Last weekend I flew back to Maryland for Mark's high school graduation. I apologize if I didn't get to visit you; there's only so much time to visit people on a short trip. Perhaps over Christmas we'll be able to stay for a bit longer and be able to have leisurely visits with more people. We'll see.
For the flight out I tried using a mobile boarding pass for the first time, which worked well and allowed me to figure out ahead of time that the flight's gate had been changed. That led me to check the board, where I saw that it had been delayed. Apparently they ended up using a smaller plane, delaying the flight even further while they tried to bribe people to give up their seats. The 10:30 flight didn't end up getting off the ground until after midnight.
Unfortunately the subsequent delay in arrival time meant that nobody was available to pick me up. Mark had an award ceremony I was hoping to go to but I missed that and had to wait at the airport until it was over for him to fetch me. We had decided to fly me in on Thursday instead of Friday so that this wouldn't happen for his actual graduation, so in that sense I guess it was a success.
After getting in the car with Mark I started a whirlwind of activity that didn't slow down much until the flight back to California. We went swimming in the river (jumping in from a nearby rock), visited Rachel's family, and attended a number of different graduation-related events.
Interesting story: As kids, our mom signed us up for a lot of different activities so we could figure out what kinds of things we enjoyed doing. One of those activities was gymnastics, something I stopped doing early on after a night of failing to complete a cartwheel. When Mark tried it a few years later he was good at it and stuck with it for a while. Between some combination of having other activities to go to before or afterward and us being too young to stay home by ourselves, I spent a good deal of time doing homework in the waiting area while he was taking gymnastics classes.
That rather long-winded preamble is to say that there was another parent with a son in Mark's class and a younger daughter who would wait her turn outside with us, crawling under the chairs and begging her mom to buy her fruit popsicles from the freezer chest. At one point I got the idea to attempt to publish a Lego City newsletter, and this mother was the only person willing to humor me and subscribe. Ever since then we have been running into them.
As it turns out, the little girl goes to Mark's high school and was in the play with him. Now that Mark is graduating and going to college, this encounter likely concludes more than a decade of running into each other at similar activities. I had to get at least one picture.
Rachel had a great time while I was gone too, spending time at the beach, shopping, and going to her first baseball game. I was a bit sad I didn't get to go with her to the baseball game, but I suppose it serves me right for not getting her to one in the eight or so years we've been together.
Which reminds me that our three-year wedding anniversary is tomorrow (today for you East Coasters). Three years? I suppose there's validity to the colloquialism that the perceived rate of time passage is directly proportional to enjoyment. <3
