ORIGINALLY WRITTEN JOEL KLAASSEN
I’ve been looking in the mirror and wondering lately if it could be true that I’m starting to look a little older.
It was confirmed in Vogt’s IGA last Sunday afternoon. This little guy about the size of our grandson Louis looks up at me and says, “Gwampa.”
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An interesting Web site that has come to our attention describes a way to put away a little money for college for your kids or grandkids.
The site is called upromise.com. On it, you can purchase things you normally would buy, and a percentage of the purchase (usually 3 to 6 percent) can be credited to a college savings account that you specify.
We won’t be going out of our way to buy things we can get locally but will take advantage of it when we can. Since I can’t buy men’s clothes locally anymore, I went to one of the men’s stores on the site. There, you can build a person (model) who sort of looks like you and then put the shirts, etc., on the model to see how they look. It’s amazing and amusing at the same time.
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One of the challenges facing teenagers is finding work for the summer months.
If a job isn’t available, you might try what we did about a dozen years ago. We found that mowing lawns was a great experience for son Dan when he was about 14 years old. With a little sweat, it became quite profitable. At the height of his-our-glory, we were doing 33 lawns, many of them every week to 10 days. That was in the days when it rained.
The only problem with the plan was that school started in August and the lawns still needed mowing all the way into October. And guess who got to mow them then….
When he tired of mowing after a couple of years, Dan went out and found a job milking cows. Both experiences were excellent teachers of responsibility.
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With the job comes the desire to buy a car or truck. I thought I could put that off by saying that no car would be purchased until there was enough cash to pay for one. That happened just two years later.
Then came the new engines for three cars and two trucks. These were great times for father and son-yanking engines, having them rebuilt and putting them back in and hoping they would work. We didn’t know much, but we were fearless.
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We had two big events to choose from in Atlanta this spring. We could make plans to attend the Final Four or grandson Louie’s second birthday party.
Easy choice. Birthday party.
