On Saturday I discovered that the grant
money for this fall’s course had already been paid and what was left over was
deposited in my account. The problem is though that only one course has been
paid for and that which was deposited is only half the refund I normally get. A
letter I received on Friday said that my “application will be reviewed again in
January” to determine my eligibility for a 2016 grant. I suspect that they did
it this way because, unlike all the previous years, I’ve only enrolled in one
half course in the fall. Since the grant is meant to pay for a full course
equivalent, I guess they just automatically split the award. That makes it very
inconvenient for me because I’m used to paying for all my fall and winter
courses right away. The refund I receive is enough to pay for an extra half
course, but since I’ve only received half, I’ll have to keep it in my account
until January. I’m assuming here that all I have to do to qualify for the other
half of the grant is to pass Children’s Literature but it is going to be
uncomfortable to have the fees hanging over my head this time around. I’m going
to go to the admissions office on Tuesday to try to get an explanation and to
find out how sure I can be that I’ll be getting the other half.
I’ll
also need to get an explanation for why my student account has a balance owing
of almost $7,000. As far as I can tell that amount is a flat fee that is
automatically charged to every student’s account at the beginning of the term
and then it, hopefully, disappears when the system gets the information that
the student isn’t taking a full course load.
Since
it rained in the late afternoon I didn’t take a bike ride that evening, even
though it had stopped by then. I figured there might be lots of puddles to ride
through and it also might start raining again, so I stayed in.
That
night I watched an episode of Bonanza that started with the lynching of someone
suspected to be a cattle thief by a group of masked ranchers. The wife of the
victim was shot in the back as she tried to run for help. Hoss, on the way home
from courting a girl named Cameo, discovered the bodies after seeing several
unmasked men riding away from the property. Among the men, he recognized his
friend, Jim, who was also sweet on Cameo. Jim was later arrested on suspicion
of murder, but Hoss was reluctant to give the evidence that he’d seen Jim near
the scene of the crime because he didn’t want to incriminate his friend if he
was innocent. This was all further complicated by the fact that cameo was
certain Jim was innocent and Hoss didn’t want to make it appear that he was
just trying to get Jim out of the way so he could be with Cameo.
The
brother of the lynched man organized a lynch mob of his own made up of farmers
who were fed up with being bullied by ranchers. Jim escaped from jail and ran
off with Cameo but the lynch mob caught up with him and took him to the same
tree from which their leader’s brother had been hung. They allowed Cameo to go
for help because they knew she wouldn’t be able to get the sheriff in time. She
ran to Hoss and begged him to save Jim. He agreed to go there and found Jim on
a horse with a rope around his neck. The men were about to make the horse run
out from under Jim when Hoss arrived. He forced the lynch mob away from the
horse at gunpoint and was standing beside it, about to cut Jim free when the
lynch mob’s leader gave the horse a verbal signal that caused it to run. Hoss
jumped in to catch Jim’s fall, but he was trapped. All he could do was hold onto
him and keep his weight from causing the rope to tighten around his neck.
The
lynch mob rushed in to try to get Hoss away from Jim, so he had to fight them
off and hold Jim up at the same time. Hoss was shot in the arm, but still
refused to let Jim go. He was told to let him go or die. Finally, Jim kicks
Hoss away from him to keep his friend from being killed.
It
seems that the most interesting episodes of Bonanza were directed by Robert
Altman.
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