I finished grad school.   Thursday May 27 2010

Oh right: I graduated!

On one hand, it doesn’t really feel like anything has changed. On the other hand, my lifestyle these days basically involves four components: babysitting, reading books for fun, applying for jobs, and calculating how long it will take before my student loan money runs out. It is the paradise I imagined while I was studying for comps! So, I guess that it DOES feel like things have changed.

My brother and I graduated from two different schools on the same exact day. My parents decided to go to Boston for Greg’s graduation, since he wouldn’t have any family there otherwise, and my uncle Jeff and my cousins Erik and Andrew came to my graduation.

It was pretty great. After my parents and Greg got finished with the Berklee graduation ceremony (which was in the morning, whereas mine was in the evening), they flew down to Tampa real quick so that they could make it to Greg’s and my graduation party, which was very fun! Lots of people came, and the food was good, and my family and Mike’s family got to hang out all together for the first time, and there was that general mingling of normally-disparate groups of people from all different parts of my life, which I love.

All in all, a good day.

And then I went to Vero, to hang out with Greg before he went back to the freezing North.

We played golf with Dzia-Dzia (my maternal grandfather), and I got one of my all-time best scores (58 on nine holes… don’t judge me!).

I love living in a state where the standard urban wildlife can eat you.

Here’s my parents’ impressive new vegetable garden. It’s the first year (as far as I know) that they’ve done this, and it has already ruined me for store-bought lettuce.

Also, my dad gave me one of their many, many tomato plants, and now it is on my patio, producing fruit at a rapid pace.

Here are some photos where Greg and I pretend that we graduated together when in reality we just put our outfits back on for five minutes a couple days later, after a long argument about tassel placement:

And then Greg had to go home. And I had to go back to Tampa. But I did return a week later, to hang out with my all-time best pal on earth, Adrienne, who just graduated from law school at William and Mary.

I always miss her, and we never get to spend enough time together these days. But we did do some fun stuff: we went to the beach and then drank some rum runners at a table overlooking the river, we hung out and caught up on our lives and all the gossip, and best of all, we went to karaoke in Sebastian with my parents, Uncle Jeff, some of my dad’s work friends, and Mike, who came to town a few days after Adrienne did.

Here are my dad and his brother pretending to be the Blues Brothers:

Definitely this is something that we should do again!

Mike came to town to go fishing with my dad and myself. I do not really fish, I just lounge on the boat and read books and take pictures of the fish that are caught, which I like a lot better than fishing.

The men caught a bunch of fish, but nothing we could keep.

I also got to see a puffer fish puff up for the first time ever! I have seen lots of puffer fish, but never one involved in this kind of sweet puffing action:

I also went swimming for a while, which was awesome. I am trying to swim in the ocean as much as possible before the oil slick arrives (heavy sigh…)

And then Adrienne went back to Virginia, and Mike and I went back to Tampa.  And now I am back to my regular schedule of babysitting, reading books for fun, applying for jobs, and calculating how long it will take before my student loan money runs out.

So, things are going pretty well these days!