Colleen's Column

Somebody just asked me about "dream dresses" the other day, so I thought I'd share the process with you. Okay.  You just got engaged, or you're graduating, or going to a Rennaissance Festival, or you have some other special occasion that you really need an awesome dress for.  Great!  (However, I'm going to talk about this as if it's a wedding dress, simply because I just did one over the winter so it's fairly fresh in my mind.  Some steps will not apply for other outfits.) Step 1:  Collect ideas.  These may be drawings you did when you were little of your ideal dress, a picture of Cinderella, a copy of a painting, a Bridal magazine, a picture of your grandmother's dress, of a flower, etc., etc.  All well and good.  You may like the skirt of one dress, the sleeves from another, the neckline from somewhere else, and that is fine.  I can work with that! The other thing to do at this point is to go to a bridal salon (bring a white T-shirt or blouse

On June 10 graduated from Baker College of Port Huron with my Associate of Business degree.  Yippee!!!  Graduation was at McMorran Auditorium in downtown Port Huron - there were about 400 graduates, so the ceremony took about 2 hours.  It was really nice. Now I'm going on for my Bachelor's degree in Marketing. Isn't the cake cute?  My sister Catherine made it for me.  The cap, diploma, and flip-flops were not edible, everything else was.

Because the show was down in Wayne, MI, which is about a 2-hour drive from my house, I took my Mom and my two sisters down on Saturday afternoon and we stayed at a Days Inn in Canton.  The room had air-conditioning, for which we were very grateful.  We went to the early Mass at St. Joseph's Catholic Church at 7:30 am, then headed over to the school to set up.  Father Radecki even announced before his sermon that the Fashion Show was after the second Mass, at 11:00 - it was definitely a new experience for me to have that kind of notice given for one of my events!  After Mass we went across the street to the new parish school, and Father took us on a tour.  Everything is brand new and it is really beautiful.  It brought back good memories of attending Catholic school myself - complete with the Sisters teaching. We still needed to check out of our hotel room, so my sisters helped me unload the van, then Mom took them back to collect our stuff while I started setting up. I was act