Graduation

Today I got the pleasure of waking up really early and then driving for several hours to James Madison University (JMU) to attend the graduation ceremony. Why would I do that? Well my cousin Jo Beth was one of the graduates.


Look, there she is on the stage. Everyone cheer! A big round of applause for Jo Beth graduating! She still has an internship that she has to do for the next two months and once that's done, then she's all official.


The college within the University that Jo attended seemed to be heavily weighted towards females. Her college had Social Work, Health Service Administration (where Jo got her degree), Health Sciences and Psychology. I think Psychology was about 50-50 girls to guys, but the other three were probably 90-10 ratio.


It was not the best weather for an outdoor ceremony, but it could have been worse. It was overcast and a bit cold. It looked like it was threatening to rain, and it did start to mist a bit during the ceremony but then stopped. It didn't actually start raining until later in the day, so that was good. And it turns out that Jo actually lied to us. She was worried we were all going to be late, so the time she told us to show up was two hours before the ceremony began. So we got to be out in the cold for a couple hours *before* the ceremony even started. Gee, thanks Jo! In her defense, being late tends to run in our family, so she can't be faulted too much for wanting to make sure we all got there with time to spare.


I took a ton of photos. Almost filled my card up. The problem was with it being overcast, you didn't really have good photo conditions. But I decided to try and make up for it quantity versus quality.




Got lots of shots with her and her family. For some reason though on most of the shots, there would be multiple people taking a picture simultaneously and they always seemed to be looking at the other camera. I wonder if it's because I wasn't using my flash?


Hmmm, apparently another picture of Jo and her friend Tera made it up. That may or may not be how her name is spelled, I just met her today. Funny story there actually, before the ceremony when they were putting on the gowns, they were both trying to tie on the sash (or whatever you call that thing that goes around the neck and down the back). No one else was having any luck and I ended up tying both Jo's and Tera's. All of which was a little odd as I'm tying this sash to the zipper on the front of their gowns. Can you say awkward? After I was done I went ahead and introduced myself, figured that was at least the polite thing to do.


A really expensive four year degree or a finger puppet? You decide. And I should point out that a lot of the students were wearing VA Tech colored ribbons on their gowns to honor those lost during the incident at Tech earlier. I thought that was a pretty nice gesture on their part.

I didn't get to see all of JMU's campus. But it looked like a lot of stuff was under construction. Guess those high college tuitions are being put to use expanding the school.

And while I was driving to and from JMU today, back here at home Ginger took Catherine to attend a birthday party. You can see Catherine in a couple of pictures over on Barry's blog.