The moving has begun...

The POD landed yesterday as John described. It was pretty weird having no idea what to expect on how this thing would end up in the parking spaces. I'm sure the guy delivering it had to think I was pretty weird taking pictures of him dumping off our pod but hey we had to keep you all informed :) John has begun the stashing boxes from the second bedroom in the pod so the house is beginning to empty out a little bit more. There is just still too much to do but little by little we are moving.

The tradition at UGA is to have your picture taken at the arch for graduation. Well I don't want to stand in line next Saturday after graduation so with a little help from Dave in John's lab we took our pictures of us in our regalia. It sorta seemed more real that we were graduating but still its pretty surreal. The pictures are pretty good. Let me warn you that huge robes are not flattering on anyone. I look like a short round black blob and John looks like a tall round black blog, but hey we have our PhDs so why not dress us up in funny costumes and take pictures :) And also they are not the most lightweight, cool temperature things to wear on a 95 degree day in Georgia at 1pm. I think I lost 2 pounds of water weight just to take the pictures. I'll post the pictures after graduation. I'm still worried about jinxing us that maybe if I post them graduation won't happen or something. Damn me and my superstitions.

Friday was my lab's end of summer, Noreen's got a new house, yea REU and SURP are soon to be over, Dawn graduated, etc. It was fun and nice. Big thanks to Noreen and Chris for hosting. It always is a pain in the butt to have a party-madly cleaning and prepping the house to then have everyone come over and dirty it up. I hope everyone had a nice time. I gave all the girls in the lab these really cute squid change purses. I found them through a vendor at AthFest and just had to have one for everyone. The artist, Jude Stuecker, has some wonderful stuff but the change purses (under small works on her webpage www.judestuecker.com) just couldn't be passed up. She was also more than willing to make more and alter colors and everything. I hope the girls liked them. EVS and family came so it was nice to see them. EVS and I exchanged gifts. He gave me a $30 gift card to Borders and I gave him 4 of these recreations of SunJar's that I am calling Light Organ Jars because they glow blue due to a nifty trick that James H helped me with by taking an overhead sheet and printing blue ink on it. They looked pretty cool. I found out how to make them by using the Instructables website. Check it out at: www.instructables.com/id/Home-made-Sun-Jar/. The website is also full of other diy projects. We used this before to make a fabric covered headboard for our bed. Ah the internet. What did I do without you in my early days.

Tonight we had dinner with John's lab. It was also nice to hang out with everyone from his lab. Brian is in town so seeing him was good. He's been finishing up some stuff for a paper so he spent his vacation from his post-doc at Princeton here in Georgia doing science. Oh the dedication.

By the way thanks kt and James for the suggestion of roadsideamerica.com. It definitely rocks. John and I are already exploring for cool things to look at while we are on our way to Texas in the next few weeks. We are already looking forward to getting on the road. I think the move will be good for us (or at least I think so now). This whole moving thing has been something new for our relationship so I am hoping we will continue to grow as this big event happens. I said in my defense that if we could both defend our dissertations at the same time that we could get through anything together. I hope that includes a very long car trip with a sometimes easily bored person :)