elitist

This last weekend was a whirlwind of busy-ness. My parents, one of my brothers, my grandparents, and my in-laws were all in town. My family arrived on Friday, so E. and I spent most of the afternoon with them, had a break before dinner, and then did dinner with them. Saturday morning, J. and I dropped E. off with my parents so they could hang out with her and we got some much-needed time to ourselves before we had to go back to pick her up and drive out to Abbotsford for my graduation.

I must say, I definitely enjoyed the MA grad ceremony far more than the one for my BA. The speeches were shorter and more interesting, and it was really neat to see my name and my thesis title printed in the program. I didn't get to wear a funny hat--they skipped those this year--but hopefully I'll be faculty at a university at some point in the future and then I can buy my own funny hat to wear to commencement ceremonies. My hood colours are definitely ones I can live with. Red and white suit me much better than the blue and orange than one of the other programs had.

Me just after being hooded (photo by North Clackamas Photo, aka my dad)

The other preferable side of the MA graduation is that I got to pick up my diploma then and there. I don't have a frame for it yet, but I'm going to get one sometime soon and stick it up on the wall. I think my diploma from my BA is in a box somewhere. It's funny how I'm still paying for my BA (no student loans for the MA!), but the MA means a lot more even though it didn't cost as much. It's exciting, though. My youngest brother is threatening to get a Ph.D. just to out-do me, but since I'm planning to start on one of those sometime in the next ten years, he'll have to get going on that (he's in his last year of high school and is uncertain about what to major in--he's said he wants to do a Ph.D. in General Studies).

I'll be going in to school sometime in the next couple weeks to take advantage of the alumni perks. I can get a parking pass for the school for free, and a subscription to the library for a really great price. I want the parking pass so I can go in and use the library without having to pay for parking. I think the library subscription gives me access to the journal databases, which I need if I'm going to work on a couple of the paper ideas that I want to submit to a journal.

E. survived being away from me for over four hours, which I think is the longest we've gone being apart so far. When I held her after the ceremony and asked if she missed me, she stared at the wall. She had everyone making a fuss over her, so she was fine. My grandparents love her, my parents and my in-laws love her...I'm almost afraid to think what Christmas is going to look like. My dad took hundreds of pictures of her over the weekend. She's pretty photogenic most of the time. There will probably be thousands of pictures of her by the time Christmas is over.

My brothers have decided that (at least for now), I'm the official elitist of the family, since I'm the one with the Master's. We're having an elitist party at Christmas to celebrate the graduations that have taken place over the last couple years in our family (two of my brothers, J., me). It's also an excuse to invite people over that haven't seen me in years because while I was waiting for my paperwork to be processed here, I couldn't leave Canada. I haven't visited my hometown for nearly three years, I think. And now we're only about 6 weeks away from being there. Dang it. I have to start Christmas shopping.