Commencement 2009

Somehow, I'm not sure I thought the day would ever actually arrive!
But it did. And I'm official.
Now to work on turning "official" into "professional."

dress shoes stockings (purse?)

So, early this morning, I haul my sweet husband off to the Coast to go shopping with the “carrot” of going to Harbor Freight Tools, and the outlets to shop for shoes. For my part, I had just realized as I was falling asleep last night that I needed a dress and shoes for commencement in two weeks!

Rather than go to outlets first, I asked to go to Ross’s Dress for Less. Once inside, I headed for the women’s shoes first, and he headed to the opposite side of the store where are located the men’s shoes. From the looks of what is displayed in the women’s shoes, brown is the new black, and while I was busy being an adult, patent-leather shoes seem to have made a come-back.

What I liked didn’t fit, and there wasn’t a lot to choose from in sizes which would fit, so I decided to go on to goal number two: finding a black dress.

The purses just happened to be on the way to the dresses. Really. I swear.

My first thought though was that if Husband found me in the purses, he would say, “These don’t look like shoes or dresses!” And wouldn’t you know it, not 30 seconds later here he came and guess what he said.

Well, I did find a dress. It is black and white, and I thought I recalled seeing a pair of nice black and white shoes on the racks. I did. They have REALLY high heels. They fit. I bought them.

At this point I needed to eat. We couldn't make up our minds, and ended up all the way down 49, so we turned left and drove across Beach Boulevard.

Now, I've ridden across 90 a couple times since, Katrina, but he had not -- at least not east from Gulfport to Biloxi. It's still pretty sad; the worst is that you feel so disoriented because all the landmarks are gone. There is no sense of *where* you are along the way.

We drove all the way to Ocean Springs, then back to Edgewater Mall area. We decided to eat at the restaurant which is now located where the Baskin Robbins was before Katrina,the Al Freso Italian Bistro (which also has a location in downtown Ocean Springs). The food was quite delicious.

Yes, Husband made it to Harbor Freight Tools, and left with a large bag of goodies. I managed to get out of Hobby Lobby and Hancock Fabrics without a single purchase. We made one more stop, at Hudson's Treasure Chest, then headed home. It was the first time in a very long time that he and I went off like this for a whole day just "pooting around," as Mom would said.

I did not buy a purse.

Yet.

past homes

I was playing around with Google Maps earlier this week, and created a map of the places I have lived. Using the street-view, I was able to see how these houses look now.

This is the house where I lived until the summer between 4th and 5th grades.

Then we moved to this house -- only it wasn't brick-faced when we lived there... and perhaps it is just a child's memory, but it sure seemed wider than it appears in this image.

When I was 14, we moved from Florida to Maryland, and after 6 weeks in the Holiday Inn, we moved into this house... only all white like the one next door, not red!

In 1976, I moved to Texas with my then-fiance. This was his parents' home. I lived in the front left guest room (see the circular area) until we found an apartment; then we lived there again a year later when our lease was up and our new house wasn't ready.
There's no photo of the apartment where we lived, because it is now a single-dwelling housing area.

This is the first house I owned. It still looks the same. I really loved this little house. It had large main rooms -- living, kitchen, master bedroom -- along with two small bedrooms, two baths, a laundry closet, and a garage.


It is kind of cool and yet kind of scary that you can find stuff like this on the Internet.

Changeling

Last night we watched Changeling. You can perhaps guess it made quite an impression upon me as I rise from the depths of oblivion (otherwise known as real-life in a graduate student's world) to post here!

It is a compelling and thought-provoking story, not surprising for something coming from Clint Eastwood, and I was pleasantly surprised to see the screenplay was written by J. Michael Strazcynski (Bablyon 5 television series), his first feature film -- I will refrain from comment on the dialogue <wink to LMA>.

Here's an excerpt from a Time magazine interview with, as B5 fans know him, JMS:

How much of it is true? It's all a true story. Every bit of it. We wanted to go from "Based on a True Story" to "A True Story" in the credits. To do that, I had to work with Universal Studio's legal department and go through every single scene and provide attribution. Every single scene in that film can be traced to something. I spent a year researching this thing and ended up with 6,000 pages of documentation.

(Additional info about the story development & JMS)
So, given "all" of it is true, makes the effect even more chilling.
Among them...
How women were treated a mere 70 years ago... things aren't perfect, but we've "come a long way, baby!"
How children were treated a mere 70 years ago... compare the story, say, to episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Adults (and children) are still committing horrible atrocities upon children, but children definitely have a very different place in society than they did. I wonder how many of them realize and appreciate the change.
Political corruption, disenfranchisement, unlimited power in the hands of a small few... definitely things to take to heart.

It's not a 'feel-good' film, y'all (thought there are some happy moments). But something everyone ought to take time to watch.