Luann by Greg Evans and Karen Evans for September 03, 2014

She’s cleared about 13 levels of this “game”. One more to go, before heading to the “boss level”…. – There’s the signpost up ahead. You are about to enter….

Frank & Nancy DeGroot’s little girl is growing up so… so… not fast nor slow, but at some pace.

Well, Luann, your college life has finally begun…I wonder how long it will take you to jump into jeans and a t-shirt like the rest of your soon-to-be classmates? ;)

“The 14th Grade”“The First Day Of The Rest Of Your Life”“The Old College Try”“On The Way To The Learning Buffet”“….Even Higher School”“She’s Leaving Home (And Coming Right Back)” (♫)“Get Your Learn On”“Looking Good, Learning Good”or “Laughing In The Face Of Detention”

TEMPLO S.U.D. said, less than a minute agoFrank & Nancy DeGroot’s little girl is growing up so… so… not fast nor slow, but at some pace.

I hope you’re not trying to say ‘half fast’. (But you are, aren’t you.)

Jeans, Tshirt..backpack…now thats typical college attire. Even for a community college student.

Methinks there was some exaggeration going on… ;)

I guess…hope she doesn’t have to run to a class from one that is just finishing up as those sandals are Not the kind of shoes one ought to run in… ;)

You forgot to include the time shopping for that book bag, the shoes and as she put it, the one pen, one pencil, etc….

Or have off days?

Re: Frank and Nancy still in the house…you have a good point there! I was wondering the same thing! ;)

Puddles looks like he’s making a shovel-ready project.

Whatever they did over the summer, it wasn’t gardening. Those hedges are awfully dark and low!

Frank and Nancy are having breakfast when Luann leaves for her noon-time class. Maybe before class starts Luann needs to fill out some more forms at the administration building, get a library pass, have her parking sticker validated, pose for her student ID photo, get a textbook at the student store, etc., but my money is on grooming herself in the restroom and then sitting in the empty classroom for 1.5 hours before class starts, trying to position herself just right to make the best first impression. Imagine her reaction when, after all that, Mr. Fogarty walks in and sits down at the instructor’s table.

I guess I was one of those late-bloomers. Hated high school with a passion as I was not “popular” and was also behind in some core classes like math and Spanish. So full of teenage angst! Those were the days…not! I bloomed in (several) community college(s), and eventually went off to a four-year university where I excelled in my classes. Graduated with a 3.9..and a 4.0 in two Master’s classes. My high school counselor and some teachers I had would have Never thought I would even get into a 4-year university! =-O

by the face, biggest critic of Lue is Puddles

Poor Puddles is sad. His adoptive mother is leaving him, again. Oh well, time to take a pee, then go back in and curl up for a little snooze. She’ll be back. Life is good.

oh gawd, she should NEVER wear lipstick if she looks like THAT….also, if it takes her that long to look like THAT then she needs more than general education…

I see that someone’s creepy comment has been eliminated! Yes! Now, back to the present: it is like wow, how time flies! Guess I’d better mosey on upstairs with IS Katie and get us both settled in! ’Nite all! ;)-—————————————————————“And what is bettre than wisedoom? Womman. And what is bettre than a good womman? Nothyng.”(Geoffrey Chaucer, 1340?-1400)

… and, a new life starts!!

For some, it’s a BS (we all know what BS means), MS (More of the Same) and a Ph.D. (Piled Higher and Deeper). Luann is working on her MRS…

Right, the shoes make her head go above the top frame edge.

The “make-up” is essentially lipstick, earrings, and slightly coiffed hair. So… lipstick. Perhaps drawing her lipstick thinner caused it to look black and squiggly. Granted, it’s not the best altered look from the tomboy we’re used to, but if you transpose the drawing to what it represents… more attention to the bangs, earrings, and some lipstick is not all that overboard for a new location and a first impression. She’s dressed in girly clothes before. I think the blouse is out of date..I too look forward to the idea of Fogarty showing up and ruining all her anticipation. :)

luann is all grown up!!!!! tears from her puppy!!!!!

Off topic – what’s with the ‘midnight madness’?

I added a comment to you a few minutes ago on yesterdays forum. (It is now 4:20am my time, to give you a time reference.)

Don’t those people ever work?

I don’t think Nancy works, not sure, but Frank is sitting there in a tie. I doubt he’d do that just to sit around home. I figured he was probably home for lunch and they have eaten and are just now having their coffee. (I could be wrong, but I’ve already been wrong once this year and I’m not due yet. :-) )

Severely disappointed in Luann’s taste in shoes…

Nice to see that Pitts CC is within walking distance of the DeGroot manse (there is no indication that Luann intends any other mode of transportation—no car keys, no mention of bus fare or bus schedules, no mention of anyone picking her up). Once she gets over the first-day challenge to look her best (eye make-up, bright lipstick, carefully coiffed hair, rather preppy-looking three-piece outfit, and platform sandals, albeit not too well color-coordinated), she’ll fit right in with the rest of the community college crowd….

Poor Puddles.

a mighty big IF

Ahhh, Luann’s STILL in “High School” Mode.

But THAT’S about to Change…..,

Good Luck, today, Luann. :)

I think you’ll find those clogs are going to come off quickly, especially if it’s a huge campus and disconnected buildings,etc., making you walk a lot.

Fear not Puddles. Lu will be back, shortly.

Luann’s class was at noon….what time does Frank go to work?

Luann’s class was at noon….what time does Frank go to work?

I’m not sure if it will happen or not, but when Fogarty retired from Pitts High, I mentioned that it would not surprise me if he showed up teaching at whatever college Luann ends up at.

Certainly for a little “retirement” coin, but not as a “career” thing…

Still, at the end, he seemed quite tired of teaching. I honestly don’t know if he wants to teach anymore… Maybe he’d be a “security guard” or “custodian” or something… 8-O

Is she going to have the big clown lips all the time she’s there?

I would definitely be disappointed if Mr. Fogarty showed up teaching at the junior college. That would indicate (a) that after 29 years, Greg had trouble thinking of a new teacher character; (b) that Fogarty really didn’t retire, even though the strip devoted three weeks this past May to talking about his retirement; © that the junior college was willing to hire a burnt-out high school teacher who, by his own admission, was ineffective in teaching his students; (d) that Greg learned about college by watching TV sitcoms like “Boy Meets World” and thus got the idea that a teacher might follow his students to college; (e) any or all of the above.

Hey Greg, we still need closure on Knute and Crystal! ( separately if not together).

And the fact that we don’t have it yet gives me hope that they’ll still be around, somehow, in the “college years…” :-)

Didn’t she attend any freshman orientation, get a list of texts to started reading, pick up any pre-set assignments? Todays’ strip reminds me of Elle in Legally Blonde on her first day.

Luann wouldn’t be wearing those shoes if she were going to Columbia Community College in California. It is downhill and uphill and all around a lake.

> Luann wouldn’t be wearing those shoes if she were going to Columbia Community College in California. It is downhill and uphill >Pitt, as its name implies, is “uphill” in every direction. You just can’t get any lower than Pitt.

And that would be a big waste of the reader’s time. I hope Mr. Evans has a better imagination than that…

Luann is SOooo going to faceplant into whatever passes for “lunch”.

It’s always so easy to spot the freshmen.

Question: My first day I went loaded with a backpack full of notebooks, textbooks, etc. Have laptops & tablets replaced all that or is Luann going to collete lite?

That girl is never going to own a car.

When Luann picked up Quiall at LAX and took him to the dance at Pitt HS that same night, her car was red.-

Quite the day. My grandson started at U. of Wisc. today. Yesterday, his sisters went to elementary school, middle school, and high school. And the dog started puppy obedience training.

Puddles’ expression says it all

And she’s finally off! She has (obviously) made it a point to cast a great image to make good impressions. But, what if, on the first day, she is seen by a male freshman who never had a date, let alone a girlfriend, in all of high school? And this poor guy immediately decides that Luann is “the one” he has always dreamed of… Such things have happened in the real-life world!

Poor little Puddles.

Good point! At the time I wrote it, I was not consciously thinking about that past story with Gunther, but it could really be a situation where Luann thinks, “oh, this is happening to me again, why?”

why would they quote have to let her take her car its her car

Do you know for a fact that she’s the true owner, (i.e. with title in her name)? I do not. And I’d have difficulty believing that she could afford one at this point, give how little she has worked or saved money. Either she got a really good deal, or her parents own the car. As I said, she either owns the car or has access to the car.

the fact that she doesn’t have her car keys in her hand at the very moment she is portrayed in the panel at the end irrelevant people need to imagine a few things when they read these comics they’re not going to draw every detail in the expectation that someone’s going to notice every bit of minutia.

I actually agree in re: the “keys in hand” issue, but that wasn’t my comment… it was the OP’s. I also agree that unless otherwise specified in the strip as “canon,” we are free to imagine/speculate as we choose, and discuss it here, as long as we are ready to accept the critique of our “Luann community” here, and stand ready to defend our positions, if needed.

Evidently the car must be painted with special “mood paint” that changes with the mood of the owner. This was from June 10,2013:

Sheriff? Any comments on this? :-)

Ha! I too had initially thought it green (remembering the strip you show), but the two others that were red/maroon gave me pause. I really enjoy your “special mood paint” comment!!!! Very funny!

It is confusing for you to say that it’s legal to let a dog roam your property, and then say that you run the risk of the dog being picked up. Animal control officers carry out laws. If it is legal for a person to allow a dog on their own property, unsupervised, the animal control officer would not have authority to pick that dog up.-Not that I want to continue this discussion, but if you are going to split hairs, I will, too.-Not all states ‘take the field’ on all topics (i.e., pass statutes that overrule any local laws on a topic.) In Florida, the issue of animals ‘at large’ applies at the state level once the animal (usually a dog) has been involved in an incident of biting a person (or killing another animal). -Otherwise, it is left up to local governments to define what they mean by ‘at large’.-Here is the definition for Seminole County in Central Florida, where I live:“It shall be unlawful for any animal owner to allow, either willfully or through failure to exercise due care and control, his animal(s) to run at-large upon public property, unless said public property expressly authorizes the same, or upon private property of others, including common areas of condominiums, cluster homes, planned unit developments and community associations without the consent of all owners thereof, unless said private property owners authorize the same by express or implied consent.”-In other words, if the DeGroots lived here in Seminole County, Florida, and allowed Puddles to sit in their own yard with no supervision, Puddles would not be subject to an animal control pickup.

It’s another thing that has happened in “real life,” where the ultimate perfect high school couple float away from each other when the college years come…

As far as an appearance by Fogarty in Community College, the elderly people here will remember the television series where Dobie & Maynard enroll in junior college, only to encounter Mr. Pomfritt from their old high school!

Frank wears his white shirt and tie at home at noon. Could it be that he works nearby and comes home for lunch? He is sitting at the table with Nancy drinking coffee, so he must be on his lunch break.

Maybe Nancy means that she had been getting ready since 1700 hours instead of 0500 hours. Nah! That can’t be it.

@ReallyBad2-Specifically, Seminole County statutes forbid owners , through either willful action or ‘failure to exercise care and control’, to allow animals to roam on either publicly owned property (unless said property specifically allows this, as in a dog park) or private property owned by anyone other than the owner of the animal.-Public property would include public rights of way, such as streets, sidewalks, parks other than dog parks, school yards and the like. So if our Animal Control officer sees a dog (with or without collar) walking by itself down the street, or running through an alleyway, or swimming in a drainage ditch, the Officer is authorized to take the animal in.-Similarly, if someone calls to complain that a dog (with or without collar) is roaming around alone on the tennis courts of a condominium, or in the caller’s yard, the Animal Control officer is authorized to pick up the dog.-Most animal control officers don’t have time to just drive around at will, by the way. They are busy with calls. In some communities (not here in Seminole County), they also have to respond to calls about wild animals. This leaves little time for ‘routine’ patrols to see if an animal (with or without a collar) is sitting in yard that may be the yard of the owner of the animal.

It could be a Saturday.

With all the nitpicking going on today, I have yet to see anyone bring up the fact that Frank is jokingly suggesting that Luann could earn a PhD in no time if she worked as hard in class as she did putting together a look.-She’s going to a community college. She can earn an Associates, and, at Seminole State College here in Florida, she could even earn a few BA or BS degrees. But not a PhD…

-The special skills of IamJayBlue are needed today over on the Dark Side of the Horse, to assembly a list of tunes about money. Most of the posters can only come up with one at a time (although I do like the Beatles tune…)

I wonder if she’d be able to get a job with anyone other than Professor Rod Lakes?

I thought that was Jim Henson?

I cut my teeth on the DEC PDP8/L at our high school. We had 3K of memory, I/O was paper tape punch/reader and an old ASR – 33 teletype console that had been modified.

I attended both a public and private HS… graduated from the private one. The public school is the one that had the PDP 11/40, with two DecPack RK05 drives, and one DecTape double unit. The private school could not afford that, and had a PDP-8L with one DecTape Unit that ran the whole thing… slow as all get out. Also one DecWriter dot matrix printer and the others were all ASR-33s. We also had a Dec Card reader and a 300 LPM line printer.

I do recal the IMSAI 8080, the chief competitor to the Altair 8800 for all old style “geeks.” The “War Games” machine (it’s what Mathew Broderick used in the movie).

Funny…. speaking of “Museums,” in 1989 (within a few years of my graduating college), I was sent to the Boston area for computer class that lasted a week. In my off hours, I happened by the computer museum that was up there. Wouldn’t ya know…. there before me stood the very mainframe machine used for many of my college classes – a CDC 6600. Uggh! :-PPP

(Re: Response to a certain statement:)

Another part of it, is that some can’t dream of anything happening between 10 and 4. Oh, wait…. (X^D)

They used to have toy die cast cars that change color with water. Could be a special Pitts Car wash that no one else knows about…

There’s also football helmets that are treated to change tone in movement under the lights. The Jacksonville Jaguars used that one two years ago, to change from midnight teal green to black, depending on which way the player stood under the light… but nothing from green to red. Now that I think about it, seems like a good way to go through an intersection….

When I previously saw the car, either a Honda or a Toyota Prius came to mind….. – An alternate explanation could have been that one car was Lu’s, and the other was Frank’s…..

When it’s the first day of school, nothing much to chew on for commenting but the other stuff…. – That’ll change (some) once we get into class….unless we just catch Lu giving the “recap” upon her return home….

In my grade school, we actually still used the abacus to help reinforce math skills with a focus on visually helping us to see how to get from one number to the other with addition, multiplication, etc….

That’s being mean! I like it.

Luann’sheading off for her first day of college, and her mother’s still characterizing her activity as “cute.” A nice juxtapsition there! (Not that I blame Nancy – I suspect Luann is in for all sorts of reality bites, from the utility of fashionable shoes and book bags to the reality of needing to perform, not dress, to impress.)

She looks more like she’s hawking Mary Kay than going to school.

“But to do this to an animal we intend to keep alive and not for the medical welfare of that particular animal…. Sorry… no go…” …. if you’ll look into it a little further, you’ll find that spaying for female dogs is recommended to greatly lessen the risk of mammarian cysts and cancer.

I’ll look into that. If it actually has some medical benefit to the given animal, then maybe so. But that benefit would have to outweigh the risk of the animal never being able to reproduce again.

So she still has Puddles?

Today’s strip is a little sad. Not only Puddle’s expression, but the image of a mature Luann leaving the familiar world of high school and home and going all by herself into an uncertain future. I think that we have all experienced that “point of no return” feeling some time in our life. On the bright side, maybe Viper will turn out to be one of her drama instructors.

Oh, I just read the comments on spaying and neutering your pets. Unless you’re a breeder, it is a good thing health wise for the animal. It also controls the overpopulation of unwanted animals who get dumped along freeways, are subject to abuse and disease, and, of course, the sickos like Michael Vick who use them to “train” their killer, fighting dogs. The rescue centers are too crowded to take in all the strays (who, in turn impregnate other strays), so most of them are killed. My current dog was shipped up to my state’s humane society from North Carolina, who apparently is very quick to kill the unwanted ones. They took her puppies and spayed her, but now she has a good home.

The new adventure begins!

I don’t understand what the problem is with Luann’s make up. Her complexion is the same as always. If she were heavily made up she would have color on her cheeks and eyelids. She only has a darker line on her eyelids to show mascara and possibly eyeliner. Her lips are just wide enough to show she’s wearing lipstick, not heavy, not duck lips, just modest color, (not black or blood red). Look at yesterday’s strip and you’ll see that even with no makeup her mother’s lips are twice the size of Luann’s. As for her hair, she has a little extra body and more curl on the sides, that’s it.

The shoes, on the other hand, are not made for walking far or fast. She may regret those on campus.

Looks like Tiffany

The benefit to having a male dog neutered is that the scent of female dogs in heat within a mile radius do not drive him crazy. My previous tenant had an unaltered male that could not be contained in the yard. He would routinely rip sound lumber panels apart to escape.

I can’t believe you wrote your entire post using only one period! ;)

Frank is like 65 or something, he’s retired!

Well Tiffany is a natural beauty…

How did this thread dissolve into a debate about dogs? Oh, right this is Luann.