Woman in the Middle

I remember my college graduation as marking the moment I was finally DONE! I think Youngest Daughter felt the same way Saturday.  I, on the other hand, remember when she started kindergarten, so my great joy and pride for her achievement was tinged with nostalgia, as I mentioned a few days ago. So I shed some tears, as this mom often does at significant moments such as college graduation. I cried when the graduates marched in, I cried when they sang the national anthem, and then I cried just a bit more for no good reason. But then I was OK.

During the two hour ceremony, Eldest Daughter took the time to figure out how many woman were in the 2015 class of mechanical engineering graduates. Drum roll please….13! That is 13 out of a class of a little more than 200. That makes me even prouder, that Youngest is taking a path that so few women take. She hopes to be an inspiration to other young women who may not think that they can pursue engineering. I think she will be.

Here are a few pictures we took at graduation.

Here is the whole family with the happy graduate. I am wearing the outfit I bought the night before, after I was told I had to dress up for the event.

Here is the happy graduate with her roommate for the past two years, Melissa. Note the blond hair. Thank goodness for that blond hair. Whenever we spotted it we knew Youngest was nearby! BTW, Melissa’s dream has been to work in  the Imagineering department for Disney. Happily, she was just hired by them,  which is why she put “Dreams do come true” and Mickey on her cap.

This is what the top of Youngest’s cap looked like. Her sorority has a tradition of the little sister decorating the big sister’s hat when they graduate. It says “Kiss Me I’m a Grad.” Note the “K” and “D” are different colors. That represents their sorority, Kappa Delta. Then the word  ”ME” is a different color, representing Youngest’s major,  mechanical engineering. Her little sister was so clever!

I want to commend Cal Poly, Pomona for a lovely but fast paced graduation. It was appreciated by all of us in the audience!

Peace Out!

The college youngest attends, California Polytechnic University, Pomona, or Cal Poly for short,  has a large agricultural program. No college I ever attended had a “beef unit.” That is where the beef cattle live. It makes Cal Poly Pomona very picturesque with its cattle, horses, and fields devoted to agricultural production. Every year just before Halloween they have a Pumpkin Festival. We have never attended , even though it is just 35 minutes away. So this year, being Youngest’s last year, we decided to put aside our efforts to clean out Mom in law’s house and spend a morning at the Pumpkin Festival.

One of the reasons we have never gone is that it always seems to be hot on the weekend they hold the festival. This past weekend was no exception, Oh, it could have been worse, but the sun was very warm as we wandered the pumpkin patch and all the booths. I got a kick out of seeing all the people wearing fall clothes int he warm weather. People, it doesn’t matter if is the second half of October, hot is hot!

I can tell you, the place was packed with people and so many bring wagons or trolleys or even strollers so they can roll their pumpkin or five back to their car. They actually grow pumpkins at the school but they also being in tons and tons of “ringers” and put them in the fields as well.

Keep in mind we were there the second day. Youngest said that there were so many more pumpkins the first day. So many more than the huge number you see here!

There were lots of booths where the clubs at the school were selling a variety of food. We bought the pumpkin spice donut holes. Yum! There were also food trucks and games for the kids. I know we weren’t kids, but we still took our photo with this.

Cal Poly has a Farm Store, which is open year round. It is a fun place to shop and find jelly, salsa, wine, and other interesting things that make great gifts.  They also have plants of all kinds grown right there at the school. I always like to check out the succulent selection. Outside the store they had this big pumpkin display.

I hope you are in an autumn kind of mood now that you have seen the Pumpkin Festival!

I crawled out of bed this morning, had my breakfast, and then headed over to the computer to check my email. When I pulled up AOL they had a photo of a pensive President Obama and a headline announcing the Supreme Court had come out with their ruling on the Obama healthcare initiative. I decided to read what happened and as I was reading I came across the following sentence:

 The court’s four liberal justices, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, joined Roberts in the outcome.

I had to do a second take…did I just read three women’s names???? I did just read three women’s names! Really, I don’t live in a cave somewhere. Of course I was aware in some vague sence that a Sonia and an Elena had joined Ruth and the guys on the Supreme Court. But to see that in print that way…Wow! Blew my mind at 8:56 a.m.!

You see, and I may have mentioned this before, when I was in college I was still being asked if I was pursuing my MRS degree.  So, the change that has occurred  blows me away.

However, my Youngest Daughter just witnessed the graduation of the mechanical engineers at her school. Out of 150-200 graduates, only four were girls. Hum…so almost as many women are on the Supreme Court as graduated with mechanical engineering degrees from Cal Poly Pomona this year. To young women out there, if you are so inclined, please consider a mechanical engineering degree. As those four young woman graduates prove, you can do it!

This is me cutting statice flowers into tiny little bits.

I spent something over three hours carefully cutting  little purple flowers off of dried statice. That was interspersed with picking through the flowers bits I cut off to snag any green stuff out with tweezers. Yep, over three hours! But, we discovered that while cutting little dried flowers and picking out tiny bits of leaf with tweezers sounds like the grunt job, it was actually the really GOOD job! For a few minutes I tried to escape it and my job then became hauling big tubs of eucalyptus branches around. My Youngest Daughter and her two friends got to glue very thin sheets of seaweed to the float, something that started becoming annoying due to the smell of the seaweed. My Eldest Daughter got to get into an awkward position and stick white rice to glue she spread on a wall of a building on the float. She had to lean over a gap in order to do this.

My Eldest Daughter is using tweezers to pick any and all offending bits out of the cut flowers.

However, in spite of its less than glamorous nature, all five of us agreed that we had a good time and really enjoyed seeing the “behind the scenes” aspect of Rose float decorating. I think it was especially enjoyable because the Cal Poly rose float is a student endeavor. I found out some interesting facts related to Rose float building as I cut the little flowers. Cal Poly grows their own statice and dries it in a lab room on campus. They cut those dried  flowers in to little bits (like I was doing) all year-long in order to have enough. Some of the flowers are put through a blender to create purple or blue dust. In other places on the float it is used just as we made it, little tiny bits of flowers. The Cal Poly float has a super hero theme this year. The woman super hero has lovely red lips which I discovered are covered with freeze-dried strawberry dust. I walked by just as they were applying it and it smelled yummy!

Here is a shot of my Youngest Daughter gluing seaweed to the window edges of a high rise building on the float.

Every visible surface of a Rose float has to be covered in natural material and we saw all kinds of different things they were using on the float: ground coffee beans, brown coffee fibers (used for hair), ground dried pink bougainvilla flowers, white statice, parsley, the white rice I mentioned before, and I even saw a bag of kitty litter that is made of wheat chaff.  They weren’t starting to decorate with the fresh material yet as all of those flowers have to be cut and put in those little florist vials of water before being placed on the float. They were just about to start that process as we left, filled with the goodness of having helped the Cal Poly schools with their Rose Float. We all agreed that we want to do it again next year!