rain, rain go away!

The youngest Smith graduated from high school last week. Gilbert High has played "home" to all 7 siblings. For the last 18 years there has been at least one of us roaming Tiger Hall, but on Thursday the legacy came to an end. Sam and I chose to support Natalli by attending her graduation ceremony. This usually involves extremely uncomfortable heat, and sun in your eyes (since there are never any seats left on the shady "home" side of the stadium). This year Someone thought it would be funny to throw an Arizona blizzard at the 800+ graduates and all their supporters in the stands. We sat for 3 hours in pouring rain, and not hot summer rain. This was bonafide freezing, wind blown rain. Never in all my years as an Arizonan have I witnessed rain fall for more than 10 minutes, max. I'm almost positive this night set a new world record (I'll have to look it up in next years Guinness). Despite the down pour, the genius in charge opted to let the 12 speakers, and 4 musical numbers perform as planned. This was no doubt the same guy who chose to use speakers from what looked like his home stereo, instead of the conveniently located stadium loud speakers. We didn't hear anything all night. A few grads walked off the field before the diplomas were handed out, luckily Natalli had an umbrella to shiver under. Another world record was set that night, they read through the grad's names faster than ever before. What usually takes 2 hours of the program, was done in a whopping 30 min! We joined the remaining crowd and rushed the field immediately after the last grad's name was read, give or take a few, we couldn't make out the mumbling. Everyone ignored the Principal's plea to "please return to [our] seats for the remainder of the program". The crowd decided it was over right then, and we couldn't have agreed more!
This was our view