A Huge Post. Get Comfortable.

Well its taken me a while, but here it is. A gigantic catch-up picture post. We just got our internet hooked up today, and we got our phones. Its great to be connected to the world again!

So then. Lets start where I left off...Graduation. The night before the ceremony was an awards banquet. Mike won the Marvin Wagner Award, which is for best teaching by a 4th year, and voted for by the third year class. It was a really fun surprise. He didn't expect to get anything because James actually got a letter in the mail stating he did NOT win a certain award. I guess we should have expected something when Mike did not get a letter. Who knew?

The next day was the graduation ceremony. It was great! The ceremony was everything it should have been. Lots of people giving speeches, lots of people graduating and me not paying as much attention as I should have. The Biomedical Sciences students graduated as well, and as they graduated their dissertation title was announced. Completely crazy stuff like "Characterization of the Transcriptional Repressor Protein, SPIOOB: Protein: Protein and
Protein: DNA Interactions" or "Rac GTPase-Medicated NADPH Oxidase Redox Signaling in Hyperhomocysteinemic Glomerular Injury". Come on, nobody knows what that stuff means! What they should have said was "Johnny studied Protein. A lot." But anyway, you can see all the pictures of graduation and the party here.















So then after the ceremony, we jumped in the car and started our drive to Maine. We took our three days to do it and really had a good time. It was fun to see the country, but mostly I saw this:















And then every so often, we got to do this:















One place really stuck out. Betty Beavers Fuel Stop in New York. What in the world is this place? Crazy stuff.















Claire did fantastically. We tried to get a portable DVD player for the car, but it ended up not working. Even still, she did very well. A lot of sleeping and a lot of singing. And of course a lot of eating candy. Belive me, if the girl wanted a sucker, she got a sucker. It was like buying sanity.






































Finally we made it. And it looked like this as we crossed the state line.














But before that, we stopped at Niagara Falls. We have a lot of pictures, and I posted a bunch here. But here are some of my favorites.











































Standing at the falls in the last picture was amazing. You could her the calm of the quiet waves as well as the roar of the falls. Definitely my favorite part, it was amazing to stand so close.
The falls were really beautiful. And the town itself was like a Wisconsin Dells carbon copy. It was really crazy how alike the two places are, other than the huge Niagara Falls. And they had some pretty funny signs.




































The People Mover sign cracked me up. And then the "Clifton Hill (tourist area)" was hilarious. Like we would have thought it was normal in Canada to have a street where the Incredible Hulk was climbing up a building and a giant Frankenstein was eating at Burger King.















Finally, after we got to our new house and brought most of our stuff inside, we decided to have the floors refinished. They look awesome. It has been incredibly inconvenient, but it was worth it. Now they are dry, so the moving in has begun again and its nice to start to get everything put away and settled. We are still a few days from putting any furniture in the living room, but really we've been so busy there isn't a lot of time for sitting down anyway. So while the floors were drying, we hit the beach. I am amazed at how many beaches there are within 10 minutes. We went to four in two days. Kettle Cove, Cresent Beach, Old Orchard, and Pine Point. All were unique.












































We also went to the Portland Headlight again. You can see all of the beach and lighthouse pictures here.

That about wraps it up. I'm going to bed!