Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
Ol’ Robbo hopes you will indulge him in his pride over the two Elder Gels receiving their master’s degrees this weekend, Eldest in library sciences, Middle in public affairs, both from Indiana University. And in his relief that both Gels have well-paid jobs waiting for them as a result. Huzzay! Huzzah!
Yes, as noted below, Mrs. R and I traveled out to Bloomington this week to participate in the festivities and to assist teh Gels in their transition from students to alumnae. All in all, it went far, far more smoothly than Ol’ Robbo had dreaded it might.
On the way out, we stopped over for the night to visit with Youngest, who graduates from Miami of Ohio in two weeks. We took her out to dinner, along with her Young Man and four of her other closest friends. Ol’ Robbo has mentioned here before how impressed he is with this set, all of them being extremely polite and engaged? Said dinner did nothing to change my mind about any of them. Indeed, it gave me hope that the future is not totally lost.
We stayed over in Youngest’s apartment. It’s actually more of a studio, although a ridiculously large one, but it’s also fairly sparsely furnished. Since there really was no place other than the bed to sleep, Youngest graciously let us have the place to ourselves and bunked over at one of her friends’ place. Youngest’s digs are on the town’s high street, located at one end of a strip of bars and restaurants known as Uptown. Ol’ Robbo was fool enough to reckon that since this was a Wednesday in exam week, things would be rayther quiet. Ha, ha, ha. Various bands of drunken kids stumbled under our window into the wee hours of the morning. There was a time when Ol’ Robbo would have taken this as ordinary, but I’m way too old for it now. Needless to say, I didn’t get much sleep.
Next morning, we saddled up and headed out. All Ol’ Robbo can say about the drive to southwestern Indiana is that it is much hillier than he had previously imagined. Also that the beltway round the southern part of Indianapolis is a typical construction nightmare at the moment.
We duly arrived in Bloomington Thursday morning. All of Ol’ Robbo’s previous fretting about where on earth we were going to park proved to be groundless: We simply dropped off Mrs. R’s Honda Juggernaut at the football stadium and left it for the weekend, no problemo. Here, we stayed at Middle Gel’s digs, this time an apartment suite: One of her roommates had already moved out and the other was gone for the weekend, so it all worked out splendidly. Alas, Middle’s digs, while not on the strip, are still mostly student-infested, and the revelry Ol’ Robbo was forced to overhear at Youngest’s was also very much present here. Like Sergeant Hulka, I’m too old for this shite. ***
Thursday evening was Middle’s graduation ceremony. It went off just fine: An organist played a lot of Bach; there were the usual boring speeches; the doctoral candidates presented a lot of authentic academic gibberish justifying their degrees; and then the various batches of master’s candidates went forward. In her turn, Middle was duly hooded. Fortunately, she’s relatively high up in the list, alphabetically speaking, so the audience were not so utterly sick of clapping by the time she went across the stage. Everybody behaved themselves, and out of a couple hundred graduates, Ol’ Robbo saw exactly two who deemed it important to slap “Palestinian” flags on top of their mortarboards. Whatevz.
Eldest’s ceremony was Friday morning, although it wasn’t much of a ceremony. Unlike Middle’s, Eldest’s school did not do a formal hooding of its masters. Nor did it even allow robes. Instead, all undergrad and post-grad candidates were invited to appear in biznay-casual attire for a sort of generic “celebration”. Eldest is not one for ceremonial, but she believes that if it’s going to be done, it should be done right. Therefore, we didn’t bother. Instead, the four of us went out for a lavish celebratory brunch. Much to Ol’ Robbo’s displeasure, this involved hiking up to some swanky mall on the north side of Indy, which was quite a distance, but in the end a good time was had by all.
Saturday morning was devoted by Ol’ Robbo to assisting Eldest to clear out her digs. And I am here to tell you that I was downright Solomon-like in splitting her accumulated possessions into the chuckable, the donatable, and the stuff I was willing to help her bring home between her car and ours. In about five hours, we had filled up her downstairs trash tipster, made a run to Goodwill, and divvied into neat piles the loads to bring back to Port Swiller Manor.
The rest of the day was spent with strolling around the Indiana campus. Eldest and I must have walked about six miles, altogether. Ol’ Robbo won’t say the place, as a whole, is beautiful, although it has beautiful bits here and there. I’d just say that it seemed to have a competent set-up for a middling-large state school. Also that off-campus housing is a seriously lucrative biznay in those parts. A couple of the local bigs seem to have their hooks into all kinds of housing options. As to the local pro-Hamasshole rally, yes, they were there, camped out on the campus green. Really, it looked more like a bunch of idiot undergrads (but Ol’ Robbo repeats himself) catching some rays and languidly repeating half-understood slogans than anything else. As we walked about the streets outside of campus, Ol’ Robbo was delighted to see all the outdoor graduation celebrations going on.
Evacuation began at O-dark-thirty this morning. Ol’ Robbo will not bore you friends of the decanter with the details. Suffice to say that Mrs. R’s Honda Juggernaut and Eldest’s Mazda were saddled up and ready to ride out within ten minutes of the time we had planned. Convoying the eleven hours back to Port Swiller Manor, there is not much to report, except that Eldest was shocked at the vehemence with which Ol’ Robbo criticized her observed tail-gaiting when we stopped for lunch at the Craker Barrel in Cambridge, Ohio. 85-m.p.h. and the Gel is halfway up the tailpipe of the fellah in front of her! Ol’ Robbo cannot think of a quicker or stupider way to get involved in a major traffic accident than this, and I told her so. (Accusations of favoritism were quickly quashed, as I’ve chewed out Middle Gel over the same damned thing.)
Anyhoo, here we are. Mrs. R, Eldest, and Ol’ Robbo are back at Port Swiller Manor. Middle Gel is treating herself to a vacation in San Diego starting tomorrow. We all reconvene in two weeks to see Youngest graduate. This time, four of us will stay at her apartment. I’ve no doubt that hylarity will ensue.
Good times.
Two other completely random observations.
First, there is a night bird in southern Indiana that Ol’ Robbo needs to identify. Several times I awoke to its, and its fellows, incessant calls, thinking that it was time to get up, only to find that it was about three ack emma.
Second, coming east today, Ol’ Robbo reveled in Ma Nature’s weather decor. Although the first part of the drive was uneventful, I-69 between Morgantown, West Virginia and Hanckock, Murrland is damned dicey as a drive as it is, and Ma left a drape of clouds that came down in the form of fog and spilled over the front range of the Alleghanies at Sidling Hill, and then settled ever lower as we climbed up the lower slopes of South Mountain at the eastern end of teh Great Valley. No fun for driving, but as we got back to our little patch of the NoVA piedmont, it continued to drizzle, and as Ol’ Robbo looks out across the Port Swiller Manor garden this evening, he notes that the peonies and the wisteria are firing right up. (Apologies – there is nothing coherent about this observation. Ol’ Robbo just throws it down after a very long day.)
** Fun fact: “Academia Waltz” was the name of the cartoon strip Berke Breathed did as an undergrad at the University of Texas. Yes, that Berke Breathed, the one who does “Bloom County”. My high school Latin teacher was a classmate of his.
*** Ol’ Robbo dearly hopes you need not need a footnote for this reference.
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