Please excuse my absence from the site over the last two days - I went on a whirlwind college tour with my daughter in southern and central Ohio. We are VERY late to the game for the fall semester because she has been in Americorps for the last 10 months and sequestered in remote regions of Appalachia for the most part. Her last project, however, is in Ohio, so we ran around yesterday taking tours.

It was weird being the dad instead of the kid (college doesn't seem that far away to me, though I left over 20 years ago) but I have also never been prouder. Through no particular fault of my own, she has turned out to be a very special young woman: with heart, poise, sweetness, intelligence, and, um, looks (just luck, that one), with few or none of her mother's and my more annoying characteristics.

We had assumed she was set with the University of Cincinnati, but there were a few unexpected issues there - like them not matching her Americorps college funds, and some complications with scheduling - so we also went by her mother's and my alma mater, Wittenberg University, a much more expensive private liberal arts school in Springfield.

Beisdes getting the royal treatment on EXTREMELY short notice (she IS the daughter of two alums, after all) she very much enjoyed the quiet, pretty campus, the personal attention, the 15-1 student-teacher ratio, the international travel emphasis: in short, the relaxed snootiness of it all. I was frankly pleased to see a small gleam of elitism kindle in her egalitarian eye.

So now she's all confused, but it's a nice problem because I'm sure she'd have a great time at either school, and with Witt matching her Americorps funds, cool-guy discounts for being the offspring of beloved alums and other fudging, the price difference is only 50%: not nothing, but not insane either.

Now she has to decide if she wants to go to a big school in a big city, or a smallish school in a smallish city - it's up to her.