Reflections on the Weekend

Firstly, congratulations to Sister, who has graduated from her fancy Notre Dame, beating me by a good month... despite starting one year later. As earlier posts have indicated, I went down with my family for graduation celebrations and activities. I figured I'd outline things I took away from this past weekend:

• I was not going to do the big graduation walk in Husky Stadium because I didn't think I could sit through the whole damn thing. This was reinforced by my sister's commencement, which was just a tad over two hours. I felt like throwing myself over the bleachers -- speechs from a Cardinal and Martin Sheen were not enough to prevent that. The UW one will be along the lines of 4.5 to 5 hours. I will, however, do my small geography one -- the whole thing is two hours, including the dessert buffet.
• Spending time with your family can be... fun.
• The whole area of and around Notre Dame is really flat. This might sound wierd, but it's not something you see around here much. Their campus is very very fancy and nice, probably two to three times larger than UW -- despite catering to one fifth amount of students. Well manicured lawns, extremely clean campus, and old buildings that looked like they were built yesterday.
• $40 steak at Ruth Chris... that's it? Two small balls of meat, and six pieces of shrimp thrown in?
• Perhaps because of it being a smaller school, I felt there was a lot more chemistry amongst the student body there -- my sister seemed to know a lot of the people, and you could tell during the ceremonies that all the people didn't just go to Notre Dame, they lived it; parents were equally as enthusiastic.
  
• My sister has roomates with very... exuberant parents.
  
• Airplanes are a double edged sword -- I hate just sitting there in your seat for hours at a time (I made sure not to drink much beforehand so I wouldn't have to pee on the plane), but I love looking out the window. I stared at the ground for the first hour when we took off from Seattle, and the ground and wing of the plane when we took off from Chicago. Maybe I should take a series of one hour flights to all my destinations?
• Chicago traffic is out of control.
  
• Finally -- never trust any food or drink offered from a Comfort Inn hotel.
  

And I feel like I have to share this story: we flew in Friday at noonish, and got to my sister's house later that night. She said they had just ran out of toilet paper, and there was no more in the house. Well, that's all fine and good... until we returned to her house the next night. Still no toilet paper! Sunday? Nope. Monday morning? Nah. How does a house with four girls get through four days without toilet paper? One would be ridiculous, but four? It boggles the mind.