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Spring Weekend 2014

May 5th, 2014 apcook15

Feliz cinco de mayo, amigos (and happy quatro de mayo, for those who know about it)!! Shockingly, this is very likely to be my last blog post of junior year. If you’re having a hard time believing it, imagine how I feel. It’s a very fitting final post, though, and one that I’m happy to head into the summer with. In the midst of writing a Hercule Poirot murder mystery, compiling a writing portfolio, and so on, now is the only time I’ve had in this week or the last one to take some time aside, and I want to use it to tell you all about Spring Weekend!

Perhaps as a send-off present, perhaps as compensation for the horror of finals, I don’t really know, but Holy Cross always does an AMAZING job putting together Spring Weekend festivities for its students. Some of the various ones will be shown here, but seriously, we were treated from everything to a pig roast to a HOLI festival of colors, from an outdoor carnival to a Nelly concert tonight. With the exception of the concert, ALL OF IT was free to the student population, and this writer just wants to take the time to thank Holy Cross for its amazing generosity – I can’t think of many other schools that cares about its students as much as HC does, and I’m honored to be a part of it.

We’ll start off our pictures with the HOLI festival, which took place on the lawn of Figge Dorm Saturday afternoon. As I approached, a big plume of color just erupted out of the crowd, and I was able to snap a few pics before diving headlong into the fray myself. There were bags of (we’re told) launderable paint dust that anyone could pick up and just pour on unsuspecting bystanders, and at the end of the day it looked like we were all victims of a Crayola drive-by. Beneath all the paint and the dust, I think I ran into and took some pictures with my friends Nick and Michaela, my soon-to-be-roomate Joe, and my cousin Ben; the key word there is think, because I really couldn’t tell who was who beneath all the colors. So if I didn’t know you, thanks for taking a picture anyway!!

Proud future residents of Williams 506

Michaela? I think you have something in your hair

Dude… What happened….

BRING IT ON

I can’t recall EVER getting this dirty at family cookouts

There was then, as I mentioned, a fantastic cookout up at the Hart Center, catered with BBQ fare by Kimball Dining Hall. Maybe it’s just been so long since I’ve had them, but it was pretty amazing having some “straight from the grill” burgers and dogs, with all the fixings . If I needed any more sign that summer’s on its way, that was it! Once we had eaten, there was also a giant inflatable obstacle course, a shooting gallery, a hoops contest, a mechanical shark (a mechanical bull, but a shark), and a bungee trampoline, among other things.

The view from the top was great, but my stomach (with dinner in it) never really got off the ground

And from there we were treated to Holy Cross’ annual year-ending fireworks display! We’re so high up that I feel Worcester as a whole is treated to this spectacle, and the school spares no expense in making sure it’s a cracking (see what I did there?) good one.

My own personal highlight of the weekend was on a much smaller scale, though, to be honest. Two of my best friends who’d been away in Washington DC for the semester – doing big things in the Attorney General’s Office and U.S. House of Representatives, I might add – came back to visit for the weekend, and just to see them back on campus was more than the price of any fireworks display or pig roast. Meeting up in my other friend Adam’s room after the fireworks, we just chatted for over an hour and caught up on life. I smiled to myself about halfway through and thought, for the first time this semester, “it’s just like the good old times.”

Junior year was a great one, undoubtedly: I’ll never have a schedule this sweet ever again in my LIFE, my room and roommates were incredible, and I’ve made some really unforgettable connections on campus that I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. It was tough, though, too. The school itself remains as great as it ever was, but it’s really the people in it that make Holy Cross what it is for me. Over 2/3 of the friends I’d made as an underclassmen were abroad this year, and I’ve missed each and every one of them dearly. Selfish as it may be, I’m super excited they’re all leaving their host countries one by one and heading back to the States, because it means Holy Cross will become whole for me again. Having some of them come back for Spring Weekend was the chance to simultaneously both think back on my freshman roots and look ahead to my time as a senior. It felt nicely full circle, and it only added to the great time I’d had the rest of the day.

Before I keep rambling on, though, I’ll just end it here by saying that Spring Weekend was a great way to wrap up my 3rd time around at Holy Cross, and I’ve never been more ready to see what Senior Year has in store. Good Lord… where’s the time going???? 3 down, 1 to go!!!!!!

This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2014 at 10:37 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.