Sound Off

All these pictures are from my iPhone.  I love this thing, a bit too much!

Over the last few years I have had a difficult time finding external speakers for iPods/mp3 players.  They tend to be unreliably short-lived and distort sound to a certain degree.  And expensive!  I'm thinking, though, that my next investment will be in this Lego speaker that can connect to iPods.  It's only $10 on thinkgeek.com and use the iPod life rather than its own battery.  Yay!

On another note, I spent this past weekend back at my school for the Alumni Reunion.  Rather than organizing for a specific class, it's a series of milestones gathered together.  This weekend we had over 1,200 alumni attendees and their families for the 5th, 10th, 25th, 30th, 40th, 50th, 55th and 60th reunions, and more!  I spent the first two days trapped in the Registration room, handing out packets to alumni and orienting them with what they needed to do with their name tags and residences for the weekend.  Thankfully Saturday I worked outside at different events, and it was glorious weekend.

I spent Wednesday through Sunday living in one of the upper class dorms, but it's the shoddy one known to be trashed on weekends.  The walls are this terrible whitewashed stone, and there's permanent stains and odd smells in the carpet, but at least I had a view of the courtyard..!

As a student working registration, we would be open until 10 pm so I wouldn't have time to make a proper dinner and eat until 11!!  Luckily, there were quite a few friends living on campus for the summer, whether they were doing research or working, so we had some food resources.  My friend Soknea, from Cambodia, always cooked jasmine rice and fried chicken.  She also stir-fried asparagus, while I contributed peanuts and haphazardly cooked lentils, and my friend Viktoriya made a cucumber tomato salad.  We kept joking on how we should be documenting the curiously innovative meals of struggling college students :D.

The alumni were, for the most part, generous, zealous people with a great enthusiasm for my (our) school.  Some of them had not been on campus in over 40 years!  It was my pleasure to show them how things have developed and changed, and they shared many of their stories as well.  The classes of 80, 81 and 82 (for the 30th year reunion) resided in the same dorm that I lived this past year as a Freshman.  My friends and I were wandering around Saturday and saw that all the lounge furniture had been moved outside!!!  I found it brilliant.  We would have been fined if we tried that...

One of the annual events during the reunion is the Parade of Classes.  I had to help blow up hundreds of balloons, for each class had their own specific color and theme.  It was hilarious and I was so thrilled to see all these alumni marching around.  It was also amusing how drunk they all were throughout the weekend, and we danced with them during the concerts at night, and some had to be chased down after they stole a golf cart!!  Despite the long hours, I'm glad I came up to work.  The pay check will be gratifying and I'll certainly do this again next summer!

This is the class of 1961, and their banner. I can't even imagine what the next 50 years will bring.

Listening: "I Won't Back Down" by Tom Petty