The day started out with the graduation breakfast. This should probably be a post in and of itself, but I digress. After running myself fairly hard the night before (staying up until almost 4 am) to get things packed and ready to move out, I went to pick Anna up at her dorm at 9:50 or so to make it to breakfast by 10. The breakfast was nice with most of the stuff there provided by the faculty and staff who had come to give their best wishes to the graduating seniors. After a while of eating and kibitzing (I don't remember who Anna and I sat with, but I'm sure she does) the graduates were encouraged to get up and talk. Caleb Roepke and Matt Cadmon talked, Leatherwood talked, Becky Casselberry talked (I think), and memory blurs... oh, and Dr. Helmuth talked and closed things off. All in all, it was a very nice breakfast with some nice sentiments mixed in. It really reminded me how much I would miss this place.
After breakfast, Anna and I called her parents and went down to our apartments and loaded up everything that we had packed into their Suburban and our Camry. After all of that packing, we trekked up to the north side of town and deposited the whole lot of it in storage, got gas, and headed back to campus, picking up lunch along the way. It would be more accurate to say that I came back to campus to clean and check out and everyone else went off to run errands, but more about that later.
I got back on campus around 1, and we were supposed to have all of our stuff out of the apartment and cleaned up in time for our 3:30 - 4:30 checkout. For a while, I honestly thought we might pull it off. Turns out that Wilson actually managed to pull it off (with a great amount of help from his father) and Gallagher came pretty stinkin' close (I think he might have made it if it weren't for a couple of complications that he will surely mention.) Wheeler got to stay for the summer and came out smelling like roses... whereas I have a WHOLE lot of stuff.
In the meanwhile, Anna and her mother went to Tyler, Pounds Field to pick up my Nana (maternal grandmother who didn't want to be called Grammy Sherman in the Pennsylvania Dutch tradition.) As it turns out, her flight got delayed by 2 hours in Houston, which would have made her late for the graduation banquet and my fiancée and her mother late by proxy. So Anna and her mom (I still don't know what I'm supposed to call my mother-in-law to-be) came back to Longview, and I was left trying to find some poor schmuck to sucker into running out to Tyler to catch her plane. At that same time, I began getting phone calls, reporting that my Paternal Grandmother Cynthia and her husband (Grandpa Earl for the sake of convenience*) had just arrived in Longview. So, I ran around the apartment, called in some more banquet tickets, and begged Strang... er... Gallagher to run out to Tyler to pick Nana up when she arrived... which turned out to require him to leave no less than minutes after he agreed.
Anyways, with graduation banquet looming large, I realized that Nana couldn't make banquet and so I wouldn't need her ticket. So I begged Wilson to run and pick up only 1 ticket (instead of the two that I had called in earlier) and I would keep cleaning. Turns out that I could have used that ticket, as Dad called an hour or so later, having arrived in town after driving 12 hours from Cincinnati, instead of the usual 14 that it takes (lead foot runs in the family and the construction in Arkansas is finally done.)
So yeah... it was Grandma, Grandpa and I running to graduation banquet with Anna and her parents. We sent Dad off to his hotel for and dinner and an early turn-in (he turns into a pumpkin at 9 PM EST, which meant he was about ready for bed just as the banquet started.) An important note is that Grandma and Grandpa had never been to campus before, so it took them a bit to find the place, and Anna and I had been confused as to where the banquet would be, so that added to the fun. Anyhow, we found the grandparents and went and got seats, whereupon Anna's tardy parents arrived and we all had dinner, punctuated by some rather entertaining speeches filled with jabs at LeTourneau by people from whom I would never expect such things. All in all, it was a nice event, but probably not worth the $13 per ticket except that I got to see my friends receive honors, and that was really nice.
About 10 minutes (maybe less) into the banquet, Geoff called to inform me that he, my mother, my "little" brother Jonny (at 6 feet tall), and Geoff's girlfriend had all made it into town. So I tried to line them up something, but they just wanted to eat and crash. Anyways, the evening was ended off by seeing my grandparents off to run back to the hotel, lining up picture time for the following morning, calling all of the family to organize logistics for the next day and wish them good night, and going back to Anna's apartment to help put furniture back where it was supposed to be.
It was fortunate on the furniture front that we were assisted and largely organized by Anna's father, at least on the door front. My future father-in-law is a handy-man extraordinaire, and if anyone could help with the hellacious project of moving full-sized wooden doors out of the attic and putting them where they belong, it was Anna's dad. That bit took about 45 minutes, and the wiser heads ducked out at that point, right as the cleaning began in earnest. Shortly thereafter, Anna and crew decided things needed to be moved here and there and I ducked out a bit to do more phone calling and apartment work, returning to finish bunking beds with Ziggy and Moore's help and then heading back to my apartment for an early bedtime. Hitting the sack at midnight helped prepare me for my 7:30 am wake-up the following morning.
*footnote: He's been my grandpa all of my life, even though we're not technically related, and he's a cool old computer nerd who has taught me a lot of things and helped me fix a lot of computer problems.
Posted by Vengeful Cynic at May 6, 2005 10:12 PM | TrackBack