I returned from TCS in mid-July, fully exhausted from the long days of the seminars. Our team was given a bit of vacation, which I didn’t use since I was going to take the following week off in order to unpack my things, perform various moving actions like changing my license plate and so forth, and drive to my old roommate Jonathan Parr’s wedding in South Carolina.
So, I spent a few days getting acquainted with my new office at Excelsis in downtown Orlando, and with my first assignment, which was to transcribe one of the seminars from LA. The process of transcribing is rather slow and tedious, but it was to be my life for over a month. For all the tedium, however, I was glad to be going over Graham’s material again, and at a very slow speed. Graham Tomlin spoke, you see, at between 160 and 180 words per minute, whereas my top sustained typing speed is much closer to 75 words per minute. The solution was to slow down the audio recording, while retaining pitch, so that it sounded roughly like Graham was extremely drunk (and wise), and so that I didn’t have to stop and rewind the recording all the time.
The slow-downing (as we technically named the process), while making the overall transcription more efficient, did mean that I transcribed audio at something like 1/3 the rate of the actual recording. In other words, it was going to take a long time.
Thankfully, I had a break on the near horizon, and so on July 23, I think it was, I drove up to Newberry, South Carolina. I met Jon that evening, and he took me fishing in a little boat on his family’s pond, to which we got via a dusty farm road in his grandfather’s old pickup truck, past some people rounding up horses. The south, indeed.
No fish were caught that night, but the next day was a little more fruitful. That is, we shot guns. Shotguns, in fact, of various sizes and recoils. His uncle had a clay pigeon thrower, so Parr and Tyson Vozza (who’d come the night before) took rounds shooting. It was great fun, and I didn’t do bad at all, shooting about 85%, even though I’d never fired a gun before. My performance would improve the next day, when I shot 100% of the targets!
Many more friends trickled in during that time, and we attended all sorts of wedding-ish parties and what have you, until the actual wedding on Saturday, for which all of us Stanford folk were late. Who knew the minister would start exactly on time? The reception was outdoors nearby and full of great food and dancing, followed by a late night out at a lake where we’d had the bachelor party not 24 hours earlier. It was a wonderful way to celebrate Jon and LeAnne.
I left the next day after sleeping enough to ensure that I wouldn’t fall asleep at the wheel, and got home just under 7 hours later.
The next weekend I got word from my brother that he had indeed asked his girlfriend Ellen to marry him! So the first of my siblings to get engaged. It was a pretty weird (but awesome) experience, and I was glad to start with the preliminaries of welcoming someone new into the family.
The rest of that month wasn’t so exciting, unfortunately, filled as it was with transcription and, surprise, a couple hurricanes! Charley and Frances, to be exact. For Charley, it was just my sister and I at home (our folks were in England celebrating their 25th anniversary!) as the relatively small, but ferocious, hurricane passed directly over Orlando. While many properties were damaged, ours suffered no real harm, despite the winds and the things flying around outside. Frances was much more chill (or maybe it was Jeanne? Let’s call it Frances). Ellen’s family had come to stay with ours for that weekend, and so the 7 or 8 of us were essentially locked in the house for a few days, eating, sleeping, and partying (no seriously, partying). Again, while Frances proved to be a very serious storm, the brunt of it passed by us and in retrospect we probably didn’t even need to board up our windows.
As we neared September, I had the honor of flying out to Stanford to be in Nick Bott’s (and Jenna formerly-Shuer’s) wedding as a groomsman. So for a few days before the wedding, Nick and all his entourage, from both Stanford and St. Louis, hung out and did all sorts of fun bachelor-type activities. We were even given the gift of a sailboat ride around the SF bay, which was all the more cooler when my dad was able to get out the telescope from our SF apartment and tell me how many fingers I was holding up on the boat out in the bay! We also spent time with Nick and Jenna’s families, and Jenna’s bridesmaids. The wedding itself was on Sunday, in a beautiful redwood grove by a secret little lake up in the Santa Cruz mountains. The ceremony was beautiful, the string quartet was beautiful, and dare I say it, even the “special music” was beautiful (Nick asked Alex Polk and I to play Come Thou Fount). The reception was even more beautiful, if that is possible, followed by a night of dancing and being emotional about friends getting married and so on.
But that is where the story must stop temporarily. This whole “What’s Happened Since Graduation” series has taken much longer to write than I had planned, so I am going to have to move more quickly from here on out. In fact, I think what I’ll do next is simply do a basic recap of the last part of 2004, which does deserve a recap due to the important things which have happened in it. But I can’t spend all my time catching up, because then I’ll never write about anything besides events, and we all know that sucks. So bear with me, and we’ll pull through it soon!
