Senior Dinner

Tonight was our fancy-smancy senior dinner.  Each year, a couple in our church and a team of helpers provide a five-course, elegant dinner for our graduating seniors.  Tonight was our feast night and it was a beautiful and delicious night.  The seniors are always so amazed with the whole process.  I don’t think they have very many opportunities for five- course meals.  Or at least it doesn’t seem so based on their reaction to more than one-piece of silverware and shiny charger plates.  🙂  Every year it is awesome to watch their reactions.  We had  fun night and it was great to just spend a relaxed and slow night with one another around the table.  We, people in general, don’t do this enough.  To really slow down and experience a meal together. Every year I have such mixed emotions with all the graduation festivities.  I am joyful to witness and to remember how each of them have come into their own persons over the past six years of knowing them.  But the joy is mixed with sadness as they prepare to leave for new adventures and I acknowledge that things will never be the same.  But this is the way the journey goes and I would not have it any other way. 

It has been a busy week and I have not had time to post much.  I typed up a lengthy post last night but then lost it accidentally and was too tired to retype it.  So, only I will have the joy of that post and it will be erased from my mind as well in no time.

There has been some inquiry into the funeral of the bed centipede (although no one cared to come for the visitation or to at least send flowers in memory).  In actuality, I was late arriving home on Tuesday and was not able to properly dispose of the bed centipede.  So at this moment, he is still in his ziploc coffin, on my desk, by my laptop.  I have decided to conduct an experiment.  About four years ago, I killed a wasp in my bedroom window sill.  I sprayed it with something that I can’t recall today but whatever weapon I used, it worked.  The wasp laid dead on the ledge by my bed.  So I decided to leave the corpse there and to watch the decay process over time.  The wasp was there for over two years.  Almost every week before I turned out the light, I would investigate and see where we were.  After two years, it very much resembled a dust bunny – any distinguishing wasp features gone.  I don’t know when I would have ended the experiment but it was a decision I never had to make.  You see, my wonderful mom decided to give me a gift and she cleaned my house while I was gone on one of my many summer trips.  And being a thorough cleaner that she is she cleaned the "dust bunny" from my window sill. 

So now I’ve decided to conduct a similar experiment but this time I will study the effects of decay in a ziploc baggie environment.  Perhaps I will stumble upon some amazing preservation technique.  I really don’t know.  But in the meantime, the centipede lies in state in my home office.  Ask me next time your at my house and I’ll allow you to have a few moments of silence with him.

Peace – Melissa