Well, I'm Back

Hello there! I'm finally home (in Colorado) and settled down after two weeks' worth of graduation activities, moving, and travelling. It feels wonderful to finally relax... I don't have to worry about homework, or exams, or packing, or any of that mess. (I suppose I probably should start worrying about all the change-of-address stuff, and transferring my car title to TN, etc. etc, but I've decided not to think about all that until next week at the earliest.)

Graduation was, of course, wonderful. My parents came down, as well as most of my grandparents- it was so great to have them all there. My sister was graduating too (I co-oped, or interned, essentially, for a whole year while I was in school, which is why we both graduated at the same time), so it was a great family affair. Here are a few pictures:

Me and my sister Allison (you can tell I'm the dorky one)

Me and Laura, another chemE (chemical engineer) and one of my best friends :-)

Me and my parents before the chemE reception

Me and my awesome grandparents (minus one- we missed you, Nana!)


The whole family, the morning of graduation


Me and Laura before the ceremony started


Some of my favorite chemE's :-) The three closest to me, Laura, Adam, and Brian, comprised my senior design team (DAWS Engineering)

Me and my research advisor, Mario

Mmm... sorry if I got a little picture-happy there. You should see my photo album on facebook, though; 60 pictures! And that's only because 60 is the limit. I'd been waiting for this day for a long time, and I wanted to make sure it was well-documented ;-)

The day after graduation my grandparents headed home to Texas while my parents, sister, and I drove up to TN to meet my movers and spend the weekend unpacking my new apartment. I'm all "unpacked," but will have a lot of organization to do when I get back, particularly regarding all of my knitting and other craft-related stuff. I have a lot more works-in-progress than I thought, and I need to sort them all out. I also have a plethora of various crafty gadgets and supplies, all of which were in extreme disarray after four years of college. (Since I rarely had time to work on projects, and also no longer had access to all of Mum's craft supplies, I had been slowly and sporadically accumulating various craft supplies over the course of my college career. Since my bouts of craftiness were usually broken up by months' worth of solid, 24/7 schoolwork, and since storage capacity in my bedroom was extremely limited, all of my craft-related items ended up scattered and stored in random places. Ugh. I have to say, though, that since all the acquiring and scattering of items had occurred over such a long period of time, I really had no idea how much stuff I had actually acquired and scattered. If I had known the extent of the chaos, I probably would not have been able to sleep at night.)

Anyway... we headed back to Colorado earlier this week. We listened to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in the car, and I got quite a bit of work done on my Hogwarts Pal's first sock... more details on that later. Since we got back, I've been busily relaxing. ;-) Getting caught up on sleep was a priority (I'd been averaging 5 or 6 hrs a night since spring break), and I've been working on my Hogwarts Swap socks and also another project. I also read HP and the Prisoner of Azkaban (yeah, I know, I was forced to read them out of order... *shudder*) and have been working on HP and the Order of the Phoenix. And we've had a couple days "in town" (running errands in the closest city, which is an hour away), which are always exhausting.

All right, I'm going to go "relax" some more, after I do some laundry. I'll post soon about my Hogwarts Swap sock progress... and one of these days I'll get around to designing my own template for the blog (I feel so uncreative that I've just used a standard one.) Goodbye for now!

Jennifer