Graduation 2017

Well, it's finally over. Mostly. I still have to do an internship before it's official, but I am finished with my classes. Last Friday and Saturday were the graduation ceremonies. I didn't get many pictures myself, I was a but busy, but I gave my dad my camera, and my friend Rachel was there and took quite a few great pictures as well.

Friday night was the convocation ceremony for the graduates in the schools of LAS, Liberal Arts & Sciences.

We all got a medal from the school to wear during the ceremony.

Advertising was the first school into Hilton Coliseum, so I was one of the first ones in.

And since we were first onto the floor, we were also the first up.

The woman on the end in black, one of the people reading our names, was actually one of my favorite teachers from 4 years ago when I first started at Iowa State! Her name is Jane Cox, and she taught my History of Theater class, before I switched majors, when I was still going for the design degree. I actually even wrote a whole blog post about her, which you can find HERE. I'm sure she didn't recognize me, I was in a class of probably hundreds, but I recognized her immediately, and it was nice to see her again.

Afterwards we tried to get some pictures.

But the lighting was not very good, so this is the best we have. :)

That was convocation. The big one was the next day. To begin, every school went to a different location to line up. We were supposed to be there by 12, and the ceremony didn't start until 1:30, so there was a lot of sitting around.

My location was the Cyclone training arena.

I rarely take selfies but I did that day.

I took a picture as we walked out on the field of Jack Trice stadium. You can see just a fraction of the people graduating here. The ceremony was huge. I think there was almost 5000 people graduating here. Little did I know, I got my cousins Shaina and Sasha in this picture, as well as Rachel.

She texted me until I saw them. :p

She also got a picture of my family all the way on the other side of the stadium.

And Dad got a picture of them. :p

He also took a picture of Jackson. :)

Here's a game for you.

It's similar to Where's Waldo, but you're trying to find me. :p

Does this help?

I am there, but good luck finding me.

This was the picture published on the school newspaper's website the next day.

That's a lot of people.

Dennis Muilenburg, CEO of Boeing, and Iowa State Alumni, gave the commencement speech.

LAS was the second school to go, so I was up rather quickly, in comparison to the whole ceremony.

We all went through a photo tent to get our picture taken by a professional photographer before we went across the stage, but they didn't tell us what the tent was beforehand. My dark sense of humor imagined something nefarious going on in there. In particular I was thinking of a scene from an episode of Doctor Who were people were lined up to enter a building in order to be "upgraded" into a Cyberman. Yes, it would not have been very funny if it had been true, but I have a weird sense of humor. :p

No one got a very good picture of me actually getting the diploma (cover) but Rachel did get a great picture of me on the giant screen over the field.

The rest of the ceremony lasted until after 5, and by the end pretty much everyone had left. I didn't want to be one of THOSE people, I didn't want to seem rude and leave just because it was more convenient, so I stayed.

I suppose I should have just left; in the end, staying got me nothing but a sunburn. :p

But a girl gave me a streamer wand to shoot confetti, so I guess that was one good thing. :p

Afterwards I took another selfie while I waited for my family.

And then we went back to grandma's for a reception.

And Rachel insisted I pose for pictures with people. :)

Shaina

Rachel

 Sasha

Alex

Shaina and Alex

 Joel

Joel and Jared

Mom and Dad

That night, after everyone had left, I found this attached to my car.

Not sure who left it there, or why I didn't notice it earlier.

Mom thought it was Joel, but I never heard for sure. :p

And that was the day! I am glad that Rachel and Dad (and Sasha with my phone) were there to get pictures, because only like 5 of these were mine. There were of course official photographers there, and I should be getting a copy of those pictures, but I don't know when those will be coming. I'll probably do another post whenever I get those pictures.

As I said before, I won't have OFFICIALLY graduated until I've done an internship, and I am currently working toward that. I'm spending my first few weeks of summer building a portfolio/website. I'm making mostly a lot of new art and taking a lot of new photos for the site. I'll probably share some of the new stuff as I create it, and I'll of course share the website when it's finished. Stay tuned!

A Strange (But Really Cool) Coincidence

Yesterday I put together post about my Grandpa Bell's funeral. I edited the photos in the afternoon, wrote it that evening, and put it all together last night. I put it up on the blog and scheduled the post for this morning on Facebook and then went to sleep.

Then this morning I woke up to this picture in my Timehop.

So, it might seem like I did this on purpose, but I didn't! Completely by coincidence I posted my blog post, including this same picture, exactly one year after Grandpa's 90th birthday party.

Now, I'm not one of those people who believes that this was a sign that Grandpa is looking down from heaven and sending me a message or whatever, but it was such a cool, strange coincidence that I thought it was worth posting about. :)

Grandpa Bell

As most of you know, my Grandpa Bell died last month. Sadly it was the same day as Jacob's wedding. We found out as we left the reception. I didn't want to mention that in the post about the wedding, but thought I should mention it here. We knew it was coming, but it was still a shock.

As funerals tend to do, we had a ton of family brought together that week. I took a bunch of pictures before and after the funeral, so I wanted to share them here. Before I do that though, I did want to share a couple of the pictures I took at Grandpa's 90th birthday party last year. All his kids made it down for that special occasion, and we had to photograph it. This was my best picture from the day.

My other favorite picture I took that day was this one. There were a bunch of really old photos on a table at the party and I decided to arrange and photograph them. I'm really glad I did.

We miss you grandpa.

The whole weekend of the funeral, my nephew Jackson was the center of attention.

Dad is obsessed with Jackson the most, and of course gets first dibs as grandpa, but Mandi loves all babies and had to be persuaded to relinquish him. :)

We spent a lot of time at Uncle John and Aunt Becky's house that weekend. It's a great place for big family gatherings.

I swear I didn't put an Instagram filter on this picture, it just turned out this way!

Jared had a story to tell and Afton was a captive audience.

The funeral home was decorated so nicely. Lots of amazing pictures from the past.

That big one was taken by my cousin Kim. It's one of the best pictures any of us had of him.

It's one of my favorites. It's just the perfect picture of him.

I didn't get any more pictures here after this because I just feel weird about taking pictures at funerals. Plus I was a pallbearer and had to focus on that. I'm glad that Mandi was there because she stepped up and took some great pictures that day.

I don't think anyone likes funerals, but grandpa's was really nice, and a fitting tribute to him. I'm really glad I was a part of it.

After the funeral all the pallbearers were given a shell from the guns that were fired at the ceremony. I put mine on my bookshelf, next to a couple of diamonds from Jacob's wedding.

After the funeral we had a picnic in a park, though I didn't get any pictures there either, because it was a lot of people I didn't know and the few I did were too scattered.

After that, the family all headed back to Aunt Becky and Uncle John's.

Sometime later, an ice cream truck came by for some reason, while a bunch of people were outside, and Uncle John bought everyone ice cream!

The rest of these pictures were probably taken the next day. We went back to Uncle John and Aunt Becky's after church on Sunday.

I loved this picture of Grandma and Maggie. :)

Then Jackson was back to being the center of attention.

That's all I've got. It was an emotional weekend, but really nice too.