25th Rice University Reunion

Patrick and I haven't gone to a college reunion in about 10 years. The last time we went, Natalie was still a toddler and Anthony was really into Harry Potter. They had a Harry Potter themed breakfast at Baker College that year and the kids had such a blast. This time was a bit different. Of course Anthony is away at school and isn't with us. Alex wasn't interested in visiting the campus at all. Eric had more fun hanging out with his grandparents and getting spoiled with his Lego gifts and food.

We left Natalie with her friend Margot and Margot's parents so she could compete in her first UIL competition. She wasn't too specific, but she won third place in Spelling (Margot won first place) and she got in the top 15 in all of the subject areas she entered. That sounded pretty good to us.

This is a quick photo that I snapped on the way to the Alumni Brunch on Saturday morning. I love the bright graphics they used for the tickets and all of the reunion tags and signs. I thought about asking them if I could keep a ticket for my scrapbook but decided that a picture would take up less space.

The Rice University campus has expanded quite a bit in the 25 years since we went to school there. There were eight residential colleges at that time with two of them being single-sex dorms, now there are eleven and all are coed. There were around 500-600 per undergraduate class then. This fall they had about 950 in their freshman class. There are many more buildings than when we went there, which posed a slight problem for us. We were supposed to go to "Baker Hall" for the Alumni Brunch from 10am-1pm on Saturday, but we didn't realize that until we were almost to "Baker College", which of course was in a completely different part of the campus. Luckily, the campus is still small enough that we could walk everywhere, although we did take one of the shuttle buses (that they didn't used to have) to Baker Hall once we figured out our mistake.

At the brunch, they showed a documentary called "180: The Spin on Willy's Statue", about a significant event that happened during our senior year. The statue that is shown in this picture behind me is of William Marsh Rice, the founder and namesake of the university. Some students turned that statue around as a prank. I wish I could have a copy of that documentary so I could show it to my boys. It was informative and well done and taught me some things I didn't know about at the time.

The other alumni event we went to was the barbecue at 3pm-5:30pm before the Homecoming game versus Lousiana Tech catered by the local Good Company Barbecue. We got to see a few people that we probably should have remembered, like a guy I was in the MOB (Marching Owl Band) with and another guy that went to my same medical school. I also saw another guy that practices up in Illinois where we used to live before we came back to San Antonio. We didn't see anyone that we used to hang out with. They may have been there at the dinner and dance on Friday night. We couldn't make that because we were still driving into town. We didn't feel right pulling the kids out of school for this.

We didn't go to the game which we actually won 52-14. Interestingly we lost most of our football games when we went to school there, but then we had the big powerhouse teams like University of Texas and Texas A&M University in our division. We went home and spent a little time with my parents. It was a good trip and we plan on trying to go to Homecoming again next year.