im in ur grass landin mah choppa
First of all, a bit of an apology to those of you who had some difficulty logging on to this site over the past 48 hours or so. My hosting company has been having some issues and the ol’ blog has been completely kaput a couple of times since Thursday.
I’ve been using this hosting company for a couple of years now and this is first time I’ve ever had any trouble with them. This site will be down again tonight for a couple of hours sometime around midnight for some scheduled server maintenance. Hopefully that’ll put an end to these little hiccups we’ve been having.
So, with that out of the way, back to our regularly scheduled programming…
Airports are for suckas
This weekend marks the last of our triennial nightmares here in College Station for 2008 – graduation weekend. Thousands of parents and family members converge on our little town to pack our restaurants, drive badly on our roads and generally cause me to stay inside for 48 hours. It’s still better than move-in week though, because they’re all out of town come Sunday morning.
This weekend’s even more crazy because the university lined up President George W. Bush to give the commencement speech. And even though 72% of Americans disapprove of the job he’s done, he’s still a pretty big drawing card around these staunchly conservative parts. So pretty much everyone around campus was running around like the Emperor was visiting the Death Star or something.
I assumed that since we have an airport that’s a thirty-second drive away from the arena hosting the convocation that the president and his crew would roll into town in a plane like every other VIP. I was wrong. I had forgotten how much presidents love to ride in helicopters.
And since just anyone can land their helicopter at the airport, the president’s entourage sat down in a cleared field right next to our office building instead. Why bother with that lengthy thirty-second commute when you can cut that bad boy down to just twelve seconds? I’m sure at this very moment, engineers are working on adding a retractable roof and helicopter landing pad directly on the floor of Reed Arena so that future presidents can just jump out of their choppers and on to the stage.
A group of us gathered around to watch the festivities and I thought to bring the camera along. That means that if you want to, you can look at an insane number of pictures of the president’s helicopter fleet arriving, sitting around and then leaving.
After the president finished his address, we all reconvened to watch him leave. There was a brief moment of excitement when one of the escort helicopters headed straight for us and my co-workers were sure that they had locked their missiles onto the glint of my camera lens, but they ended up harmlessly flying over the building instead.
Then I went back to work. So ends another riveting story.
what if the speaker parachutes into the stadium? now that, I’d like to see……hope your town has returned to normal…
One time, I went to a gradutation speech given by George W. But he was only the governor at the time. And it was a po-dunk high school graduations. And I honestly though his speech was kind of dumb. It essentially was “don’t have sex.” Seriously. So hopefully this one was better than that one.
Haaa. I didn’t listen to his speech on Friday, but whatever he said, it was pretty short.
Momma Bush spoke at my A&M graduation. She was pretty interesting, but I can’t say that her speech changed my life.
I don’t remember anything about high school graduation other than I was bored.
I couldn’t even tell you who was at our high school graduation! I’m sure I was bored, too. I do remember Jason Talbot passing out Skittles. Yummmmmm, Skittles!!
Well, I am ashamed to tell youthat I drive to Love Field to see Air Force One and the motorcade when POTUS came to stump for Governor Perry in the 2006 elections. I don’t even like the guy, but I was all atwitter seeing the motorcade. Then when I was at H&M in DC, the motorcade went by and it was like, “Whatever. Seen it.”
For nerds like us it’s pretty cool, though.