Congrabulations! You Grabulated!

I was honored to attend the University of Puget Sound Graduation this weekend, featuring our own Elizabeth Anne Weber. I'm sure you are all very proud (as I am!) and wish her all the best going forward.

While the celebration itself was exciting, one of the most interesting aspects of the whole thing was the crowd of people gathered to celebrate. All of Betsy's close friends (naming them will come in handy later: Vanessa, Emily, Kyra, Ashley, Erica) are very different and very quality people. Each of them had, on average, about 10 family members/friends present. I spent a lot of time with these people as graduation progressed, providing me an opportunity to expand my worldview a bit. Here is a little cross-section of some of the people I met.

• Chris, Kyra's older brother - He was interested in my hodge-podge musical career, but I was interested in his current job leading wilderness trips for troubled youth. Not surprisingly, one of the largest problems for his kids is drug abuse, but surprising to me was that thing he named as the second-largest problem: video game addiction.


• Jen, Betsy's brother's girlfriend - She is widowed and has three kids. She was in the service for nine years, several of those in Japan. She knew a lot about plants and will be moving to Oregon next fall to finish her landscape architecture degree at U of O.


• Vanessa's father (whose name escapes me) - He was a retired neurobiologist. He and I saw eye to eye on a lot of the reasons that a life doing science is not a bad life to live.


• Vanessa's brother Meriwan (Vanessa is half Iranian) - He was rather a typical teenage boy, but had an incredible and harrowing story about traveling 500 miles (California to Washington) to see a girl he had met at a summer camp, sneaking into her bedroom window via a nighttime rooftop climb, and being discovered by her parents shortly thereafter, with associated consequences.


• Colby, Ashley's sister's boyfriend. Really nice guy and really handy. He and Ashley's sister Elle (sp?) were trying to scrape together money to get a small farm going in Vermont. He taught me a little bit about raising livestock, and how much land a farm really requires.


• Erica's twin sister Haley, who is a 2008 Northwestern Grad (Go Cats!) and will be doing the Peace Corps in Central America next fall. We got to talking about the NU Marching Band, which she was in for four years and I was in for four days.


• Ashley's grandmother, who was a coxswain for a crew in the 40's.


• Emily's Uncle (who was not there but I've met him and he bears mentioning) - He was a corporate lawyer. He discovered a company that produced water filters and bought it. When he couldn't find a chief scientist with the necessary expertise to run the research arm of the company, he got a Ph.D. in microbiology and did it himself. He now sells portable, small-scale water filtration systems to third world governments as an alternative to building plumbing infrastructure.

I have pictures from the graduation that I'll post shortly. I love you all, and happy birthday Campus.