There's a serious hole in the emails - last one was today, from some couple with whom I was exchanging Tyrannosaurus Rex's mp3 files, I guess I got to them via Napster. The connection I had before the move was the best 54K modem could provide, as Earthlink didn't have DSL in the area yet. But as we didn't use the phone much, this didn't matter, and there was unlimited local calls, so why not. Then for about half a year we had cable, which was good in the beginning, but... see 31-V-2001. and then 18-XII-2001..
The emails resumed only on 18th - so I have no clue what when happened meanwhile, just an outline of events. So I only guess this was the date when we got Ricardo and Go into VCU in Richmond.
We arrived quite early in the morning, finding our bearing (and parking) before the crowd woke up. We found the admissions office, the counselors, the billing, I wrote some checks and/or we found whatever places were necessary to find.
Few days later, we had our two students settled. Found them a room nearby - didn't look like much, but wasn't too shabby and basically cost 250$/month apiece. Don't remember how much of the bill was on me - all of it (only in the beginning?), or just the down payment plus Go's part, but there it was.
She enrolled into Visual arts - which I thought was mostly the digital stuff, until, much later, I learned it's pretty much all of the painting by whichever means - oil, water, pixels, vectors, anything. I thought, by analogy with code, that if it's called visual it must be pixels, otherwise it's just text. Then I checked the dictionary. Ricardo took computer science and economy - a double major. They couldn't get a place in the dorm as there were no provisions for married couples, but then the dorm would have cost a bit more and they wouldn't be together. The campus aka camp was nearby - the whole old downtown was either VCU's buildings, or rent to students, and the rest were the decrepit old brownstones which look like they didn't see much of paint and plaster since they've been rebuilt after the big fire in "Gone with the wind".
I think Jose didn't have any idea to put Ricardo to high schooling, we basically forced his hand. And, over the years, I think we paid between quarter and third of his bills. We kept paying our part of the rent for Go for the two semesters that he took longer than she to graduate - she finished earlier because of all the courses she previously took in A-burg and around DC at community colleges.
9-I-2020 - 7-IV-2026