xiphias | My wife has a postgraduate degree!

Lis graduated from Simmons today. I assume that most folks who are reading this also read her blog, at http://www.osmond-riba.org/lis/journal/
(published to LiveJournal as

riba_rambles), so I don't need to go into too much detail about that, I suppose. But Amy Tan is a wonderful commencement speaker -- she's got the "famous person spoke to us" cachet, which is important, but she actually had something significant, and commencement-appropriate to say about life, and she was piss-your-pants funny about saying it. I hope a transcript of her speech surfaces somewhere. . . the bit about Cliff's Notes was just wild. She was talking about how, in her college career, during the semester that she was taking seven English classes (because of her bargan-hunting instincts -- she discovered that a semester was the same price no matter how many classes she took), she did end up thrice resorting the those notes. Which didn't bother her until one day when she was killing time in a bookstore about to give a reading, and she found herself looking at that rack of black-and-yellow striped books, and happened to see the Cliff's Notes for The Joy Luck Club.

Naturally, she started flipping through it. When she got to the end, there were some lists of questions -- "Which character in the story most represents Ms Tan herself as a viewpoint character?" She was very interested in this one, because apparently she's asked this question a lot, and never knows what to say, so she was quite excited to find out the answer. . .

The picnic I put together was a success. I mean, after we got most of the family to where we were having the picnic. I didn't get maps and directions printed up. . . we did manage to commandeer a classroom with a laptop, web connection and projector, so that we sat our family down in the seats, brought up the Mapquest maps, and gave a quick presentation on how to drive from Here to There. . . nonetheless, my grandparents got lost. . . I blame myself. We needed handouts. And I knew we would need them, but I didn't get them written up and printed out. Oh well.

The bialys went over well. They'll be better next time I make them; I've got some ideas of things I should change. But they were good. We've probably got ten of the sixteen bialys left over -- they were big enough that you could make two sandwiches per bialy. The garlic mayonaise went over great.

And the lilacs were in full bloom at the Arboretum.

Then we went back home, and went out for pho. Since we were right in the neighborhood, we dropped by Mystery House for Games Night.

I think

browngirl,

teddywolf,

tigerbright, and

jadasc were a little surprised to see us, especially since we brought Lis's parents with us. My parents wanted to come, especially since they like all the Mystery House folks, and really miss

browngirl, who they love dearly (which, of course, means they're just like everyone else who's ever met Ayesha), but they weren't able to. I'll try to talk Mom into coming for next Sunday.

My in-laws got along with everyone about as well as I assumed they would. Lis's mother won at "Apples to Apples"; Lis's father did not win at "Illuminati", but he made a very respectable showing. Especially considering that it was his first time playing. I mean, it was a respectable showing, period. I've very rarely seen someone play better their first time out.

tigerbright won.

My cousin Mike, who is not

volta, also showed up, and played "Settlers of Catan." I believe jadasc won.

Lis to her Mom back to the hotel around nine or so, then went home; Mike took Lis's dad back to his hotel around midnight, then dropped me at home. (This was so that Mike, Dad-in-Law, and I could continue gaming after Lis and Mom-In-Law started falling asleep on their respective feet.)