June 13. On this day in 1997, I walked in the graduation ceremony at Auburn University. Hard to believe it’s been 10 years since that day. Today is Wednesday, but in 1997 it was a Friday. That’s right, I graduated on Friday the 13th, pretty cool, huh? I had received and accepted a job offer right after Spring Break 1997 so my last few months were spent trying not to fail my last few courses. I was scheduled to attend job training for seven weeks starting that August, however, several friends that were going to work at the same company changed their training to June 16th, the Monday after graduation. I thought, “what the hell…”, so on Sunday, June 15th, I boarded a plane for Dallas, TX to begin my new job (well, training). It’s been a whirlwind since then. Wow.
In honor of this day, let’s take a trip down memory lane and see a few pics of me in college and during the aforementioned training in Dallas. Sound good?
Follow me.
LOL…okay, this is my college id. Stop laughing. This photo was taken in June 1992. I used this id throughout college. You can click on the picture to see a larger version. Maybe even use it as your desktop wallpaper. Stop laughing. I only got a new id during my Senior year when I believed I would have to turn in my id when I graduated. Obviously I didn’t. Stop laughing. Even though I grew up in Alabama, I was a surfer at heart. Stop laughing.
Here I am right after the graduation ceremony. I’m posing with the sign telling the business grads where to sit. At this point, I now have a Bachelor’s of Science in Management Information Systems. I was so excited to be a college graduate. In two days I’d be flying off to Dallas to begin my career as a consultant (which would last for the next 8 years).
Here I am with my parents right after graduation. This is just outside the basketball coliseum where the graduation was held. There is no diploma in the black case I am holding. The diplomas were mailed out separately after the administration had checked that you don’t have any unpaid library fees, tuition, outstanding warrants or misdemeanors. I mean, I did, of course, but that’s a tale for another blog article.
This is my room senior year. I lived in an apartment complex called The Patio with my brother. I only lived there my senior year as my roommate the past 4 years had graduated. Tidy, isn’t it? That computer on the desk was top-of-the-line for 1996, when I got it. 133Mhz Pentium processor with 16Mb of RAM. 16!!! Oh, it also had a SCREAMING FAST 28.8Kbps modem as there was no cable internet at the time. I don’t know how I got any work done on it. Nowadays, it would be like trying to figure out your taxes on an abacus.
Well, that was fun. Hope you enjoyed the pictures. You can click on any of them to get bigger versions. Please, feel free to comment or email me to give me hell about my college id picture. Trust me, everyone does. 🙂
I may have a wrap up article on Friday. Stay tuned.
You know what else I found today? Hostess Apple Spice cupcakes. I thought they only sold these around Christmas time. Holy crap-in-a-hat these are divine. These things are like little apple-spice tears from heaven. Fluffs of clouds that have been lightly spiced with apples and frosting. It doesn’t get much better than this. If you can find these…GET THEM. So. F’n. Good.
So, during Passover, Coke began to notice the dip in sales during the months around the Jewish holiday. It obviously was a significant enough dip that Coke had to do something about it. In order to hold onto its important Jewish sales during Passover, Coke produces batches of its soda with sucrose (beet sugar and/or cane sugar) much like it did before the big switch to HFCS and the whole manufacturing process is lorded over by a Jewish representive. To soda enthusiasts, this means that Coke, Pepsi and Sprite, during the month of Passover, are available sweetened with pure sugar to those who go looking for it. And it can be a difficult search as the switch is not nationwide and centers mostly on large Jewish communities. This makes the few weeks before and the few weeks after Passover a large, geeky scavenger hunt for soda enthusiasts.
So, how do you find it? Coke Classic, Sprite and Pepsi will have the largest showing. You supposedly can also find some of Dr. Brown’s sodas with cane sugar in them (I’d love to find a Black Cherry). 2 Liters of kosher soda will have yellow caps on them with Hebrew writing and a P stamped on the cap top. Cans, which are much harder to find, will have the Hebrew stamp on the bottom. Big cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco will have lots of it. Smaller towns will be harder to find unless you have a Jewish grocery somewhere near you. Passover this year begins on the morning of April 2 and lasts the whole week.
Cavalcade of Awesome 