Alex and Beth and I are back from Washington! And Alex has graduated from college! He has no job as of yet but we'll work on that. We'll let him get a break first for a little while, though. Beth and I left Warsaw last Thursday for an afternoon flight to Seattle (in a rare good deal, economy parking at O'Hare was full so they were letting people park at hourly for the same rate...park closer and save some cash). We got to Seattle around dinnertime and met up with Alex at the Tipsy Cow for dinner. Friday, Alex had some things to do so Beth and I ran some errands - going to Target, driving around, getting a storage unit for Alex's things which coincidentally turned out to be the exact same storage unit that we had for the past 3 years until last fall when we cleared it out and are now back in - and rested at the hotel until meeting Alex and all his friends for dinner. We told Alex we would like to take him and his friends out to dinner, expecting just 2 or 3, but the crowd grew to 12 plus us by the time everyone came out. We weren't expecting every single one of his friends. But no matter, we had fun meeting everyone and they seemed to be good people and enjoyed meeting us. Saturday Beth found a place to get her nails done (for the first time in years), then later on we 3 went to the Redmond City Center and to Seattle; I had told Beth about the big antiques/stuff shop at Pike Place and she wanted to go visit it, but the nearest parking we could find was quite a walk away and then down a huge amount of stairs to the waterfront, and by the time we got there, she was done in already. We weren't there very long at all. Maybe an hour altogether in the city. Sunday was the big day: we met for breakfast at the Redmond Pancake House and then headed to the Lynnwood event center to drop off Alex to get ready. That was about 90 minutes before it was opened for guests. As we're sending Alex off, he can't find his tassel. Looking everywhere...in the box, in his hat, in the car, it is not there. He must have left it at the place where he was decorating his mortarboard last night! Back at campus! Or maybe it's in his car! Or maybe in his apartment! Oh no! Panic! So he goes in all panicked, and Beth and I hightail it back toward Redmond to see if we can find it. We realize on the way back that there is very little time left and we'll be lucky if we can go back, get ready, and come back in time, let alone look for the tassel. On the way he does text us that they had an extra tassel for him so crisis averted there, but we are rushing to get ready and driving as fast as we can to get back there in time. We never should have planned to drop Alex off and go back to the hotel, it's too far. So we're rushing to get there and traffic is getting worse and worse as we approach. 15 minutes before the ceremony starts we're still down the highway and Beth is just in tears that we're going to miss it. In the end I drop off Beth at the events center with a couple minutes to spare and go park; I walk in at about the same time the graduates are walking in. But we made it. It was a nice ceremony, there were some very good speeches including from one of Alex's good friends who the student body selected to speak. There was a reception at Digipen immediately after so we went there for refreshments and for Alex to see some friends and such, then dinner at Redmond's later on. Monday was a long day. We got started working on clearing out and cleaning up the apartment in the morning, then took a break to go see Scott at his new apartment and go get lunch with him. It turns out that Scott's car died recently, but at his new place he has good access to public transit so he's going to make a go of not having a car for a while. So I asked if he might be able to keep Alex's car for the summer in his parking spot at the apartment, and he said sure! So that'll save like $120 a month. Scott came back to the apartment with us to help clean up and get everything into the storage unit... took us several trips but we got it all out... and the apartment wasn't really that dirty either. So all packed up and moved out, not even any keys to drop off, after the like fourth run to the storage unit we were done and went out to dinner with Scott and his new girlfriend, who seems very nice. Alex had a gathering to go to at the campus afterwards, so Scott dropped him off there on the way back to his apartment with Alex's car. Alex stayed with us at the hotel overnight, and by 9:00 am Tuesday we were at the airport. Our flight left Seattle around noon SeaTac time, and closed the book on that stage of Alex's life. On to the next....