Memories Part II

This post is a continuation of this one, where I'm offering a few old pictures for your amusement.

Fig 22: September 2007. I tried to pick good pictures to show in these posts, but the ones with the best memories aren't always the most artfully composed. Here my sister and I share a giggly sleepover in my Grandma's house.

Fig 23: October 2007. My mother begins exploring photography - with fancy equipment, instead of a point-and-shoot!

Fig 24: January 2008. The winter forces my mother inside for photography, but she has no studio - so we put up a sheet. Making do, making do...

Fig 25: Janurary 2008. My sister always poses in graceful, pensive poses - flipping her hair, gazing into the distance, looking over her shoulder... I don't have the knack for that, so my mother has to work with what she's got. Hey, what do you want from me? :)

Fig 26: February 2008. Taking a class on how to grow and tend a bonsai tree.

Fig 27: March 2008. Was invited to dinner by a friend, and eagerly accepted. When I arrived I looked around the table and thought, "Which one of these, just isn't like the other ones..." Funny to be the ethnically odd one out for once, gave me a new perspective!

Fig 28: June 2008. Trip to Cape Cod, my first time there.

Fig 29: July 2008. First boat trip across Boston Harbor, to visit the harbor islands.

Fig 30: August 2008. Hiking trip with friends in New Hampshire.

Fig 31: September 2008. Kayaking at the engineering women's retreat. We rented out a cottage and ten engineering girls spent the weekend relaxing. Ah.... And you should have seen the good food coming out of that kitchen with all of us pitching in!

Fig 32: September 2008. Trip to Vermont. See how good my mom is getting with that camera?

Fig 33: December 2008. Turns out that I become good friends with that group where I was the odd one out. We still keep in touch now, even though they have graduated and moved on.

Fig 34: Christmas 2008. In Boston there is an event every year where hundreds of people dress up as Santa. A handful of friends and I participated. And then the next year in 2009 we went again, because "we already had the costumes!" the boys told me.

Fig 35: January 2009. I took a trip to Singapore, but I arrived without my luggage. So I had to wear jeans and a T-shirt while everyone else was in suits...

Fig 36: January 2009. I thought I would remedy the situation by going shopping for a dress the next day. But do you know how hard it is to find clothes for a 5' 11" girl in an Asian country? Not trivial... but this dress has a special place in my heart now.

Fig 37: January 2009. On the way back from Singapore, I stopped in London for vacation. Ahem, sorry. "Extended layover."

Fig 38: April 2009. Grad school formal night, with a bunch of single girls. It was fantastically fun. (Formal night 2010 I wrote about here)

Fig 39: May 2009. I graduated with my Master's! This is me standing in front of the machine I built for my degree.

Fig 40: July 2009. Just like my mom and I took a trip to scuba dive to celebrate my B.S., we also took a trip scuba diving to celebrate my M.S. This time we went to Belize.

Fig 41: July 2009. I do have one more degree to go... is there another diving trip in the future? Start thinking now, Mom! Don't worry - it'll be a couple years from now...

Fig 42: July 2009. Enjoying the sun in Belize.

And then all the more recent pictures are since I began blogging. So you readers know a lot of what's happened to me since then.

It's really cool for me to look back over old blog posts now, to have a record of my experiences in grad school. These photos serve the same purpose for my undergrad experiences. And I think all these memories are worth the price.

At the end of it all - the lesson learned? Keep a backup of your backup drive. Storage is cheap these days, recovery is not...