The Pinnacles

This long weekend my parents, Mina, Matt and I went up north to Cervantes to see the Pinnacles at Nambung National Park. Matt and I had already been with his family, but I thought my parents and Mina would really enjoy it, and I was right!

The Pinnacles are about 20 minutes drive from the town of Cervantes (where we stayed). It's a really strange sight - in the middle of nowhere, there's a huge area of yellow sand with giant limestone formations jutting out of the ground. The whole area is surrounded by thick scrub so it really is like walking onto another planet (and at sunset, that planet would most definitely be Mars).

We also drove up to Jurian Bay where we spent some time on the beach and had an awesome fish 'n chips lunch. It was the first day this Spring that the temperature rose over 27 degrees (where we were anyway, I'm not sure about Perth!) and the beach was packed with people making the most of it. We managed to find a nice quite spot to spend a lazy Spring afternoon.

To my surprise, everyone actually had a great time! My family is notorious for having arguments over nothing in times of high stress, and going on a road trip counts as an extremely high stress situation. My parents and Mina thought the Pinnacles were really interesting, and apart from them packing the whole house to bring for a 3 day holiday, everything ran quite smoothly. I may even be able to convince them to come down to Albany next long weekend...

I Have Graduated!

Last night was my graduation ceremony from Engineering / Computer and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Western Australia. I now have in my possession two pieces of paper that make my 5 years of study official!

As far as ceremony goes, it wasn't all that bad. Ever since my high school days, where our Speech Night went for 4h, I have not been a fan of ceremonies in general, but the 2h graduation was actually pretty good!

Lara, Ro, Adam and I all deferred our graduation ceremony so we could graduate together, and it was definitely worth it. Because mid year graduation is quite small, R0 me and Lara (M, M, and K) actually got called one after the other consecutively! Adam (N) would have been called before Ro had he not chosen to drop the engineering part of his degree and keep going with Computer Science honours grrrr.

As mid-ceremony entertainment, one of the computer science lecturers sitting up the front of the hall fainted in her seat. She turned a lovely shade of green which matched her sash color beautifully (we can laugh because she was OK folks). It was actually quite ironic since she fainted in the middle of the valedictorian speech during the part where the student was describing how they didn't become an air hostess because of fear of vomit, and was much more interested in disease anyway. How awkward.

After the ceremony we did the obligatory dorky photo shoot all around the UWA pillars, had some drinks and nibblies, and then headed down to Basement on Broadway for a drink. Ro actually surprised us by booking an apartment for after graduation celebrations in the city, his shout, which was really sweet of him!

All in all a great night spent with family and great friends. I'm so happy that we decided to all graduate together - I couldn't imagine a better bunch of people to have graduated with!