always an aggie

Here at Utah State it's Homecoming week, filled with traditions, and football, and excitement ... and street painting.

Aggie Bull-evard goes right through the middle of campus and each year it gets painted by the different clubs and organizations. Every club gets a 10x10 space to paint their logo and/or incorporate the Homecoming theme - which this year is "Celebrate! Once an Aggie, always an Aggie." The street painting is a contest so there's only a two hour time limit to paint. The winners are for best overall, best incorporated theme, best artistic, and best greek.

My husband reserved a spot for the Theatre Student Association and was in charge of the design. He spent a good amount of time on it last week. After bouncing ideas off of me and other students, he finalized his idea. So Saturday, we were out and about buying supplies. We stopped at Home Depot for paint and such and Wal-Mart for cardboard. My husband decided to make a cut-out of the design beforehand to save on time ... which ended up working really well ... except for it filled up our entire living room and lasted most of our Saturday.

Once we had the cardboard laid out, my husband measured and traced and cut. And I helped, of course. We spent quite few hours on it. To make the time pass, we watched the Utah State v. Colorado State football game ... which they won ... go Aggies!

The painting was going on Monday night. Also going on Monday night was Legally Blonde rehearsal, which takes a good hand full of the departments students. My husband tried to recruit people to come help paint via emails and texts, but no real commitment came from it ... except for mine. It was just going to be me and the street. I was nervous to take on the challenge, I'll admit. We got there just before 6pm to get settled in. And to my great surprise, a theatre student showed up. She is in Legally Blonde but said she'd help for ten minutes or so before rehearsal. So it was the three of us tracing the design in chalk on the street.

Once rehearsal time came along, our friend left. My husband called the director and asked if he could stay since I was the only one there. Thankfully, the director let him stay for an extra hour. Huge relief off of my shoulders. As we were painting, we found that we had to use lots of paint to fill the gaps, and paint does not dry quickly on the street when there's clumps of it. But it started looking really cool. People would pass by and say, "Oh, I get it. Theatre masks in the 'U'. That's cool."

Shortly after we started painting, we had two more students show up to help us. Awesome! It made the job go much more quickly. The four of us had some difficulty painting on top of wet paint, which we had to do because of the time limit, but we got the job done. It was a lot of fun.

The design is a clock with an 'A' in place of the numbers. It represents always being an Aggie. The finished product turned out great and we were pretty proud of it. Sadly, we didn't win anything.

Overall, the street painting was stressful and fun ... two things my husband and I seem to be pretty skillful at. :)