So now what?

So after a rather, um, tumultuous start to my senior year, I settled in for the second half...the last semester I would ever be in school. Kind of amazing, if you think about it (which I really didn't). I had started to work on the President's re-election campaign with Students for Bush, which was a lot of fun- we did a volunteer sign-up at the March Madness games in Columbus, which was a lot of fun, even though it was really, really cold. :) Classes went well, even if I was taking evil, horrible, class-I-will-never-use Political Research Methods.


January brought the CPAC trip, which was a lot of fun, as usual, except for getting lost on the way to D.C. and the absolutely freezing weather conditions. We saw W. in a motorcade, which was fun, and we got to tour the White House (didn't see the First Dogs, though, which was kind of a bummer). The green room was definitely my favorite, even though I expected the Secret Service folk who worked those rooms to be a wee bit more knowledgeable about the rooms themselves. And the East Room is a lot smaller than it looks on TV. I just kept thinking of Dolley Madison hanging her wash in there. Or Trisha Nixon's wedding. :)

The rest of the year just flew by. I had my twenty-second birthday in April, and graduation was May 7, 2004, at the Cap Center (which was finished my sophomore year). My mom's parents came down (my dad's dad died when he was in college and his mother had died my sophomore year of college) and we had brunch at school, which was nice. Grandma and Pa had been there a few times before, for Christmas Festival and stuff like that. The ceremony itself was nice, even if the speeches were a bit dull, and I had honor cords for SAI and for Sigma Tau Delta, the national English honorary. Tiff was there, too, and Branden and I took lots of pictures afterwards before my family headed to brunch at Bon Vie, on of my favorite restaurants up at Easton.

It was a beautiful day, and I was so thrilled to have graduated on time. That was my underlying goal ever since my sophomore year, and I had done it. :) I was very, very proud and was ready to move on, even though I loved college and all my friends. I would miss the social aspects of it tremendously. But with the campaign ahead of us, I knew there were still good times to be had.