stay hungry, stay foolish

to the tune of: Better off Alone by Alice Deejay

Commencement Weekend #2 was still fun, even if I didn't get any diplomas out of it. I went to the Night Before Party, which I missed last year, and got to see Ben's final Harmonics performance (well, until the alumni song at spring show next year) and Dave and Meg's swing solo. Then came karaoke. There's a reason why the folks who invented karaoke have private booths for small groups of singers instead of a large performance hall. We had to sit through performances by people we didn't know that alternated between incredible (the Harmonics stacked a few singers on deck...not fair!) and truly saddening (sorry, three teenage girls do not do Garth Brooks justice). But we got in a fun group performance of Greased Lightning and a stirring rendition of Oklahoma!, a tribute to Dave and Joe Fairbanks' home state.

The actual Commencement Day was much cooler than last year, thankfully. Wacky Dance didn't seem to work as well as last year, but it was still a great time for photo-ops. Steve Jobs gave a pretty good Commencement address, thankfully not rubbing in too much the fact that he never graduated from college and still has more money than all of us put together. Maybe his best line was:

...you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

I spent the next week saying goodbyes and helping people moved. Then my family flew out to meet me on what turned out to be the only rainy weekend this month. Aside from getting rear-ended in SF by a careless teenager who was busy flirting with her boyfriend, we had a great time touring Sonoma wineries. I did my first wine tasting--maybe I just don't know anything about wine or maybe I was just stuffed up from the cold I had, but I had a hard time telling the difference between, say, a 2002 Cabernet Sauvignon and a 2003 Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon.

It's amazing how many "microclimates" the Bay Area has: while we were getting rained on in Sonoma, it was apparently clear and sunny in San Jose. But fortunately that meant that the clouds on Saturday stayed north of the Golden Gate Bridge (maybe to avoid paying the toll), which meant that for once it was sunny in San Francisco! I never thought this possible, but indeed we were able to get great views of the Bridge in Golden Gate Park. (Note: Let me know if you have trouble with that link and what browser you're using... some rogue browser seems to like turning %20s into +s for some reason.) The Palace of Fine Arts also looks much cooler in bright daylight.

This week is going to be exciting: Kat comes back from Paris, Irish dancing in Berkeley, Friday Night Waltz, a Big Bad Voodoo Daddy concert, and a Fourth of July barbecue are all in the works.