these are days.

I've been super laze about writing of late. Actually, strike that. I've not been super laze. I've been thinking about writing, and have been meaning to write, and more than all this, I've actually been wanting to write. The past few months have been somewhat antithetical to this, though, and so while there has been sufficiently interesting happenings to report, my mental state has not been such that I've actually wanted to write. And so I haven't. But I'm feeling better now.

It's a sunny morning in Santa Barbara, and that's a rare thing of late. These days seem to dawn consistently gray and overcast, and yesterday even ended that way, with a misty shroud hanging about the hilltops. Everything is in bloom now, more flowering trees than I've seen at once in my whole life, in all colors and shapes, which helps to brighten even the dreariest of May Gray days. This area, very unfortunately, lacks my springtime favorite though, so abundant in my homeland of MN this time of year:

oh, lovely common lilac, I can almost smell your heady fragrance.

but the jasmine bushes are well represented, and that almost (but, not quite) makes up for the lack of lilac. The house that I grew up in in St. Paul had 2 lilac bushes in the yard until sometime in high school when Daddio decided they had to go, reducing me to stealthily stealing bunches from unsuspecting neighboring yards. I'd do it when I lived in Minneapolis, too, walk around late at night with a good pair of scissors, searching for a lilac bush near enough to the sidewalk so as not to be trespassing while I stole the lilacs.

School finished last week. The stinky boys I started the program with are now certified commercial divers. Of about 30 that I started my classes with, 6 graduated (plus 3 stragglers from other semesters):

MDT Class of Spring 2007.

From the top, my left to right: Casey, student x, Simon (conveniently, these first 3 are the aforementioned stragglers) Josh, Evan, Nick, Nate, Carlo, Rob. Bottom row: our esteemed instructors Ed, Don (my favorite), Geoff, Dan (the WI native). The ceremony was bittersweet, I'm excited for the grads to be on their way, but will certainly miss their presence in school and in Santa Barbara. The ending of the school year itself was bittersweet. I'm glad to be done with classes, but the scattering to the winds of all my classmates, those who I've spent long hours and days with over the past months, feels a bit like being untethered. But I also feel pretty free, and that's a pretty decent feeling, too.