apropos of anything

Quick, it’s a multiple choice question! Is the above:

A) My email signature

B) Something Homer said on The Simpsons this Sunday

C) Something I said at our lovely North Carolina hotel this Saturday

D) Not a good sign

E) Both C and D

Those of you who said E, well, you’re just brilliant. Or cheating because you were actually in the hotel with me, and therefore you are disqualified and will not be receiving any charming surprises at all.

But enough about the hotel. The less said, the better, actually, for all our sakes, especially because there was so much more to North Carolina this weekend than our hotel.

	A familiar sight in the South.

Take, for example, the Yankee half of the family discovering Waffle House.

(They claim our fine southern establishment has crept north of the Mason-Dixon line, but I can’t imagine it’s the same up there, where you can only pick from two Waffle Houses in the entire city, while here we have a certain intersection on Tara Blvd. where you have your choice between four, yes four, different Waffle Houses.)

We had one next door to our hotel, so of course we had to go the first night. This particular Waffle House didn’t have vanilla or cherry syrup, nor did they have apple butter that didn’t come in pre-packaged, so apparently there are honors to be won even in the South.

The gas station across the street, however, with its mini grocery store, and its camo hats and hunting paraphernalia, stands in a category entirely of its own.

There was also our trip to the lovely Duke gardens, halal Philly cheesesteaks, ice cream from a family-owned dairy out in the middle of farmland — the ten-minute drive out there was half the fun — and then a frenzied dinner at Mansoor’s apartment, complete with twelve trips to Harris Teeter. And that was all Saturday.

Sunday was the graduation ceremony itself. No fewer than three sources told me I was flayed in effigy Sunday morning when the boys discovered I’d put all the water bottles in Mansoor’s freezer; thank goodness I’m not Debra Messing (with her awful, awful hair), or I’d have felt compelled to do the told-you-so dance in the middle of the muggy outdoor ceremony when we discovered the water bottles had melted just enough to be both drinkable and deliciously cold. Hah.

So, ceremony (with surprisingly good commencement speech courtesy of Dr. Peter Gomes of the Harvard Divinity School), hurried pictures, lunch, and more pictures. To wit:

Just the kids, fulfilling a family tradition on a campus full of traditions.
(That’s the old well in the back.)

We are quite the paparazzi family. No less than five cameras got that shot, and there’s an even funnier one on Sumaiya’s camera of all the photographers going after the same picture.

And that was that. We’re good for another year now, until Rashaad flees the Illini coop.