Stairway to heaven. Or something. (Taken with instagram)
The brightest star in the black...
Hmm… one of these retails for $65 and the other may or may not have been “thrown together” in an hour in my basement on Wednesday. Can you guess which one? (Yeahh… ok, not the slyest photography work on my part…) Anyway, I’ve had this project (and many others) in mind for months, so it’s about time I got it done! Yay me! What do you think?
Highlights from the weekend.
Sunday, May 20, 2012 - Final Exercises at the University of Virginia, Class of 2012 (aka Michelle’s graduation!)
A few thoughts on the day…
1. My little sister is done with college.. what?
2. Katie Couric = WAY better than Bob McDonnell, though she told her entire life story and at one point even said “whatEVerrrr” a la the sorority girl that she surely once was (and was surely trying to appeal most to). Oh, and the Thomas Jefferson references! To be fair, she namedropped a LOT of people and is certainly not the only one guilty of singing Jefferson’s praises at a UVA event, but it gets old.
3. Aside from my own sister, I recognized little more than two people the entire day. That is, I made small talk with two people I knew from before, neither of whom were graduating (they were Class of 2011, too) but, like me, had siblings graduating. It’s an odd feeling, though.. these people who you used to run into on a regular basis and even had classes with… fast-forward one year and how we are all strangers again! I always feel like a stranger when I’m back on Grounds.
3. Speaking of which… that is probably the last time I will be at UVA for a long time. I don’t see myself rushing back for alumni events anytime soon, especially now that my sister and a select few “Class of 2012” friends are gone. But I always said I missed Charlottesville more than UVA, and a few friends do still live there. It’s a beautiful area, and as we drove home alongside the Blue Ridge mountains I promised myself that I would start making more excuses to visit that part of Virginia again now that the obvious one is no longer available.
4. Michelle asked me later how it felt to “be on the other side” and I told her that it felt the same: long, boring, chaotic, and slightly confusing. It amazes me that the University has done this hundreds of times and has still not quite figured out how to inform, well, ANYBODY of what is going on. I suppose my own family recalled vaguely enough from last year how it was all going to go, and I suppose that every year it all works out to be as organized as can possibly be with such a great clusterfuck of people swarming in one area at the same time, but still! At least a sleep-deprived me could still find humor in the Environmental Science diploma ceremony gaffes. (They started 45 minutes late, mispronounced names, seemed to forget that they invited December grads to the ceremony and skipped over them. The “photo op” spot was on an incline on the grass. The grads didn’t even get their own seats. At least the food was good.)
5. The “Luftballons of 2012” did not disappoint! But I am slightly disappointed that we did NOT, after learning our lesson last year, get my sister one… (For those of you who aren’t familiar, those many balloons in the procession are not just decorative, but a way for parents to have an easier time of spotting their grad among a sea of black polyester). Needless to say, we never spotted our grad in the crowd :(
Congratulations to Michelle and the Class of 2012!
