Well, it’s official (aside from actually receiving the certificate in the mail): I can now, if I wish, sign my name ‘Michael Hanscom, AA’. It’s a little silly to do so, so I’m not going to, but I can.
Short updates have been appearing semi-regularly on…well, everywhere, if you happen to be following me on the web (Twitter, Plurk, LiveJournal, and a number of others, thanks to the multi-site-update magic of Ping.com), but let’s see if I can back up a bit and fill in a few more details (photos from each day’s festivities are linked to on the day’s name).
Thursday: Mom and Dad arrived in town, after having driven down from Anchorage in their mini-RV (their “Turtle”). Last time they were in the area they stayed at an RV park down in Kent, but this time Prairie and I had found one closer to North Seattle for them to try. Turns out they liked it a lot, so if anyone ever needs an RV park in the North Seattle area, check out the Lake Pleasant RV Park, it’s highly recommended by my folks.
Anyway, Prairie and I drove up, picked up my folks, and we went out for dinner at a Mexican restaurant nearby. I still had some studying to do, so we dropped them back off after dinner and came back home.
Friday: Thanks to NSCC‘s goofball scheduling, I had my last final and graduation on the same day. Finals week at NSCC is weird — rather than actually doing a real finals week, we get normal classes on Monday and Tuesday, finals on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, and the graduation ceremony Friday evening. I think it’s overly hectic, and I’d much prefer being able to use the weekend before to concentrate on studying for finals instead of having normal class days to worry about, but they didn’t ask me when they wrote the schedule.
After the final, Prairie and I picked up my folks again. We spent some time at home snacking and preparing, then headed off to school. My folks grabbed seats, Prairie grabbed my ‘big’ camera (I couldn’t exactly graduate and take pictures with my SLR, so she used it to get shots of me and of the kids she used to teach at the Career Link Academy who were getting their GEDs), and I wandered off to check in and get ready. Sometime while I was getting rounded up, Rick showed up — a nice surprise, as graduation ceremonies aren’t always the most exciting things in the world.
The ceremony itself was nice enough — about as exciting as you’d expect it to be, with ‘uplifting and inspirational’ speakers…the usual. One of the professors fainted and was carried out on a stretcher, but they assured us she was fine, just suffered a bump to the head when she collapsed. While my parents were pleased enough by the speakers, Prairie and I (who have had a slightly more intimate view of the internal politics around the school) both thought there was a hint of desperation to the many exhortations of the fine community of NSCC. Neither of us have ever been too impressed with that aspect of the school (for a community college, NSCC has remarkably little community feel to it, even to the point of having both its student newspaper and student government collapse over the past year due to lack of participation), and the speeches rang just a little bit false to us.
Still and all, it wasn’t a bad few years, and I’m quite happy to have reached this milestone!
After the ceremony we all came back to the apartment for spaghetti dinner (with a quick run by Best Buy so Dad could get me a graduation present, sent Rick home, ran parents back to the RV park, and crashed out.
Saturday: C and K, Prairie’s mom and sister, drove up from Vancouver and showed up along with H and P, Prairie’s other sister and brother-in-law, in the morning while I was picking up parents. Rick came over again a bit later, and we all had a nice graduation party, complete with toast from Prairie (using sparkling cider, as I’m not much of a drinker, and don’t like champagne). After the party, Rick and P took off, Char, K, and H went off for a walk, and my folks, Prairie and I watched Woody Allen’s Match Point, which scored with Dad on two levels: though he generally doesn’t like Woody’s films, he enjoyed this one, and for once, he couldn’t guess the ending (more accurately, he guessed the ending incorrectly)!
After Prairie’s mom and sisters came back from their walk we all went over to the Amante Pizza and Pasta that just opened up in our neighborhood for dinner. A nice dinner there, then H and K went to Hope’s place, I drove parents back to their RV, and P and C visited and looked at photos until I got home and we all went to bed again.
Sunday: In a nice little bit of serendipity, Sunday was Father’s Day, and since Dad was here, we were able to have a nice Father’s Day brunch here at the house. Once that was done, we made one last run out to the RV park to drop Mom and Dad off (with a quick stop by a local park for some family photos), and came back home so that Prairie and I (though especially Prairie, who’d done an incredible job cooking, preparing, and generally playing hostess throughout the weekend) could get an evening of “just us” relaxing before the week started in again and Prairie had to go back to work.
And — finally — that wraps it up. Prairie’s begun her work week, and I’m enjoying being on summer break and not having any solid plans other than my job. Yesterday was spent playing with the USB turntable that parents got me and starting to import some of the vinyl I have lying around into iTunes, today’s been pretty dedicated to putzing with my weblog (writing this post and updating WordPress and all of the plugins to the current versions). Pretty soon I’ll have to start dedicated some time to starting the process of packing up the apartment for our upcoming move, but I figured I could get away with a few days of just “me” time to relax!