Thunderstorms

I was still small enough to be held, but no longer a baby. Or maybe that's just how I'm remembering it. At any rate, I felt cocooned and safe with my mother beside me.

"It's so pretty," she'd murmur as we stood together at the screen door. "Look how pretty the clouds are."

It was always dark — but the dark of an encroaching storm, rarely of night. The mist would barely brush our faces, along with a sweet, cool breeze.

When I got a little older — say, school-age, or close to it — we'd watch for the flashes of lightning, then count: one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand (which I later learned is backward from how most people do it), then either nod knowingly or jump, startled, when the thunder finally rumbled or cracked its reply.

"That must have been close to the high school," said Mom one time. Usually it was much farther away: nine miles, about.

I grew to love thunderstorms. The smell of them, the sound, the beautiful contrast between the clouds and the land. The beauty, the drama. When we moved to Florida, I discovered that it would thunderstorm every afternoon during part of the year. I would sit in my bedroom, listening to music or reading, smelling the rain and watching it sheet down the open casement window.

Later on, I learned that my mother had purposefully instilled in me that love of storms, because she had been made so afraid of them by one particular incident in her childhood. Even so, I'm glad she did.

Thunderstorms, to me, are moments when I can stand at the open door, or sit on the front porch, or gaze out an open window, and let my senses take over. I breathe in that clean-smelling air, feel the mist on my face, and I'm four years old again, and there's nothing but me and the rain.

TV Nostalgia: Barnaby

When I was very, very young — around 4 or 5 years old — I remember watching Barnaby. It was a children's show, locally produced, as many television stations did up until about the late '80s. (As I understand it, the local children's show in Toledo was Patches and Pockets.)

Barnaby talked to an invisible parrot, Long John, and had a few puppet and human character friends. During his show, he also cut to Popeye and Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoon segments, and I think those are really why I watched Barnaby. His bits just weren't engaging to me as a child, not even in that mild-mannered children's show host kind of way.

At the end of every show, as he was leaving his "house," his parting line was, "If anybody calls, tell 'em Barnaby says hello. And tell 'em that I think you're the nicest person in the world! Just you."

The above clip is the end of Barnaby's final show, in 1988. I never saw this clip before tonight, and now I find it so sad. Not just that a children's show did its final wrap — that inevitably happens, just like children inevitably grow up — but that he was so obviously sad to be ending it.

It turns out that Barnaby (a.k.a. Linn Sheldon) was a talented early-television-era actor-comedian in the Cleveland area. He also wrote an autobiography, Barnaby and Me, which I'm unlikely to find locally (but I might be able to find in Cleveland) is available used on Barnes & Noble if I really want it.

Linn Sheldon died in 2006, eight years after retiring from television, in his Lakewood home.

You don't see locally-produced content like this anymore. People just five years younger than me probably don't remember watching shows like this (or, a little later in life, waking up in front of the TV to the Star-Spangled Banner or a test pattern). YouTube is great for trying to convey these memories, but today's 20-somethings can't really relate to this any more than I can really relate to sitting around the radio set and listening to audio dramas or radio plays.

Memories of Rodgers, Part 1

It came to my attention this week, via an invitation from BGSU in my inbox, that Rodgers Hall and the two adjacent frat houses are being torn down to make way for a more modern dormitory.

In memory and in honor of the dorm where I lived during the Spring Semester of 1996, I will be posting photos and journal entries, along with remembered stories from my time in Rodgers Hall.

3 Feb 96 - Saturday - 4PM

Yesterday afternoon there was a fire in the East Wing of Rodgers. Some chic had a candle sitting on a recliner & set it aflame.

Night before, Mary was pounding to the wall to quiet our neighbors and sent my NA [Northern Aurora Drum & Bugle Corps] picture crashing down onto my nose — it bled for half an hour + is still swollen.

These stories both deserve exposition, as they're two of the more memorable and classic moments from my time in Rodgers.

The dorm fire happened late on a Friday afternoon, or early evening. I was getting ready to go to a weekend drum corps camp in Saginaw, and was lucky to have gotten my gear out of the building before the Powers That Be evacuated the building and locked the doors. (We never made it to the camp, and ended up back at the dorm late that night, but that's a story for another day.)

Turned out that a female resident had a candle burning in her room (which was against policy, for the record), and was curled up in a chair with a stadium blanket. She left the candle burning while she went to use the bathroom, and by the time she returned, the candle was smoldering and burning the blanket she'd accidentally thrown on top of it. Luckily for me and my roommate, Mary, the fire was in the East Wing, and we lived in the South Wing, so nothing of ours was damaged. The whole dorm smelled pretty funky for a while, though.

As for my nosebleed... Our next-door neighbor in Rodgers had a boyfriend. At least, we assumed he was a boyfriend. Maybe he was just a fuck-friend, since that's what they did. A lot.

The first few times, it was amusing. We'd put our ears to the wall and listen — because, really, the sounds of other people fucking can be pretty funny. It's not so funny, though, when it keeps you awake on a school night. So, to shut them up, Mary was pounding on the wall. Multiple times. Very hard.

So hard, in fact, that the photo propped on the wall above my bed worked its way off of the shelf and fell, landing on my nose in the dark. Not only that, but it landed on one corner, all the weight of a fairly hefty wood and glass frame causing the second nosebleed I'd ever had in my life.

Ironically enough, THAT got them to stop fucking.

2009 Year in Review

NOTES:

This presentation of annual data is highly influenced by the Feltron Annual Reports. Nicholas Felton is a master of infographics and data visualization, and I continue to be influenced by his work.

Percentage of Miles Walked in 2009 only includes data from 27 April 2009 forward, since that is the date on which my Omron HJ-720ITC Pocket Pedometer decided to un-lobotomize itself and synchronize to my computer again.

Dining Out in 2009 is missing some of September's and most of October's data, due to my ignorance of the fact that Weight Watchers Online only saves 60 days' worth of tracking data. I switched from pen-and-paper tracking to eTools tracking after 27 September 2009.

Top Ten Musical Artists of 2009 is derived from data at last.fm/user/dianaschnuth.

Christmas Blog Recap

Since I've been writing this blog for over seven years, the subject of Christmas has already come up a few times. So, to keep from repeating myself as much as any other reason, here are some of the highlights:

From Christmas Aftermath, 26 December 2003:

Aaron's grandparents' house is a completely different experience than mine. At any given holiday, depending on who shows up, there's between 9 and 17 people around the table. I'm really unused to that kind of massive family gathering, but I'm growing to enjoy it more each year. It's like Aaron said: over at Mom and Gary's, it's kind of fun and relaxing, with lots of quality time with just them, but after a while you get bored — especially if they're watching TV or talking on the phone. At Poppa and Grammie's, though, it's exciting and fun to be with so many people at once, but after a while you get frazzled and just need to leave. :-)

Back in 2004, this was what our street looked like on the day before Christmas Eve (thankfully, I had Christmas Eve off that year):

I've also recounted the story of my Santa Claus deconversion:

I remember the day well. I was six years old, and it was December 1982. I was sitting at the kidney-bean-shaped table in the front of my first-grade classroom, with the five or six other kids in my Advanced Reading group.

Mrs. Henighan asked us, "How many of you believe in Santa Claus?"

I raised my hand, of course. What was there not to believe? I didn't realize there was any believing or not-believing involved. Santa had magic keys to my apartment, and brought me toys on Christmas Eve. End of story.

Only one or two other kids raised their hands.

Oh, hey, here's my first Christmas!

A few years back, I compiled all of my Christmas childhood memories (or the most vivid ones, anyway) into one massive blog post:

We had fantastic 70's ornaments, too. They were all either orbs or pointed oblongs or bells, in pastel green and yellow (and blue?), with this great crystal-like coating, almost like large crystals of salt were glued to the outside of the ornaments. They made a neat brushing tinkling sound against the tree when they moved. There were also ornaments I'd made in school, like my handprint in plaster and things like that. We also had strings of lights, of course, both large blue indoor/outdoor lights and small indoor blinky lights, which would all be strung on the tree together. The blinking strands had to "warm up" first, but they'd start blinking a minute or so after you plugged them in, and would make that distinctive *buzz-tink* as they blinked on and off.

If you'd like some video fun, you can check out my high school choir (with a solo from yours truly) from the 1992 Holiday Concert, or my step-brother Philip and I trimming the tree in 1999 (ten years and fifty-plus pounds ago for me). Or, if you'd prefer some musical fun instead, download Aaron's 2001 compilation, Christmas Music That Doesn't Suck!

Hopefully this gets you (and me) into the Spirit of the Season.

The Atheist Tenor

The first atheist I ever met — knowingly, anyway — was a boy named Aaron Roberts*. He was two years behind me in high school, and was a Sophomore when I was a Senior. We both sang in the chamber choir, which was a small, tight-knit group of about 16 students. We got to know one another well and to feel comfortable being ourselves, and it was in that context that the rest of us learned about Aaron's atheism.

I honestly don't remember it being a problem, or even how it came up in the first place. He never made a fuss about any of the "sacred" songs we sang, and his non-belief was really just kind of a running joke amongst all of us. I don't remember any of us seriously chastising him for not believing in God — which, looking back on the ultra-conservative cornfield that encompassed our school, is surprising in retrospect. We engaged in a brief high-school-level discussion about proof and reason, and we all (as I remember it) agreed to disagree, with no hard feelings. (Aaron Roberts might remember it differently, I suppose.)

The only time I distinctly remember his atheism coming up, other than the initial discussion, was near the end of the school year. One of the pieces of music we were learning had been photocopied on the reverse side of some letterhead for a Lutheran church, and Aaron was one of the first to notice. He joked about being offended by the photocopies, and we all laughed, and went on singing. The end.

As for myself, I do remember being a little sad for Aaron. After all, I knew God's Plan. I imagined that Aaron's life must be so sterile and bleak, not believing in the Hereafter... but Aaron actually seemed quite happy and sure of himself, if still a little introverted and geeky at age 15. (Weren't we all?)

Before the midpoint of the school year, the chamber choir suffered a tragic loss: Scott, one of our tenors, died in a car accident. For many of us, it was our first experience with the death of a peer, and we didn't really know how it was appropriate to react. I didn't, anyway.

Our choir director, Ms. Beall, was sensitive to our feelings, and knew how we would deal best: she led us in "The Lord Bless You And Keep You," then let us have the class period to cry and talk and deal as we felt best. That was a Monday, as I recall; on Tuesday, we had to get back to work, and the tenors suddenly found themselves underbalanced, with one less member. I think that having to deal with the immediate ramifications of a missing member may have helped us deal with the fact that he was gone for good.

At least half the school went to Scott's funeral later that week, and I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of the choral program and the sports program turned out to pay their respects. Honestly, I don't remember if Aaron dealt with Scott's death any differently than the rest of us — outwardly, at least. If he did, I probably chalked it up to the awkwardness of dealing with strong emotions in front of other people, since I definitely had that problem myself.

Life is so short. So precious. Even more so when you realize that there IS nothing else. This is all we have. In all the eons of time, of all the potential people who could have lived, but didn't, we get to exist and be present and alive and conscious for a tiny fraction of eternity. Whether that's 16 short years or 90 short years, we've still beaten the odds.

It's amazing.

* I couldn't for the life of me remember Aaron Roberts' name when I sat down to write this, and had to look him up in the choir photo in my high school yearbook from 1994. Funny how people look different in photos than they do in memories, especially from high school.

Halloween, 2003

Halloween that year was on a Friday night — and, as with all Friday nights, I was home alone, instead of out being social. I'd just started the Atkins Diet, so I wasn't about to have bags of candy in the house to pass out to the trick-or-treaters. Plus, I knew from experience that trick-or-treaters actually didn't come down our street very often.

As I remember it, the decision to go out and photograph was a spontaneous one. I was in an especially good mood as I affixed my trusty Minolta to my tripod and headed out to squeeze off a roll of Halloween pictures.

These are some of the better ones...

read more...

Seven Years Running

Before I had a proper content management system for my blog (i.e. Movable Type), I updated my blog manually. This was back from September 2002 to March 2004. For a few months after that, I used LiveJournal.

It's been slow going, importing all those old entries into MT, and I'm not done yet. I've recently taken up the project again, working backward through time, and am currently importing blog entries from Spring 2003, around the time Aaron and I got married — I had to create a category called wedding — and around the time my Memaw died of complications from lung cancer.

Since I have to at least glance through every entry I import, to make sure my customized PHP script correctly stripped and reorganized my Dreamweaver HTML code into MT Import format, I'm being reminded of so many things that were going on in my life back then. Our wedding and Memaw's illness were at the heart of it, yes, but I was also noticing how overweight I was, and I was complaining about a job I wouldn't leave for another six months.

It amazes me how naive I was about blogging back then. I literally had an audience of about a dozen close friends, and although part of me knew that my blog was technically open for anyone in the world to read, I didn't actually think anyone would care. Now, though, as I'm looking through the rants about work and the details of my bachelorette party, I'm having to decide whether to edit certain things, or to just leave them for posterity and trust that a future employer won't blackball me because I took three drags from a joint in the privacy of my own home once upon a time.

There will eventually be official blog entries back to late September 2002, and a few brief bits (before I knew what a "blog" was, and was just copying off of Timmay's regular updates) from early 2001, during my last semester in the dorms.

It's a blast from the past, for sure.

Within Your Means

I've been feeling a little guilty this year. —No, guilty isn't quite the word I'm looking for, but it'll do for now.

The economy has gone to shit. I know people who have lost their jobs. I know people who have lost their houses. Yet, here we are, myself and my husband, enjoying our pricey Starbucks every weekend, splurging on sushi at least once a month (if not more), and flouncing off to Tokyo this past May. We've also planned a weekend getaway to Chicago for Labor Day Weekend, and have every intention of going someplace especially awesome again next Spring.

Like I said, part of me feels uncomfortable with our conspicuous consumption. Yet, on the other hand, I'm proud of us for being able to afford our few extravagances.

Aaron and I were so used to scraping by. When we first moved in together, Aaron was working part time, and I had a shitty-paying job that had nothing to do with my degree. We opted to keep our finances separate — an arrangement that we still keep to this day. We each paid our own personal bills, like student loans and credit cards, but split the rent and car insurance and utilities and such.

When Aaron went full-time, that definitely helped us financially. With his higher pay, we were able to afford our new car (to make us a two-car household), and our wedding, and our house. He started paying more than half of the bigger bills, like the rent/mortgage payment, and footing the bill for most of our leisure activities, all of which made my life a lot easier.

Then, two years ago, I got laid off of my shitty-paying job (which, surprisingly, gave me a respectable severance package), and subsequently found my current job. Aaron and I are now on equal financial footing again, as far as income goes, and are doing well. Our aforementioned "new car" has been paid off for a couple of years now. My severance package paid for one of our vacations, and I was happy to pitch in some savings and some credit to help fund the other two. I rolled over the 401(k) from my old job into my new job. I squirrel away money into my savings every pay period automatically, so I barely even miss it.

Have we been lucky? Absolutely. I don't deny that.

So, what if our luck runs out? What if I find out that, on top of not getting a merit raise this year, I'm getting a cut in salary — or, worse, that one of us is getting laid off permanently?

I have almost a three-month emergency fund saved up in a high-yield savings account, so we wouldn't be S.O.L. right away. And that's assuming we wouldn't make any lifestyle changes, like canceling our cable internet, or going back to eating ramen noodles like the old days. I'd go back to paying the minimum on my credit cards, and I'd look into getting a forbearance on my student loan. I'm sure Aaron would do the same. And whichever of us was still gainfully employed would pick up the slack. That's part of what being married is all about, after all.

I'm not trying to sound condescending or smart, and I hope this doesn't come off that way. I'm trying to point out that, even after I got a new job with a salary that was waaay beyond what I'd expected, our financial reach didn't exceed our grasp. Sure, I still have a massive student loan debt to pay off, and I carry credit card balances. I'm not debt-free, not by a long shot. But it's manageable.

And I refuse to feel guilty for enjoying myself every once and a while.

Sucked In By YouTube

All it took was a tweet from Talcott: "How wrong is it that I find the analog signoff montage from the PBS station I grew up with kinda touching? http://tinyurl.com/putgp6"

And, damn it all, that got me YouTube surfing. That's never a good thing. Well, it is, but not if there's anything else you want to get done. I've been surfing YouTube for an hour now.

First, it was analog sign-offs. I was looking for nostalgic or classy ones, but found a lot of Action News-style ones that ended with, "push the button, Fred—"

Then, I started looking for my favorite version of the PBS ident montage.

(The one at 0:35 is the one I remember from my childhood.)

From there, of course, I moved on to Sesame Street clips, discovering by reading comments along the way that I was not, in fact, the only kid to be scared by the "funky chimes" ending credits.

Then I found this one, with Olivia and Linda (although I usually think of Bob and Linda doing this one — they were a couple, after all). I'd be willing to bet that my Mom still knows all the signs to "Sing."

I also had never heard Luis sing it en Español while playing the guitar.

Aaron thinks it's bizarre that I remember so much music from kids' shows. I could still sing you any regular Mr. Rogers song, or most of the standard Sesame Street songs (late '70s to early '80s, and some mid-'80s when my cousin Michael watched).

Watching all these old clips makes me kind of misty. I hate to think I'm nostalgic for the days of half-day Kindergarten, when I'd come home and have a lunch of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and a naked hot dog, and lay on the floor in front of the tiny color TV in the living room to watch Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers (and The Electric Company and 3-2-1 Contact). Age five or six is an odd age to be nostalgic for, don't you think?

A Quick Thought About "Sexting"

Back in the mid-to-late-90's, before cameraphones or affordable digital cameras, if you wanted especially sexy photos of your honey, you had to either know someone who knew someone who had access to photo developing, or you had to know about THAT ONE PLACE in town that would develop and print ANYTHING. (Within reason.)

Or you had to find a Polaroid One-Step at the thrift, which is the route we went. And, boy, the two times we used that Polaroid were fun and sexy at the time, but overexposed and unsexy afterward.

People who came of age even just five years after we did had a completely different experience. These days, kids and young adults have easy access to digital cameras and cell phones that don't care what kinds of photos you take. I can completely understand why hormonally-charged adolescents and post-adolescents would get off on sending sexy pictures of themselves to their boyfriends.

What's unfortunate, though, is that the part of the brain that makes decisions and judgments is the last to develop, as I understand it. Doesn't texting a sexy picture of yourself to your Significant Other sound pretty erotic? Sure it does — until you think one or two steps ahead. I know that there were plenty of times I was guilty of that sort of reasoning — well, not about sexy pictures, but about other things, like words said and notes written and homework ignored and classes skipped.

Is there a solution? Sure. Make sure your children understand the permanence of the internet, and teach them how to think critically and project the consequences of their actions. It's not a quick and easy fix, like putting a content filter on your internet and TV, but it's a thorough and responsible solution. I know I can't really pass judgment, because I don't have children; but I do know what my mother taught me about sex and responsibility, and what I learned on my own.

If I'd had a digital camera or a cameraphone back in 1997, would we have taken sexy pictures like we did with the Polaroid? I'm not sure we would have, since the novelty wouldn't really have been there. If we had, though, they might have looked a little less... embarrassing.

Winnie the Pooh Worships Satan

Back in college, this teensy video took an hour to download over 10base-T ethernet on-campus. It was TOTALLY worth the wait, though.

The Best Years Of My Life?

I don't remember exactly how I came across it, but I found a Facebook group that someone had set up for alumni of my high school band — specifically, people who had been in band in the '90s. As I graduated in 1994, most of the group wasn't quite relevant to me, although I did see a few posts from people I knew. Mainly, though, I saw younger siblings of people I'd been in band or choir with, or people who had been in 8th or 9th grade when I was a Senior.

As a general rule, I look back on high school and junior high and only remember the weird ostracism and depression I experienced. Somehow, though, reading through this group's posts and photos made me remember that it wasn't all so bad.

Afterward, I went to my own photo albums and scrapbooks for photos to add to the mix, since the early '90s weren't so well represented — and happy times hit me smack in the face. All of us band geeks would hang out together before school by the band room, since that's where our oversized lockers were. We'd also hang out there after school and during lunch, and I have the pictures to prove that we were all enjoying ourselves. All of us. Even me.

Senior year wasn't a cakewalk. Sure, I had some weird teacher crush on my band director, which hit me square in the face when he got married that winter. Sure, one of my friends got asked out by the guy I'd been crushing on since Freshman year. I definitely did have a massive case of Senioritis. I was also spending so much time on music that I neglected my studies, which led to some very awkward moments in the second half of the school year, culminating with my not participating in the graduation ceremony with my class. But those things don't have to define how I remember all of high school, or even all of my Senior year.

High school still feels like a completely different life, lived by a completely different person. (Hell, even college feels like that a lot of the time.) But it's good to be reminded that, while high school wasn't the Best Years Of My Life like some people claimed it would be, it wasn't as bad as I tend to remember it.

Mr. Hange Was Right

Mr. Hange's Advanced American History class was an anomaly for me; while I enjoyed his irreverent teaching style, I performed poorly on projects and tests, and ultimately got a particularly shitty grade. I'm a habitual procrastinator, and my projects and papers reflected that.

The tests were all essay.

Mr. Hange looked for particular concepts and vocabulary to appear in each answer. To his credit, he did tell us in advance what information we should be sure to include, should we be asked about certain things. Hell, I think he even gave us some of the questions in advance, if not all. I was never good at studying for tests, though, and American History was no exception. That was the first class in which I ever attempted to cheat on a test (and believe you me, it's hard to read your neighbor's essay test using only your peripheral vision).

He was also very strict about demanding that every essay question had at least a topic sentence written on the page. If a student left any question completely blank, they would get a zero on the entire test. I remember thinking that the rule was a little stupid, considering that my topic sentences would generally be horrendously generic and pedantic restatements of the question.

Fast forward about 15 years: I'm sitting at my desk at work, taking a project that was created in one reporting application and recreating it in another. Some of it should be fairly straightforward, now that I have the logic straight, but I'm not sure how I'm going to solve certain problems I'm having.

Enter the memory of Mr. Hange's class.

I take the stapled packet of some eight reports and go through each, doing what I can, noting what still needs to be done. It feels so much like going through those stapled sheets, a typewritten challenge heading each one, and writing those topic sentence restatements before going back to finish the real work at hand.

Granted, today's project involved a lot more than just a cursory topic sentence, but it still reminded me of 11th grade.

So, even though I totally sucked it up in your class, Mr. Hange, I still learned something from your essay tests. Thanks.

(By the way? I also remember the SQRRL method of scan-question-read-reread-learn; and that the war hero usually gets at least the presidential nomination, if not the presidency; and that inauguration addresses really shouldn't be that long in February; and about how tradition is a hard habit to break; and that Indiana is EAST of Illinois. Among other things.)

Disjointed

Ironically enough, having an online journal has really fragmented my personal journaling in general.

I have diaries and journals dating back to when I was... let's see... seven years old. For posterity's sake, my first-ever diary entry went a little something like this:

6|28|'83
Today I had My Blood Test. I was a little Nervice. Tomorrow I Have My Tonsils out. I'm a bit Nervice about It. Bye-Bye!

(Thank goodness my entries got a little more engaging over the years. At least, I hope they did...)

I didn't really get into regular journaling until middle school, though. From 7th grade through high school and early college, I can string together a set of nine volumes (plus a sheaf of notebook paper and a spiral-bound notebook) that chronicle the happenings of my life, with only a few months-long breaks in the action.

In my later college years, the journaling started to fragment, moving to random notebooks and text files and whatnot. Once I started blogging — officially, late 2002 — most of my thoughts were finally consolidated into one place.

However, everything I need to journal is not safe for public consumption. I suppose I could write unpublished entries in my blog, but that always leaves the possibility of an accidental publishing to the world. I'd rather keep a private text file on my computer for rants about individuals, or weird dreams I've had, or talking about life events that the world really doesn't need to know about. Plus, I've been known to write longhand in a journal I keep in my purse. (I haven't done that for a few years now, but I did that for a good year or two, around 2006.)

So, despite my prolific writings online, my inner musings may be lost to the ages if I don't end up printing them out and saving them in their own rightful volume, next to the other chronicles of my life.

Granted, these precious chronicles of my life are stowed in a box in the extra bedroom, but still...

Ah, Courtship.

Aaron and I had been dating for less than a year when he moved out of his dad's house at age 22. After that, we were finally able to spend weekend nights together (as the twin bed in my dorm room wasn't terribly conducive to overnight stays, and I couldn't exactly sleep over at his house with his dad around).

Those days were lean for Aaron, monetarily speaking, so he'd make food for us most Saturdays, except when we went to the $5 Chinese Buffet for lunch. There were a couple of years, one in particular, that I remember spending entire Saturdays in his apartment, eating Chicken Helper Shake-N-Bake for lunch or dinner — rather, the more generic but still tasty Chicken Bakin' Magic or Chicken Bakin' Miracle — and playing video games ALL DAY LONG. Broken up by rounds of snoo-snoo, of course.

Recently, Aaron ripped the audio from the Puyo Puyo Sun PlayStation game, and we listened to a few select tracks on his computer, including the intro:

We played the shit out of this game back in the day, so I didn't even need the visuals. I pantomimed everything that went on during the intro, even though I hadn't played the game for years. And when the track got to about 1:35, I made the funny face I used to always make, mocking the main villain character (who, incidentally, is named Satan).

Yep, those were the days.

So, what else did we play? Let's see... we started out on Saturn and SNES, mainly, then moved to Dreamcast and PlayStation. I remember playing Bust A Move, and Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, and Dr. Mario. [Edit: And how could I forget Tetris Attack? We played the shit out of that one, too.] We didn't just do puzzle games, though; I held my own quite well in Soul Calibur and the occasional Bushido Blade. Later on, we got hopelessly addicted to the Tony Hawk games, with 2 and 3 being our favorites. As we got a little less rabid in our gaming days, we'd play Cool Boarders 2 and SSX Tricky and the later Tony Hawk games and Dave Mirra.

These days, we don't do a whole lot of gaming together on the weekends. When we do, we tend to stick with Carcassone on Xbox 360, or Boom Blox, or sometimes Wii Sports or Rock Band.

We should really get back into gaming together, though, even if we have to drag out the Saturn or the Dreamcast to do it right. Those days were so much fun.

How Far We've Come

Diana, Kris, Mark, and Aaron pose in the parking lot after the Dirtbombs show on 21 September 2002, at the Magic Stick in Detroit. We sat the camera — whose was it? — on the roof of the car, set the timer, and posed together behind the back bumper.

Diana and Aaron are both at maximum girth (and still engaged), Mark is younger and skinnier, and Kris... well, he's just Kris. At least some things never change.

(Incidentally? I officially started blogging the day after this photo was taken.)

Stale Blog Notes, 2005

Once again, from the depths of my unclean inbox:

17 November 2005 | 4:08pm

note to self: office soap operas are fun. changing info on one's own loan can turn out to be very un-fun, however, especially when it results in termination.

I'd wager that the statute of limitations on this story has expired, so I'll go ahead and tell it, since not only has the employee in question long since been terminated, but her former company is also defunct.

The employee in question — we'll call her N — had apparently been making small but unauthorized changes to her personal line of credit for some time, and no one had noticed. We worked in Loan Corrections, after all, so part of our job was to adjust interest rates upon request. Where N made her mistake, however, was cutting her interest rate by some 6% or more one day.

The comic tragedy of all this, and how she got caught, is that Loan Corrections also monitored changes made to interest rates for lines of credit, and confirmed that those changes were correct and authorized. Had N only waited until it was her turn to monitor rate changes, she might have gotten off scot free. As it was, a particularly diligent employee (not me, thankfully) was on rate changes that week, and saw that N had made a change to her own loan. He took it to our supervisor, and the rest was history.

I honestly don't remember exactly how things went down, but I do remember that her takedown was swift. Most Many of us didn't know what had happened, why N wasn't at work, and why N's desk was being cleared out until the rumor mill swung into action.

Ah, the hijinks and hilarity of working at a bank.

2008: Year In Review

It's become a New Year's tradition for me to write a retrospective of what has happened over the course of the past year, and I've found that I really enjoy going back and reading past years' reviews. They tend to encapsulate the important things, the high and low points, and some things that I would normally have forgotten by the end of the following year.

For quick reference, I have Years In Review from 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and now 2008.

Instead of going entirely chronologically this year, I'm going to group the major happenings by topics.

Hot topic #1 for 2008: Weight Loss. I started out the year with a weight-loss challenge against my friend and former co-worker, James. We both started out strong, but fell off the wagon after about a month and a half. In March, we spearheaded a new Spring Challenge, which lasted for another couple of months before we mutually decided to call it quits.

I didn't call it quits entirely, though. Shortly before we decided to end our Challenge, I joined Weight Watchers — on my 32nd birthday, in fact. Since then, I've lost about 20 pounds in eight months. Aaron's joined up, too, with the online program, and lost over 60 pounds in six months. We're both looking and feeling much better, and a "normal" and healthy weight is just within reach.

Hot topic #2, closely related to #1, was Health and Fitness. At the end of January, I tested for and earned my ranking of 6th kyu in Aikido. I'd been practicing for about six months at this point, and earning my rank felt like a major goal achieved.

Unfortunately, testing time closely corresponded with bronchitis time, and Aaron and I managed to infect much of the dojo on testing day. We both spent some time off of work, and I spent some time away from Aikido. This was just the beginning of the end of my Aikidoing; I went back to the dojo sporadically between February and May, then never made myself go back after our vacation.

Before I go off on a tangent about this year's vacation, let me wrap up the topic of fitness: Aaron and I made a habit of walking the University/Parks Trail together on the weekends during the summer, then started the six-week HundredPushups.com program in November.

OK, on to hot topic #3: Our Hawaii Vacation. This was the follow-up vacation to 2007's Japan vacation; we never thought we'd be able to afford either, but there we were, affording them. Granted, Japan was funded by credit cards and carefully-saved stash, and Hawaii was mainly funded by the unused severance pay from my previous job, but still.

Our Hawaii vacation was awesome for different reasons than our Japan vacation had been. We went snorkeling, parasailing, took multiple bus tours, ate Japanese food (thanks to the prevalence of Japanese culture and tourism in Hawaii), shopped, luaued, and learned to play the ukulele.

Also under the topic of travel is one bit of info that I failed to post to my blog, but Aaron posted to his: our trip to the World Crokinole Championship in Tavistock, Ontario. Aaron and I traveled with our friends Mark and Rocky up to rural Ontario, where we participated in the annual crokinole tournament. The good news? I won the early-bird drawing and received a free World Crokinole jacket. The bad news? Out of 136 entrants in the Adult Singles Division, I came in DEAD LAST.

Apart from these main topics, a few other events deserve an honorable mention. Concerts don't happen very often anymore, but we did get to see Matthew Sweet, MC Frontalot, and Avenue Q (more of a musical than a concert, but it still fits). We've also scaled back our anime convention attendance, but we hit Anime Punch (our favorite) in Columbus in April, and used our frequent flyer miles to head out to Providence for the first-ever 21-and-over anime con in October.

On a more egotistical note, I donated 13 inches of hair (again) in July and, not long after, bought my first pair of jeans at Buckle (a "real" clothing store, instead of a specialty store for plus sizes). I also celebrated my one year anniversary at my new job.

One other happening that can't be forgotten: in August, Aaron's grandmother passed away. She'd been suffering from Alzheimer's for several years, but hadn't been in poor health, so her passing was sudden and unexpected. We all got together to remember Grammie, and to honor her life, and I think that we all learned something new about her and about each other in the process.

If I had to pin one label on 2008, I'm not sure what it would be. This year wasn't the year of change that 2007 was, but it was, at the very least, another banner year for weight loss for myself and Aaron. We're hoping to keep that going through 2009, and to make the coming year a year of maintaining momentum.

Sesame Street and Sausage Cake

Earlier this evening, I posted to Twitter:

Busting out my DVD of Christmas on Sesame Street and preparing to make the annual sausage cake. Yes, there's really sausage in it.

Aw, Mr. Hooper! This is making me cry already. Not good. BTW, Big Bird ice skates about as well as I do.

Now, sausage cake is a regular Christmas tradition (whether I'm dieting or not), but I hadn't seen Christmas Eve on Sesame Street in years and years. So, when I decided to combine the two into a new yuletide tradition, I hadn't counted on the fact that Sesame Street would make me bawl.

I'm not sure why this happens. Maybe my 32-year-old heart just can't handle remembering what it felt like to be a wondering little four-year-old. When something hits me just right, though, like this DVD bringing back those memories of curling up with Mom and Memaw, watching my favorite Christmas specials by the flicker of pillar candles — I just lose it. I used to be such a rock, too.

Anyway, between wondering whether kids these days know that there really was a Mr. Hooper, and realizing that David really was pretty cute, and signing (and singing) along with Keep Christmas With You, I actually did manage to make some sausage cake.

I mentioned yesterday on Facebook that I'd be making sausage cake soon. Some of the responses:

Barb: sausage cake?

Me: it's a family tradition! it's like a spice cake, with raisins and cinnamon, but with sausage and chuck in the mix. supposed to be an old welsh recipe.

Manh: sausage cake?, i was thinkin' the same thing

Barb: Hmmm, sounds interesting but I think I'll pass...

Jess: I don't know about sausage cake... is it greasy or do you brown and rinse the meat prior to adding to the cake?

As I've mentioned before, the sausage cake is a Cook family holiday tradition. Since I'm sworn to secrecy about the recipe, I can't share with you all the gory details, but there are some parts of the baking that really hark back to my childhood, like mixing the ingredients with my hands (see above). It looks gross, but it's the perfect job for little hands, and it brings back great, giggly memories.

There are other parts that my mom used to do that make me feel grown-up now, like making the brown sugar topping. It's kind of a candymaking sort of affair, and it takes a strong arm to beat the syrup as it cools. It's also a challenge to pour the topping on the cakes before it hardens. I remember watching Mom making this when I was a child, standing nearby and smelling the spices and listening to the sound of the brown sugar syrup as it crackled and cooled.

I wonder if any of my more distant cousins on Grandpa Cook's side of the family make this recipe every year? I wonder if they have memories of it like I do? Wouldn't it be neat if I met or wrote to my cousins someday, and we had this in common?

I wonder how far back this recipe goes...?

Cursed?

The coffee shop where we had our first date is now a Mexican restaurant. The local restaurant where we had a delicious lobster and prime rib dinner the night Aaron proposed is now a different, franchised restaurant.

I hope nothing happens to Prout Chapel, where we got married. Maybe we should start celebrating milestones in places we don't have any intention of going again...

(Side note: I should probably scan and post some of our wedding photos from 2003 to my Flickr; it's been long enough that I'm sure our photographer wouldn't mind. Too much.)

Starcraft Memories

From: Diana
Sent: Friday, September 05, 2008 4:13 PM
To: sheryls
Subject: RE: o man

Oh, it was fantastic playing Starcraft with the guys at RCC. We’d go to Kreischer-Compton lab after-hours during the summer, hack the imaged PCs so we could network the game, and play Starcraft in the dark using cloned discs. Jamie would always be the Zerg, and Jamie's Phish-loving friend Josh would always be the Protoss. And I’d always be Human, and there were other people who’d rotate in and out, like Kirkum and Gerbil. But one of the humans would finally get nukes, and launch them at Jamie’s Zerg, and everyone’s computer would calmly say, “Nuclear launch detected.” And Jamie would ALWAYS half-stand up and say, “WHAT THE FUCK?!” And we’d all look for the tiny red dot that tells you where the nuke’s going to land.

Good times. :-D

Mixtapes

I love my iPod — don’t get me wrong. It’s portable, it holds a crapton of songs (currently 3149, plus 13 videos and 109 photos), and it’s wearing a neat Japan-inspired skin.

But I really miss mixtapes.

It’s not like I got that many of them — Aaron gave me two notable ones, but I never really traded mixtapes like he did back in high school. I made a lot of them for my own use, though — mainly with incredibly cheesy or obvious titles like “Energy Mix” and “Mellow Mix” and “The 70’s: Selections from Mom’s Record Collection.”

There was just something about the linearity of the mixtape creation experience. I felt like I had to have a plan, or at least a vague idea of what kind of flow (or intentional lack thereof) I wanted to achieve. I had to assemble the source material, usually other cassettes or CDs, but occasionally vinyl. (I don’t think I ever sourced a mixtape from 8-track. And yes, I did have a working 8-track player in the ‘90s.) If I used a song from another tape, I had to cue it up to just the right place on the tape. And then I sat down for the next hour and a half and listened to my creation as I was creating it, hovering over the pause button, waiting for the song to finish fading out before pausing the tape and cueing up the next song. Usually, right after I put the next song in to record, I’d write the artist and title down on the J-card in ballpoint pen, then find something else to do for three minutes (probably reading a Star Trek novel, or doing homework). Then I’d get near the end of side A, and wonder if I had enough room for the next song, and squint into the little window on the front of the tape deck, and make a decision. Either I’d pick a short song (or amusing filler bit, like something from the Clerks soundtrack or Monty Python) and hope I’d make it, or I’d risk wrecking the flow and just fast-forward to side B.

Creating a mix CD or a playlist or what-have-you these days requires so much less time and effort, which has its pros and cons. You’re not required to listen to the masterpiece you’re creating. There’s less guesswork in how much music will fit: either you get a graphical representation of your 80-minute allotment; or, in the case of a playlist, the sky’s the limit. Rarely is a handwritten tracklist included with a mix CD; since you’re on your computer, anyway, you’d probably either type it and print it out, or e-mail the tracklist, or just have your application of choice create a CD insert for you from the filenames or ID3 tags. Not quite as personal.

I’ve almost seriously considered joining one of those Mix of the Month groups online, where everybody creates a mix CD, burns several copies with some art (or at least a tracklist), and gives it to everyone — but I think I’d rather do something like that with my friends. Maybe just for a while. And make it a real audio CD, not a collection of mp3s that we might listen to eventually. Then all of our friends would a.) have a reason to see each other at least once a month (except the long-distance ones, like Amy, who’d probably get a zip file and a jpg via e-mail); and b.) all be able to discuss successful mixes together. Like the legendary Fries mix from Aaron’s high school days. Or his Pixies tape. Or “Hüsker Whü?” (Though everyone would also be able to talk smack about everybody else’s musical taste, too… I could see Heathbar doing an all-Billy Childish mix, or me giving out a poorly-received Emo mix.) We could even remaster those old legendary mixes onto CD — that might be fun.

And, no — despite all my nostalgia for the old days of tape trading, I wouldn’t give everybody Maxell XLII-90’s. Although, now that I think about it, I actually could record from my iPod to cassette…

More Unblogged Thoughts

Again, from the depths of my stale inbox:

4/20/05
I'm such a photographer. Everybody is oooh-ing and ahh-ing over someone's cute family picture, complete with a new baby, and all I can think is, "well, their bodies need to be overlapped more, and his head is tilted too far."

6/20/05
you can't leave your baby alone with your husband for three days while you go on vacation? i find that odd. i mean, when aaron and i procreate, we'll be learning together how to take care of our kid, and most likely one of us will be watching him or her while the other parent is at work, for the most part.

Time Capsule: April 2005

Would you believe that I have old e-mails in my inbox dating back this far?

I've started on the quest for zero, and opted to go to the oldest first. Seems counter-intuitive, I know, but I know how I roll — most of it is probably to-do lists and music I wanted to remember to download, so all I'll need to do is consolidate everything into to-do lists, then do them.

This, though, was interesting: I had obviously intended to post this to my blog, and never got around to it. I didn't know it at the time, but this "process improvement" at my job at Sky was ultimately a precursor to me and James developing a full-blown Access database. That database was a pivotal part in both James and myself getting our current jobs; of this, I have no doubt.

Let's take a trip back, shall we, to the Loan Corrections Department of Sky Bank...

Fri, Apr 15, 2005 at 4:54 PM

I got to do some slightly more fun stuff than usual at work yesterday. We're working on process improvements for our department (i.e. figure out what's a pain in the butt and then figure out ways to fix it), and I volunteered my assistance for some Excel function fun. Granted, I never thought it was all that fun in CS 100, but anything that makes my brain work is keen by me these days. I had to figure out how to show time elapsed from when we log in a request to when it's completed, and it was harder than I'd thought. I had to convert date formats to text and all that jazz, then subtract and reformat the result. Took me a couple hours to troubleshoot, but it was worth it, getting to use my brain. Whee!

Actually using my brain at work. What a concept!

My Obsession With Photos

This weekend, Aaron and I spent an afternoon with his Dad and brother. We went out to lunch, then spent a few hours just talking at their Dad's house.

Of course, me being such a sucker for photos, and being curious about Aaron's family, I started off the requisite photo album viewing by declaring, "I want to see pictures of Fat Grammie!" (Referring, of course, to the brief period of time in the early 1970s when Aaron's grandmother was quite overweight. She went on Weight Watchers and lost it all, and kept it off over the years.)

We ended up looking though nearly a dozen photo albums from the late '60s and the '70s, and I got to see not only Fat Grammie, but Poppa with a beard, and Baby Aaron at two weeks — and Aaron's mother, who passed away just about five years before I met him. I kept being amazed by the people and places I was seeing in these photos — "Wow, you really do look like your mother," and, "Is that the same rocking chair that's still at Grammie and Poppa's house?" and just looking over toward the kitchen to be sure that the linoleum in that photo from 1978 is really the same linoleum that's still there today.

It wasn't until then that I realized why I have such an obsession with photos, and candid, unposed shots in particular.

They're a time capsule.

read more...

When I Grow Up

Funny how certain people can get so obsessive about what they enjoy, but in such different ways.

When I was a kid — and I'm guessing most kids are like this — I went through phases of What I Want To Be When I Grow Up. I remember that being a standard getting-to-know-you question from the grown-ups, and I always had an answer. Well, almost always.

I don't remember when I first joined ballet at age four, but Mom tells me that she gave me a choice between ballet and gymnastics lessons, and I chose ballet. I took lessons at Laura Penton's Academy of Classical Ballet (which has long since changed names and merged with another studio); I attended ballet classes for four years, and tap for one year. During that time, I was convinced that I was going to be a ballerina when I grew up, despite the fact that I was obviously going to be too big overall — both slightly overweight and tall for my age. Neither of these things were quite so obvious to me at the time as obstacles, though, and Mom didn't tell me until long afterward about how Ms. Penton had told her that she already knew I wouldn't get far in the field of dance.

When I was eight years old, we moved from Ohio to Florida. We really didn't have the money for me to take ballet lessons there, and I remember being horribly upset... for a few months. Once I started school, though, my focus shifted from ballet to science. We were within a couple hours' drive of the Kennedy Space Center, and both the local news and my teachers at school seemed to make a big deal of shuttle launches and NASA in general. Over the next year or two, I went on a field trip to Cape Canaveral, watched the Challenger explode on live television, and learned how to program in BASIC. When the Guidance Counselor at school asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I told her I wanted to be a computer programmer for NASA. And she told me that I shouldn't limit myself like that.

At the time, I thought that was the most bizarre response to my highest aspiration. I understand now.

read more...

Adolescent Karma

If someone would have told my sixth-grade self that everyone's awkward at age eleven, I would have thought they were just trying to make me feel better.

I was the new girl. Not only that, but I was chunky — almost 5'7" and 160 lbs, just barely starting my growth spurt — with no sense of style and what seemed like a bumper crop of acne. I also got placed in the advanced class with the smart kids, as I had in the two previous elementaries I'd attended. Add to that my love for music class and choir (which were more of a stigma than being in the supplemental advanced art class in the afternoons), and I was one seriously dorky kid.

I felt like I only had one friend in the whole school (although I later learned that I was mistaken, at least from others' point of view), and even she didn't consider herself my "best friend." I felt taunted and persecuted and awkward in so many ways. I heard people talking about me when they didn't think I was listening, calling me fat and lazy and stuck-up.

That's why the unannounced Scoliosis Screening ultimately gave me such sweet and silent satisfaction.

For those who don't know or don't remember from middle school or junior high, scoliosis is a condition wherein the spine develops an unusual curve, described to us sixth-graders as an S-curve (although it can be more complex). As it often develops or becomes more pronounced during adolescence, we were the perfect age group to screen.

Screening involves standing in front of a qualified medical professional and bending forward in a deep bow, so the nurse or therapist can clearly see the spine.

The shirtless spine.

They took the girls to the girls' restroom — I forget what they did with the boys — and had us each stand in an open bathroom stall, so only the nurse could see, for privacy's sake. Then we removed our shirts, leaving our undergarments on, and bent over as instructed.

However.

The skinny girls? They had no boobs at age eleven. Unlike me, who did. For them, wearing a bra was more of a grown-up novelty than a necessity. For me, it was starting to become necessary.

One of my very few sweet moments of karmic bliss that year was listening to the snobby popular girls twitter amongst themselves in the girls' bathroom about how they couldn't believe this was happening to them, how they didn't wear a bra today! And they had to take their shirts off for the creepy nurse ladies!

It didn't make me any more popular or more accepted, but I sure was glad I'd worn a bra that day.

Making Do

Don't worry 'bout your laundry
Forget about your job
Just crank up the volume
And yank off the knob

—Weird Al Yankovic, "UHF"

I know it's not quite what Al had in mind, but whenever I think of this lyric, I'm reminded of the television my Mom and I had when I was in early high school.

It was a small color TV, maybe a 12-incher, circa 1982 (or before). This was the last TV we owned that had actual knobs to change channels, and a smaller knob below the channel selectors, labeled "Pull On / Vol." This was how you turned on your television in the days before remotes, kiddies: grab the knob and pull. (Unless it was a twist-knob instead of a pull-knob, in which case you clicked it to the right to turn the TV on and then adjusted the volume, like the black-and-white TV we had when I was little. But I digress.)

The only problem was, by the time I was in high school — actually, long before that, now that I think about it — the power knob had made a break for it. All that was left was a small, black post with one flat side, barely protruding from a round hole in its wood-grain housing. To turn the TV off, we simply unplugged it. To adjust the volume, we carefully pinched the post with our fingertips and turned it, usually levering against the flat side of the post to make for easier and more precise adjustments. If we accidentally pushed the post back into its housing, into the "off" position, that meant getting the tweezers out of the bathroom and spending a few minutes way too long coaxing the post back out of its home.

Eventually, one of Mom's boyfriends visited our apartment and was aghast at the outdated television we were watching. He bought us (among other things) a brand new twenty-some-inch newfangled TV with a remote, and we finally entered into the 1990s with the rest of society.

I think it's funny, though, how I never really thought about how ghetto our old TV was. I mean, I didn't really care that it wasn't new or fancy; I was just glad that it served its purpose, like my bed (a frame salvaged from a discarded sleeper sofa) or my desk (an old sewing machine table).

We just made do with what we had.

Unsour Grapes

I was sitting at my desk today, eating some grapes and reading a training manual, when my mind started to wander. I remembered being about ten years old and visiting my Granny in Florida, and eating the grapes that grew wild on her property.

My extended-nuclear family (myself, Mom, Memaw, and Aunt Sammie) had moved to Florida, ostensibly to be closer to Granny and Uncle Charlie (Memaw's mother and brother). So, for a three-year stretch in the mid-80s, while we lived nearby, we would visit Granny and Charlie on a regular basis — maybe once a week? We'd make the half-hour drive south from Riverview to Ruskin, passing retirement communities and various small towns and orange-packing plants and long expanses of nothing but sandspurs, until we finally took a few turns down overgrown back roads in Ruskin and made the left-hand turn onto Granny's weed-choked driveway. I still remember the sound of the tall, dry weeds smacking the underside of Sammie's car as we rumbled up the long drive, following the tire tracks through the overgrown palmettos and vines and other various semi-tropical underbrush.

Charlie's old blue truck would be parked by the shack, and we'd pull into the front yard (which looked like every other front yard I'd seen in Florida: mainly sand, with a few sparse patches of crabgrass and prickers and sandspurs). Granny and Charlie were always glad to see us, and they'd come out of their shack to greet us with big ol' grins on their weathered faces.

Granny and Charlie's shack wasn't really appropriate for company — the floorboards were oddly spaced and rotten, and there was no plumbing — so we mainly stood outside and talked; looking back, I don't even really remember what we talked about. I was young enough that I still enjoyed playing with Granny's thick, leathery skin; and I spent lots of time contemplating her long wispy white hair, always pulled up into about half a dozen tiny buns, each flattened to her head with a single bobby pin. She and Charlie both dipped snuff, so our visits would be punctuated with occasional spitting, either in a coffee can sitting on the ground or just right in the dirt and weeds, and they both smelled of tobacco.

I always had to be careful not to wander off; not that I was really tempted to go exploring, since everybody always made sure to remind me about all the snakes that lived in the weeds. Sometimes, though, Granny would take us back to see her garden. I honestly don't remember much of what she grew, but I'm sure it was typical garden fare, with some southern stuff like okra thrown in for local color.

One day in particular, she took us a different way, opposite from the way to the garden. Just around the corner from where we'd parked our car in the yard, there grew a wild grapevine with ripe fruit. Granny picked a few grapes for us, and I remember how delicious they were, just for being wild. The skins were a silvery-lavender color and were thick; and there were seeds, of course. But I still remember those few grapes as being the best grapes I'd ever had, before or since.

We moved back to Ohio in the summer of 1987, and the last time I saw my Granny was during a summer vacation we took when I was in junior high, a couple years later. She died just after Thanksgiving, the fall of my Freshman year of high school, at age 79.

Funny, isn't it, though, how we can look back on something that seemed so normal and commonplace at the time, and find such joyous details in the memories?

2007: Year In Review

Well, it's that time again: time to look at the past year and check off the big and important things that happened in my life. Accomplishments, tragedies, travels, things like that.

Generally, it's easier to do these things in chronological order, and I'm not going to break with that policy this year. It means, though, that possibly one of the worst things that's ever happened to me gets to go first in the retrospective: my miscarriage. I was pretty vague about it at the time; I hadn't made any sort of announcement to my blog readership in general, since I was only ten weeks along.

The whole experience was just tragic all the way around — it was the one doctor's visit where I didn't bring Aaron along, because it was a last-minute "emergency" ultrasound; at the ultrasound, I got to see, in no uncertain terms, that my child was, in fact, no longer cute and sprightly and waving its appendages like it had been a week before; I had to break the news to Aaron when I got home; we both went to the hospital that evening so I could have the products of conception removed; I got put under general anesthesia for the first time since having my tonsils out as a kid; and Aaron just about got his heart shocked into his throat when the doctor came out of surgery to see him and was apologizing up and down, before she confirmed that I was actually fine.

I spent a couple of days being muscle-sore from the general anesthesia, and another couple weeks of being seriously depressed. Now, nearly a year later, I'm dealing with it much better. It's still tragic, but it's tragic in a slightly more distant sort of way. I think that several things in my life helped me deal with the loss, including having to work with pregnant people and getting into Zen Buddhism.

Shortly after our loss, Aaron and I found ourselves dining at Red Lobster, facing a decision. We now had a second chance to do all the stuff we wanted to do before we had a kid. Ultimately, we decided to go crazy and take a trip to Japan.

We spent six nights in Tokyo in May of 2007, and it was the most amazing vacation either of us had ever had. We're both enamored with Japanese culture, so being in the middle of it for a week was just awesome. We went on an all-day bus tour, shopped at various otaku meccas like Nakano Broadway and Akihabara, went to the Ghibli Museum, attended the Sanja Festival, stayed in a traditional Japanese inn (ryokan), took over 500 digital pictures, and used all the meager Japanese we knew.

In mid-June, I took an unexpectedly spontaneous leap and joined an aikido dojo. A few weeks later, I started sitting with the Toledo Zen Center, which happens to be led by my aikido sensei. Both practices have helped me to be more at peace with myself, and to get that mind-body-spirit connection that I was craving.

Meanwhile, I knew that I would be losing my job in September, when Sky Bank would be officially merged into Huntington. So, shortly after we returned from Japan, I started job hunting in earnest. I sent out dozens of resumes, got a few follow-ups, and landed interviews with two companies. Ultimately, I took a data warehousing job at HCR ManorCare in November. This job literally doubled my previous income, and got me further into the fields of information services and business intelligence.

Those were the banner events of 2007. Other things happened, of course: my one-time mentor, Tim King, passed away in February; I made a feeble and brief attempt to start the Body For Life diet after our Japan trip in May; my Uncle Donnie passed away in March, and I found out about it in August; I was outed as a non-Christian in the Toledo Blade in October; and I made my largest candle sale so far ($50) to my former supervisor in December.

In a word, 2007 was intense. More life-changing events happened in one year than I think I've ever experienced in such a short time. In the end, though, I've come out as a stronger and happier person for all of it.

New Year's Eve, 1999

New Year's Eve 1999: Four couples converged at Kris's apartment for a Y2K celebration of food, drink, music, and Trivial Pursuit. It's fun looking back on these home videos and seeing how we used to spend our New Year's. This year, it sounds like it'll be Fries and Connie spending a little time with Aaron and me at our house. Any of our other friends are certainly welcome, assuming you don't have a concert to attend, or you don't live way far away, or you don't have cooler friends than us to hang out with...

</guilt trip>

An example of fortuitous timing: I hadn't realized that night how low my camcorder battery was, and ended up just barely catching the midnight festivities. That was a lesson to me to always charge my camcorder battery AND bring the adapter with me whenever I used the camera.

Please forgive the crackly audio — I could get it to export either with decent video and blown-out audio, or crappy video and decent audio, but not with both. Hopefully, I'll get the hang of Premiere soon enough.

VH1: Love It Or Hate It... Or Both

These days, it seems that VH1 shows two things: reality TV and retrospective shows. By retrospective, I mean stuff like I Love The 80s (or 70s, or 90s, or whatever). I'm not much on reality TV, but the retrospectives? Those are a freaking time sink. Black hole. I accidentally flip to an I Love The 80s Strikes Back marathon — and the next thing I know, it's two hours later, and I'm wondering where my evening went.

My latest VH1 addiction is the 100 Greatest Songs of the 90s. Watching this show is like remembering all the highlights of high school and college on random. I started high school in August of 1990, and I graduated college in December of 2001, so the 90s were really where I came into my own. I know probably 95% of these songs (I'm not hip to the more hip-hop or rap tunes from the mid to late 90s), and all of those are associated with some time in my life. The Cranberries remind me of being home from college for a semester. Oasis reminds me of the early years of my relationship with Aaron (who used to say I was his Wonderwall, while he was my one Natural One).

You know what this means, right? Hell, yeah. New iPod playlist.

Luckily, they have the entire song list posted on their website. So far, I already have about 30 of the top 100 in my iTunes, anyway.

Some of the songs are kind of WTF — "Oh, God, I hated that fucking Spice Girls song!" — but I'll probably put them on my iPod for completeness's sake. And for the amusement factor.

OK, show's back on. Gotta go. :-)

Christmas in Parma, OH - December 22, 1999

I'm not going to make a habit of posting my home videos to my blog, but I did want to post this one. This is the first part of a belated Christmas present for my family, wherein I'm taking the footage we filmed during Christmas 1999 and putting it together into a properly-edited DVD. I managed to take eleven minutes of gruelingly boring footage of me and Philip decorating the Christmas tree and edit it down into three fairly inoffensive minutes with a soundtrack. Granted, my video editing skillz aren't what they used to be, plus I have to get used to using Adobe Premiere, but I still had fun and turned out a decent home video.

Well, the first part of one, anyway.

RCC Commercial, August 2001

I bought a new toy this weekend: a Mini DV camera. Why Mini DV instead of some other format? For the express purpose of getting the above video out to the masses.

This was filmed and edited by Yours Truly during late July and early August of 2001. This video was to be aired on the closed-circuit campus cable channel during and shortly after move-in weekend, for the purpose of educating the on-campus student body Residence Life Staff about the purpose of Residential Computing Connection (RCC).

When I was done editing and distributing the finished product, I did two things. First, I created an "outtake reel" of all the funnies that happened during filming. Second, I output the final commercial onto the end of the source tape, and snagged said Mini DV tape for my own. I've carried that tape around with me for the past six and a half years, waiting to get my hands on a Mini DV camera (or deck).

The first thing I did when I got my new camera home this weekend was hook it up to the HDTV and watch ye olde RCC commercial. I'd forgotten most of the details of the filming, and it was great to see some of my old RCC friends as I remember them. It was also heartwarming to see the late Tim King again, and hear his voice.

I was disappointed to find that I had not, as I had thought, output the outtake reel to tape. Apparently, I only had it on the server, which has (hopefully) long since been replaced and put to pasture. I guess it's a good thing I still have the source material... ;-)

RCC folk, both old and new, are encouraged to comment here or on the Google Video page. I'd love to hear people's reactions almost seven years later.

My Weight History

I got to thinking about the home videos I digitized from back in 1999, and how the first thing that pops into my mind when I see that image of myself is how fat I was. I was 23 years old, in a stable relationship, living with a roommate who had become my best friend, spending the holidays with my family, generally happy overall — and all I can see now, looking back, is my weight.

That's sad on so many levels...

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Caught On Tape

After digitizing the VHS tape of my high school choir concert, I got the bug to digitize some of the home movies I made back when I first got my "Pro 8" (not even Hi8) RCA video camera. Specifically: Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's of 1999. That was eight years ago, for those of you who are math-challenged like myself.

Eight years is a seriously long time... but, then again, it really isn't. Depends on how you look at it. Now, after thinking about it and seeing it again, it does seem like a long time ago. My step-brother Philip wasn't even in high school yet. I was fucking obese and a half. Both of my cats were still alive. I still had two years until I would graduate college. Aaron and I weren't engaged yet.

It's going to take another several minutes for the video clips to transfer from Aaron's computer (where the capture card lives) to my computer, and it'll probably be several days before I get it all edited together the way I want it. So, in the meantime, here's a few amusing screenshots of me and mine in 1999:

Yes, that's seriously me. I know that the camera puts on a few pounds and everything, but damn. I sure got sloppy. By the way, it would be nearly four years from this date before I decided to do something about my weight.

Fries hosting his Y2K New Year's Eve party. Here, he's about to launch into a description of all the yummy food there was to be had: pumpkin dip (which I honestly don't remember), wings, shrimp, fudge, carrots and ranch dip, all kinds of yummies. I remember the wings and the shrimp cocktail sauce being especially good.

This was one of the weirder things about watching this video: seeing everyone happily hanging out with their now ex-girlfriends. Fries and Kathy, Mikolajczyk and his Heather, and above, Kris and Erica. (Erika? I forget. Doesn't matter.) I almost have to wonder if people seeing themselves on my blog with their exes is OK. You know? It's like the Twin Towers: you can't have them in any pictures or films or video games because it's insensitive.

Once I have my home movies edited, I do intend to post them on my blog via Google Video. The Millennium New Year's Eve Bash is only ten minutes long total, so it's nothing that'll be too painful or embarrassing for anyone, I don't think. Now, Christmas Day at the Smoke household... that could be long and weird and strangely insightful to those who haven't met my step-Gary.

Spirit of Christmas Past (1992, to be exact)

A day or two after the Holiday Concert in 1992 (my Junior year of high school), I came into choir to find a VHS tape on my chair. Someone had given me a copy of the jazz band, concert choir, and wind ensemble performances from the concert — all of which I had performed in, and in one of which I'd had a solo. It's obviously a copy of Mrs. Albrecht's tape — she was the mom who was at every single performance with her giant late 80's / early 90's VHS camcorder. I'm sure someone else must have been taping, too, but they wouldn't have focused in on the red-headed bass so often. :-)

This video brought back so many great memories of high school. I'd forgotten I had any, honestly; when I think of high school, I think of my being a misfit of sorts. Watching this reminded me of what a great time I had in choir and band, and the great relationships (if not quite friendships) I had with my classmates. Fun times were had, like taking Geometry with the choir president, who claimed he knew a hit man who would break our teacher's leg if we could collect a certain amount of money from everyone in the class. But I digress.

As I reviewed this tape, I also remembered every note and almost every word of every song. As I watched Ms. Beall cue the choir's first note, I found myself singing along, accents and all: "GLO - RY to God in the hi-igh-eeeest—" She was a great director, especially considering that she had to accompany at the same time. (I'm sure she still is a great director, too, although these days she's directing the junior high kiddies.)

The first thing I noticed while watching my solo (bookmarked in the above embedded video — just hit Play to hear my, um, glorious voice) is that the camera really does add ten pounds. As does that damnable outfit — mainly the cummerbund. When I was sixteen, I weighed about twenty pounds less than I do today, as I recall, although you'd never know it from this video.

The next thing I noticed was how nervous I was. It was funny: I hadn't watched this video for years before digitizing it yesterday. Still, as I watched my younger self descend the risers and take her place in front of the microphone, my heart started to pound and my breath quickened with the memory of my nerves. It had definitely shown in my voice, too, as my normally smooth vibrato morphed into a nervous tremolo, and any semblance of breath support whooshed away with every quick catch-breath.

After not having seriously sung for so long, I'm taken aback by how mature I tried to sound at age sixteen. I've been known to sing to myself every now and then these days, and I don't even have that dark and mature of a sound now (unless I'm being silly and singing all "looly-loo," as Aaron puts it). To my ear, so many years later, it sounds a little forced. Overall, though, not bad for a high-schooler.

I won't subject you to the jazz band or the wind ensemble. The memories are fun, but the music is painful. Especially the one *really* wrong note from the saxophones in the middle of Russian Christmas Music. The entire jazz band performance is pretty painful, too, come to think of it. (Remind me later to tell you about Ryan Galmarini, our drummer, aka Eternal Freshman. Priceless stuff. Jazz band rehearsals were awesome.)

I never found out exactly why I was given a copy of the performance, or by whom, or if anyone else was given a copy, too. I'm grateful either way, though, because this is the only visual record I have of myself performing with any of my high school ensembles.

Hope you enjoy. Happy Christmahanukwanzakah!

PS - For the music geeks in the crowd, here's links to the specific songs in the concert:

"Be Not Afraid" — Jacobson/Lojeski
  Bass feature: Bill Coersmeyer and Matthew Albrecht
  Women's trio: Jenny Waddle, Diana Cook, Cheri Burdell, and Amy Gumm
"Pat A Pam" — Simeone
  Flute soloist: Melody Marco
"Christmas Hymn" — Baker/Jungst
  Echo chamber group:Jennifer Waddle, May Ying Thao, Cheri Burdell, Brian Murawski
  Conducted by Bill Coersmeyer
"I Wonder As I Wander" — Niles
  Soloist: Diana Cook
"December Child" — Moline/Hayward
  Soprano duet #1: Jennifer Reisner and Elise Bond
  Soprano duet #2: May Ying Thao and Amy Thao
"Twelve Days After Christmas" — Silver

Unemployment Depression

Unemployment Depression: CollegeRecruiter.com Insights by Candidates

If I'm already feeling down after two weeks of being jobless, how am I going to feel if it takes three months? May the Flying Spaghetti Monster save me from such a fate.

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The More Things Change...

The cycle comes around again, and I find myself in a familiar stage of life. Familiar, yet not the same.

Hello, unemployment!

The last time I was unemployed was Winter of 2002. It was January, and I had just earned my Bachelor of Science from BGSU. I was living in my first apartment, alone, more than halfway through my lease, with no income in the foreseeable future. I borrowed money from friends to pay rent and bills while sending out resume after pointless resume. Without a car, my job choices were severely limited, and I ended up finding a short-lived part-time job at a local photography studio. I had also signed up at Manpower, but they'd only landed me one brief assignment at the County Courthouse. Once they found me a full-time assignment at Sky, though, I bid the studio adieu.

I worked in the mailroom at the Sky Service Center for a few months — March through May, I believe it was. There was a major merger that May, though, and the mailroom duties I'd been performing were being moved to another location. So, I was without income again.

Sometime around this point was when Aaron and I moved in together. I don't recall if I was unemployed when we actually moved in, but I do remember that I finally bit the bullet and took a third-shift gas station attendant position at Meijer not long after. That job didn't last long, thankfully, as Manpower called with another assignment: Lockbox at Sky Bank. I quit Meijer without notice, just in time for my Mom's annual visit at the end of June.

I started in July as a temp in Lockbox, was hired on permanently in October 2002, and I've been gainfully employed by Sky ever since.

Until today.

Today is different. I'm getting quite enough severance and retention to keep my half of the bills paid well into next year (if I'm frugal), and I have a reliable car with which to drive to a potential job. I have over five years of experience in the work force (I hate the term "the real world"), and I have a couple different directions in which I'm thinking of taking my career. I have a more professional-looking resume, and I have more experience writing cover letters that actually target the employer's needs. I'm better at interviewing and schmoozing in general. The "me" of today is much more mature and pragmatic and employable than the "me" of five or six years ago.

I'm not panicky. I'm not nervous. I feel like I should be, but I'm not. I just know something will present itself, something that screams my name, not just something that sounds like it wouldn't suck.

I'm going to take a few days' vacation, then I'm going to start the job hunt on a regular workday schedule. I'm fine. We'll all be fine.

You hear me? We'll all be fine.

On Losing Touch With Friends

I had two pretty close friends during my last few years as an active Mormon, both of whom have long since fallen off of my radar. One is Michelle, who was a church friend back when I was younger; and one is Ann, who moved to the Medina Ward as a teenager. Both Michelle and Ann were a couple of years older than I, and both were into "progressive alternative" music back in the early '90s.

When Michelle was 16 and I was 14 or 15, we spent a good amount of time hanging out, doing my makeup, listening to Depeche Mode and The Cure, going to church dances and other functions. She drove me around quite a bit, actually, and I found out later that she had complained to Ann that I never thanked her for the rides. That was one of my first and most striking lessons in gratitude, especially since I had been totally clueless as to why we had suddenly stopped hanging out.

After Michelle stopped hanging out with me quite as much, I hung out with Ann. Ann got her driver's license a bit later, but still well before I did, and we had a few fun adventures (like driving to libraries hither and yon right before closing just to find a copy of "True Stories" to watch -- and going the wrong way down a one-way street in a strange city in the dark). We hung out at her house a lot, and watched "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," and listened to Depeche Mode and The Lightning Seeds, and talked about serious topics like depression, and went to church dances and acted silly and danced like stoned alterna-chicks before it was cool.

Ann and Michelle both went to college out west, in Utah and Idaho, attending Mormon-affiliated schools, and they both married in the mid-'90s. I got to see Ann during the semester I spent at home on Academic Suspension; she'd had a baby by then, and shared with me how understanding and helpful her husband had been during her time on bed rest. As for Michelle, I kept a clipping of her wedding announcement -- I still have it in my overstuffed files somewhere.

Ann Gariety and Michelle Dolivier were such a big influence on who I became in later years, and I often wonder what became of them. I've done web searches, to no avail; they both married into much more common surnames. Really, though, I'm almost afraid to find out where they are now, because I don't want to be disappointed. Some of the friends I have kept in touch with have really fallen short of where I thought they'd be by now. For the most part, my close friends over the years have been pretty intelligent people, and I always expected that they'd make something of themselves. It's disappointing when my friends fall short of who I know they could have been.

I expect that Ann and Michelle are still in the church, still happily married, and probably have a minimum of three children each. Depending on your point of view, that's pretty successful. From my point of view, though... I don't know. I don't measure success like I used to, back when I was a practicing Mormon. If I found out that one or both of them lives in a six-bedroom house in Utah (or Arizona, or Idaho), is Relief Society (LDS women's auxiliary) president, goes to Homemaking Meeting every Wednesday, drives Billy to soccer practice and Suzie to her flute lessons, and makes time to scrapbook and sew... I'd probably be a little disappointed, honestly. Especially if they've jettisoned their CD collections.

Why? I'm not sure. It's unfair to think that way, since that *is* some people's idea (and used to be my idea) of a perfect life, of success. Success, for me, is... what? Still keeping my individuality, even as I try to make my way as a contributing member of society. Keeping busy with creative and constructive pursuits. Being financially stable. Having fun. Being happy with my station in life, or at least happy with the struggle to become more. Being unpredictable and unconventional. Being unique. Making people say, "Yep, that sounds like something you'd do..."

I'd like to think that Ann is still a little unconventional sometimes, although she's always been the motherly, responsible type. I hope she bought the collector's edition of the Monty Python DVDs, and I hope she'll show them to her kids when they're old enough (which should be pretty soon -- her oldest would be about 12 by now). I'd like to think that Michelle still has her old cassette copy of Some Great Reward floating around in her basement or attic somewhere, but that she did buy the CD later on, and has kept up with the more recent DM releases. I hope she taught her kids all the cute and weird camp songs she taught me and the rest of the Young Women in church (e.g. "Sam the Lavatory Man" and the "'Gunk-gunk,' went Mr. Bullfrog" song). I hope she still plays piano.

I hope they remember me. I hope they don't mind that I wrote about them.

Ruth Ann Gariety Hansen. Michelle Davida Dolivier... um... I'll remember your married name eventually. My bad. Maybe you'll Google yourselves and find my little blog and decide to catch me up on your lives. Here's an entire website to catch you up on mine. :-)

Conformity

Once again, I find myself with some time on my hands here at work. I actually have a cache of blog topics to choose from, for just such an occasion.

When I was a young church-going lass, there was a boy who was several years older than me. The oldest of the Headrick kids -- I forget his name. Mom would know, since I think she taught him in Sunday School. At any rate, he was a "normal" kid: kind of soft-spoken, as I recall, and particularly tall. He had one thing besides his height that set him apart, though, and that was his predilection for bow ties. Mormon men and boys, as a general rule, wear standard neckties to church, so his bow ties made him stand out.

When he turned 18, he was called to be a missionary, as all good Mormon boys should be. He was sent out to the MTC (Missionary Training Center) in Utah... and the next time we saw him, he was wearing a normal necktie. Apparently, missionaries are required to wear neckties, and his cache of bowties were forbidden during his mission. I don't know whether he ever wore his bow ties again, after he returned from his mission two years later.

I always thought that was just a little tragic. I understand the need for uniformity, but I've always wondered if the MTC managed to completely eradicate that one facet of Elder Headrick's uniqueness.

I can't believe I've never posted this poem before. I searched my site for it, though, and apparently I never have. My mother taught me this poem when I was little, and I've seen slight variations of the poem and its backstory in the years since. I believe Mom found it in a newspaper article and copied it down back in the mid to late 70s. This is how I remember it (with some help from the internet):

This poem was given to an English teacher by a 16-year-old student. It is not known whether he wrote the poem. It is known that he committed suicide two weeks later.

He always wanted to explain things.
But no one cared.
So he drew.
Sometimes he would draw and it wasn't anything.
He wanted to carve it in stone
Or write it in the sky.
He would lie out on the grass
And look up at the sky
And it would be only him and the sky
And the things inside him that needed saying.
It was after that
He drew the picture.
It was a beautiful picture.
He kept it under his pillow
And would let no one see it.
And he would look at it every night
And think about it.
And when it was dark
And his eyes were closed
He could still see it.
And it was all of him,
And he loved it.
When he started school he brought it with him --
Not to show anyone, but just to have it with him
Like a friend.

It was funny about school:
He sat in a square brown desk
Like all the other square brown desks
And he thought it should be red.
And his room was a square brown room
Like all the other rooms
And it was tight and close
And stiff.
He hated to hold the pencil and chalk
With his arms stiff and his feet flat on the floor
Stiff
With the teacher watching
And watching.
The teacher came and smiled at him.
She told him to wear a tie
Like all the other boys.
He said he didn't like them.
And she said it didn't matter!
After that they drew.
And he drew all yellow
And it was the way he felt about morning
And it was beautiful.
The teacher came and smiled at him.
"What's this?" she said.
"Why don't you draw something like Ken's drawing?"
"Isn't that beautiful?"

After that his mother bought him a tie
And he always drew airplanes and rocket ships
Like everyone else
And he threw the old picture away.
And when he lay out alone and looked out at the sky
It was big and blue and all of everything.
But he wasn't anymore.
He was square inside and brown.
And his hands were stiff
And he was like everyone else.
And the things inside him that needed saying
Didn't need it anymore.
It had stopped pushing.
It was crushed.
Stiff.
Like everything else.

Air For Band

This takes me back to high school band, back in 1992. I joined band my Junior year, and I believe this may have been the first song I ever played with the concert band — in warm-ups. Air for Band was almost always next on the agenda after our brief and basic long-tone warm-up every day. (Music majors, please note that the clarinets are featured, *and* that the main melody is in the difficult "throat tones" of the instrument. Excellent warm-up... in retrospect.)

It got to the point where Mr. W. would just start right into Air for Band before we even got our music out, and we'd have to spend the first phrase or two shuffling papers with one hand and playing with the other. Eventually, I think I had the whole first page memorized; even now, fifteen (!) years later, I can still recall the fingering of the first phrase, and I haven't even touched a clarinet in nigh on ten years. (I can still sing my part all the way through, though, of course.)

Hearing the North Texas Wind Symphony play it so perfectly is almost surreal. In my memory, I can still hear the saxophones (behind me and to my left) completely missing the key change. (One in particular, usually, although they had their days.) Jim would be on the snare in the back; and Jeff, Eileen, or Katie would have the cymbals.

During my Junior year, I was first chair clarinet (yep, my first year in band — it was more because of my attitude than my ability, IMO). That meant I got to sit next to my best friend, Melody, who was first chair flute. We had a vibe goin' on, be it in Concert Band or Jazz Band or after school in the cafeteria. Anyway, I remember it was strange when Mel graduated and I had to spend my Senior year playing Air for Band (and everything else) next to Heather instead.

They weren't the "best years of my life," not by a long shot... but sometimes I forget that they did have their moments. Air for Band was always one of those moments.

Oh, Good.

I'm still smart.

I was just looking at Monster.com, saw a link for the Tickle IQ test, and decided to go ahead and take it for shits and giggles. It would appear that I have not gotten any dumber since the first grade, thankfully; my IQ is still 140.

When I was a kid, I got put in all the Talented and Gifted programs; I felt pretty smug and superior about it, looking back, although I wouldn't have recognized it in myself at the time. In first and second grade, my elementary school had an advanced reading track; all I remember of that is our special reading group and extra trips to the school library. When we moved to Florida for third through fifth grade, their Gifted program was centered around math and science. I liked reading more than math and science, and wasn't too keen on the program at first, but I grew to love science (and tolerate math). We moved again for sixth grade, and the new school system had a SIGNAL program (I forget what the acronym stood for) for gifted students. We read novels for class, in addition to the boring excerpts in our normal reading book; the class struck me as more additional work than advanced work at the time.

Once I got to middle school (yet another district), we were separated into "normal" and "advanced" classes. As I recall, there was no mixing and matching; if you were in the advanced group, you took all advanced classes. If you were in the normal group, you didn't get to take just one advanced class. Of course, I would have taken all the advanced classes, anyway, so I may be remembering it wrong.

In high school (when I went back to the school district where I spent sixth grade), it took me a couple of years to realize that I was no longer *required* to take advanced classes. After I got my first D — Advanced Algebra II, Sophomore year — something finally clicked, and I realized that I didn't *have* to take advanced classes if I didn't want to.

It was all downhill from there.

Well, not really. I opted not to take a math my Junior year, and took the "normal" Analysis class my Senior year. (In my school, Analysis was the "I don't want to take Trig yet" class, not the super-uber beyond-Calc class.) All the other people in my advanced-class circle took Trig their Junior and Calculus their Senior year. I bailed on the maths and stuck with advanced everything else. —Oh, and I don't think I took Advanced Government my Senior year, either.

In my adult life, I've realized that my IQ doesn't really mean shit. I don't always have any more common sense than the next person. My written communication skills are pretty slick, IMHO, but that's just because I'm a perfectionist motherfucker when it comes to grammar and spelling. My social skills have been a long time in developing, but I finally feel like I can socialize like everyone else now, instead of feeling like a socially-inept goober.

Being smart didn't make me more motivated. Being smart didn't make me procrastinate less. Being smart didn't keep me from taking seven years to finish a four-year degree. Being smart didn't get me an awesome job right out of college.

Don't get me wrong: I don't regret the fact that I'm apparently more intelligent than the average bear. It's just that my perspective changed quite a bit once I lost that chip on my shoulder. It's not just smarts that can get you somewhere in life; it's persistence and dedication, too.

*sigh*

I need to get on that.

Home On The Range

We go camping at Harrison Lake tomorrow afternoon. Neither myself nor Aaron have been really camping since Scouts back in elementary school 1, so this should be fun.

We've got our s'mores action going on, our new king-size air mattress to go in our never-used dome tent we got as a wedding present back in 2003, our lawn chairs and bug spray and swimsuits and sunscreen and everything (hopefully) to help us get our camping fun on.

I hope this doesn't suck. This is more of a trial run, hence why we're only camping for one night. If we enjoy camping, maybe we'll do it more often. Until we're sure, though, 3pm Sunday through noonish Monday should be a sufficient getaway.

Update, Sunday @ noon: It's been raining since 8am. Chance of scattered thunderstorms all afternoon, all evening, and all night. Prospects aren't looking good... but maybe we'll pack up the car and head out, anyway, to see what Harrison Lake is like. We'll see how things pan out....

1 This, of course, is not including the ill-fated October camping trip of the girls of 2nd floor Kohl Hall back in 1999. Amy and I were the only people with competent fire-building skills, and our RA had to purchase firewood from a neighboring RV camper. An unseasonably warm October turned coats that night, and none of us got any sleep that chilly autumn night. What had started as an "I don't want to *know* if you have alcohol in your tent, *wink-wink*" party night ended as a 5am "Let's get back to the dorm and get some sleep" morning.

Motivation

Back when I was in college, I had a hard time making myself go to class. (Hence that 7-year Bachelors Degree that should have taken four.) Once I got to my Sophomore or Junior year, I started a juvenile but helpful system to reinforce good behavior: I printed out a monthly calendar, with my class schedule listed on each weekday, and stuck a small happy-face sticker on each day where I went to all my scheduled classes. If, by the end of the week, I had happy-face stickers on every day, I would stick a large "Special Sticker" to the calendar as a reward and a reminder that I had succeeded for that week. Sometimes it would be a sticker of my own, but sometimes my roommate Amy would present me with my Special Sticker for the week, if she was duly impressed.

As I recall, I rarely got Special Stickers -- maybe once a month, if that. Even so, the sticker system really did help me go to more classes. I'd look at my calendar and remind myself that if I could just make myself sit through [insert pointless 2:30 class here], I'd get my sticker for the day. Seems silly, but it worked. Even when I didn't get a Special Sticker for the week, I could see the classes I'd ticked off on each day and say, well, I was only one class away from a Special Sticker this week!

Well, with me trying to focus on only a few things at a time these days, I decided that I would revisit the calendar-sticker strategy. I have a calendar by my desk with a list of daily to-do items: work on my portfolio, follow up with job apps, do one daily chore, wash dishes, walk for 45 minutes, and aikido once a week. I've pruned back a little, since I wasn't able to do everything I wanted to do in an evening -- now I'll either work on my portfolio or follow up on a job app, for instance, but not both. Yet, I hadn't gotten a daily sticker after over a week of trying my new-old system of reinforcement.

Last night, I looked at my daily list, and realized that I just had to do a daily chore and I'd get a sticker. So, pretty late at night, by the time I should have been having my Quiet Time and getting ready for bed, I cleared the remainder of the crap out of the suitcase that's been sitting by my bed for two months, put it away, and counted my chore complete. Yay, sticker!!

Sure, it seems small and silly and childish... but, if it works, I'm all for it. It shouldn't have been such an impetus ten years ago, either, but it was. It's all part of taking joy in the small things, I suppose.

After I finish my new portfolio and secure a new job, I can shift to a new focus: writing, or genealogy, or whatever strikes my fancy in another month or so. Then I'll set myself another reachable goal, lay out daily mini-goals like I have now, rinse and repeat. Eventually, I shouldn't need my sticker system to keep me focused on-task. That's the hope, anyway.

Still Rings True

Recently, I found myself reflecting on some advice given me by my high school choir director upon my graduation. There was one particular passage that resonated in my memory, but I'll quote the whole note here:

May 1994

Well, Lady,

We've arrived at the end of our 4 year association. Only regret I personally have, is not having met you a few years earlier! Did you know back then, that music was your calling?

I've watched you grow and develop your musical skills methodically and academically. The only area you struggle with, can only happen when you decide to let go of thinking and simply; Be; Do; Feel.

My wish for you includes success in a difficult field and personal growth with the new exposures you will now experience. Don't cut yourself off due to insecurities. Take the chance ( - it will hurt some but it isn't endless).

Most Sincerely,
Tamara Beall

Who would have known that, thirteen years later, I would still have trouble with that.

Let go of thinking and simply be. Do. Feel.

Goodbye, Saddlemire

Courtesy of the BG News: University says farewell to Saddlemire

This was the building where I bought my books every semester. This was the building where I sold those same books back every semester. This was the building that was supposedly shaped like a slide projector.

Apparently, the Saddlemire Student Services Building is being demolished, in preparation for an addition to the theater department. I'll grant the theater department that they could use some more space, that's for sure. An additional 500-seat theater, among other facilities, will definitely be a welcome addition to campus.

Still, though... it's weird, watching my university change over time. Granted, it's all for the better, but it's still unsettling.

Smells Like Spring

I realized just now that the smell of spring reminds me of living off-campus during the summers at BGSU. Particularly, the upstairs apartment/duplex on Troup Street, across from the TV station. The one with the unusually short screen door that Aaron would bash his head on every damn weekend. That was the summer of... 2000, I believe.

Of course, this same spring breeze also reminds me of sitting on the porch swing of my efficiency apartment back in 1999; or laying on the top bunk of a borrowed futon-loft in the room I rented in 1998, at 2am with the window open. Spring, to me, smells like standing alone, feeling grown-up, being responsible, but without feeling the weight that true responsibility carries.

Someday, when different memories are fresh in my mind, maybe spring will smell like something else to me — gardening, or travelling, or having the kids home from school. That's a long way off, though.

The smell of spring makes me feel alive, like something new and different is around the corner, and I'm not quite sure why. Maybe it's because I prefer warm spring weather over the cold of winter, or because spring means the daylight hours are longer, or because spring meant the end of school for so many of my formative years. Or maybe it's simply because the greenery finally makes its appearance.

At any rate, this 60-plus-degree weather is fantastic... even though I know it won't last the week.

Dr. Timothy D. King, 1949-2007

Timothy D. King 57, of Bowling Green, Ohio died Friday (February 9, 2007) at Wood County Hospital. He was born July 3, 1949 in Cheverly, Maryland to Thomas & Annie (Kilburn) King. He was married to Patricia (Brown) on December 19, 1970; they were married for thirty years.

He is survived by his sons, David (Hillary) of Chicago and Brian of Denver; daughter, Ellen King of Bowling Green; former wife and close friend Patricia; brother, William (Patty) of Piedmont, Ca.; and special friend Carol Berman of Orchard Park, N.Y.

Mr. King was the Associate Director of Residence Life at B.G.S.U. He received his BA from Macalester College, Master's (1973) & PHD (1978) from the University of Minnesota. He was a leader with Cub Scout pack #358 and a member of the Maumee Valley Unitarian Universalist Congregation. He was an avid cook, a loving father and was known throughout the community for his generosity and witty humor.

(read the full obituary at Dunn Funeral Homes)

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2006: Year in Review

Yes, it's time once again to take a look back at the events and accomplishments that stand out over the past year, and to remind myself that I did, in fact, do something more than just coast over the past 12 months...

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Christmas Memories

I recently wrote letters to my family, asking them to write down some memories about what life was like growing up, and to share some of their favorite memories or stories. Not about Christmas, just in general. I just got Mom's via e-mail this evening, so I figured that I should probably write down some of my own memories, as a gesture of appreciation...

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Diana's First Christmas, 1976

[Posted on Flickr by dianaschnuth].


Thirty years ago this month, this was the scene somewhere in Medina County, Ohio. According to the captions in my baby book:

July 4, 1976 was your first holiday but I am saving this place for Christmas. [Page Title: "My First Holidays"]

You were 8 months old and you were in awe. On the 27th you got the croop and bronchitis and spent 11 days in the hospital.

Gifts: Raggedy Ann, dress and leotards [tights], two squeeky toys, and a teddy bear (at the hospital).

Santa was played by Butch's brother Bill.

Mom also wrote about Christmas Eve in the baby diary:

December 24, 1976: Just got back from Gramma Dobbins. Took a picture of your dad and his girl got real mad. Gean got you a Raggedy Ann.

Later - Everyone was fussing over you saying how cute you are. Bonnie got you a little dress and leotards and she got Grannie [Memaw] and Mom a juice set. It was after midnight when you went to sleep so I'm tired. I was going to watch "The Blue Bird," a Shirley Temple movie, but you have really worn me out.

I love you, good night.
Mom

In addition to all this, I'd just like to mention that the plastic Santa suit with the beard made of quilt batting is so trés 70's. Way to go, Uncle Bill! :-)

Moving Aaron To BG, August 1998

Tuesday 18 Aug 1998 | 12:05am

Fries and I helped Aaron move to BG on Saturday. Three trips: one with his box springs and mattress lashed to the top of the Land Barge, one with his loveseat, and one with his 7-foot sofa. The second trip his car stalled, and the third was in pouring rain. But he's moved in now, and almost settled in at his new place. Basement apartment, yay! "The Schnuth Cave."

During the last trip, with the giant couch, we were driving down Dixie Highway into Bowling Green. Any BG person knows that around Kroger, on North Main Street, the road tends to flood in heavy rains. We weren't privy to that yet, though, and were confused by the police and general chaos happening by the Pharm. As I recall, it was reminiscent of a Bill Cosby skit:

"What's the sign say?"

"The sign says, 'High Water'."

*sploosh*

We ended up driving over the submerged curb into the Pharm parking lot to skirt the massive puddle that was North Main that evening.

After successfully moving the sofa into the Schnuth Cave, I believe Kris declared that he was going down to BW3 (as it was then called) to get a drink.

Scans courtesy of Kris Fries. I'm so glad to have digital copies of these priceless memories!

A Photo Retrospective

[Posted on Flickr by dianaschnuth].


My drumcorps buddy Paul just started a Flickr account and, like so many new Flickrites, has started scanning and uploading photos from his past.

I had been using my Flickr account for artsy photos I was proud of... but Paul inadvertently made me rethink that decision. So, I've started scanning and uploading old photos of my own, starting in 2002. (I was going to start at the end of college in 2001 and work backwards, but 2002 was still a lot of fun.)

Expect more retrospective photos in the near future!

PS - Kris. I must borrow and scan your photo album with the photos of Aaron's move out of Lake of the Schnuth. Especially the one with the giant long brown couch strapped to the top of the Taurus station wagon. Holy shit, that was priceless.

I Miss That.

Time was when my Mom and I would go visit my Aunt Sammie, cousin Michael and Memaw every Sunday after church. We didn't always enjoy or appreciate the visits, but it just seemed like the thing you do on Sundays: go to visit family, eat the lunch they've prepared for you, listen to them complain or just talk, then politely excuse yourself to go home and get out of your Sunday clothes.

Thirteen years later, Mom lives with my step-Gary in Texas, Sammie and Michael live in Carolina, and Memaw's three years gone now. And I don't even go to church anymore.

Even though I'm all connected with the world and with my faraway friends via the magic of the internet, I feel isolated from my family. I don't understand how we were once so interdependent and loving and familiar, and now we're so far apart, both geographically and emotionally. I just don't get it.

Sesame Street Memories

Aaron and I were talking about how it's so easy to spend an entire afternoon or evening on YouTube, just surfing from video to video in a particular genre.

I just spent two hours watching clips of Sesame Street, The Electric Company, 3-2-1 Contact, and Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.

I could go back and link to all my favorite stuff, but I think maybe you should just go and search on Sesame Street and see what you turn up. OK, I guess I do want to share a couple things...

• The Sesame Street closing credits I remember best. I'd forgotten that Fridays had different closing credits than weekdays, and I'd forgotten all about Barkley.


• I'll Miss You, Mr. Hooper, where the grown-ups explain to Big Bird that Mr. Hooper isn't coming back. (I'd always heard that it wasn't long after this episode that David passed away, as well, but the cast had to explain it away, since they'd so recently had an episode about death. According to Wikipedia, though, Northern Calloway didn't pass away until 1990.)

Everybody has their own favorite Sesame Street bits, but OMG. The King of Eight, the Ladybugs Picnic, the series on pollution (that totally freaked me out as a young child), the lost kid on the bicycle that passes all the crazy psychedelic shit, Bert doin' the pigeon... Wow.

I am convinced that Sesame Street was and is quality television. I mean, the Electric Company clips I watched seemed kind of cheesy in that 70's sort of way. The 3-2-1 Contact bits were actually OK, although they were initially meant for an older audience, anyway. But the Sesame Street bits pulled me in visually and with music, although some of the songs were pretty cheesy.

Oh, and did you know that a hurricane hit Sesame Street? Big Bird's nest got all destroyed, and you can buy the DVD to see him deal with his loss and see how his friends help him rebuild his nest. Outside of the typically cheesy musical song-and-dance numbers, I think that kind of sums up one of the neatest aspects of Sesame Street: it takes real-life stuff that a kid might come across in his life, and has the grown-up characters explain it in kid terms. Death, hurricanes, holidays, the Beatles...

Buh-Buhbuh-Buh-Buhbuh, Letter B...

(Swear to god, I knew that version of the song long before I knew why it was funny.)

Thunderstorm

One of my earlist vague memories is of being held by my mother at an open door during a rainstorm. I remember the feel of the mist on my face, the sound of occasional thunder and the flash of lightning, the constant patter of rain, and the clean smell on the wind. As I got older, Mom would stand with me at the door, and I remember her telling me how pretty the rain is.

Mom had had a bad experience with a thunderstorm in her youth, and she consciously tried to make me feel calm and pleasant about thunderstorms. It worked — even now, I prefer to have the windows open during a good rain, to smell the freshness and hear the thunder and the water coming down.

There's a nice, mild rain happening outside, with constant low rumbling thunder and a gentle breeze. I've opened the windows in the basement, where the overhang from the upper floor will keep the rain from coming in. The only thing that would make me happier right now would be a porch and a swing. That way, I could stick my feet out in the rain, like I did during those perfect rainy evenings at my apartment on South Main St. in BG, during the summer of 1999.

Right now, in this moment, I'm content.

When Am I?

I had thought maybe I would do a "Five Years Ago Today" entry, or ten years, or fifteen. (I've kept a journal of some sort ever since 1984, mainly at the suggestion of my mother at first, then kept it up to keep myself grounded and sane.) When I looked through my journals, though, nothing exciting really happened on or around September 26 in 2001, or 1996, or 1991.

As a snapshot: Around this time in 1986, I was ten years old. I was getting over a nasty bout of headlice, during which Mom had to cut off five inches of my hair, to make the fine-toothed-combing easier. I was distraught; when I pulled my hair around over my shoulder, "it barely came to my elbow!" Cry me a river.

Also in September 1986, I joined Girl Scouts. I also read the Star Trek novel Uhura's Song for the second time. I've read that same battered copy literally dozens of times since, and can quote several passages as well as I can quote Monty Python.

Fifteen years ago, in 1991, I was quite the church-going lass. For example: I was reflecting on a lesson on gratitude, and decided to write my high school choir director a letter of appreciation for all she was doing for the choir. She ended up receiving the letter on a day when she really needed the pick-me-up, which did my little Freshman 15-year-old heart good.

I was also interested in composing, and had high aspirations for my music. I'd given a copy of one of my choral scores to the aforementioned choir director, and she said she was going to have the choir sing it... but she never did.

Ten years ago, in 1996, I was hanging out with Aaron and with the Mary/Mark duo. I had also started my personal homepage, giving out my "Di's Unegotistical Homepage" weekly award to none other than Jeffrey Zeldman Presents. I was also missing my late stepdad, Tom, who had passed away almost one year before. Aaron was always supportive and understanding, and helped me be OK with being all weepy about it sometimes.

Five years ago, in 2001, I had one semester left of my undergrad. I had just moved off-campus, and wasn't journaling much — on paper, anyway. I may have done some "Talking To Myself" on my trusty Mac, although I'm not inclined to hook that bad boy up right now to see what's on it. (Yes, I still have it — or at least, a later incarnation of it. I believe I upgraded to my PowerPC 6500 after the year 2001.)

Edit: I actually do have my Word file of random ramblings on my PC, transferred with all my half-finished short stories. The entry for September 26, 2001 begins:

I should learn not to talk wedding with Aaron over the phone. It's never a good thing. He always gets "realistic" on me, saying such confidence-boosters as "I'm going to have to get a second job," and "maybe we should just go down to City Hall," or my personal favorite: "We'll get married... eventually."

I'd forgotten that I was thinking about wedding planning at that point, too. Another good quotable from that entry:

I'm so upset, in fact, that I've just spent the past two hours researching cost-cutting tips on the internet instead of writing my four-to-five-page script for Video class. And Aaron always says, "graduation comes first, then getting a job, then getting married." I know, I know. Life won't stop while I try to find a job, though, and it certainly won't wait for us to plan our little wedding. Or decide when it will actually be held.

What struck me as I was browsing these entries was how I've changed throughout the years. It's obvious through my writing when I became the person I am today, for the most part. I matured through high school, as does everyone — I was painfully dorky in my Freshman year of high school, in retrospect. By 1996, my writing flowed a lot like it does today, and my brain seemed to think much like it does now. I know I was less responsible, more self-centered, less realistic... but I think that, by age 20, I was "me." Maybe even before that.

That makes me wonder: when I get even older, will I still agree that I was "me" by age 20? Or will I have reached some sort of personal epiphany between now and older that makes age 20 seem even more childish?

Seven Years Ago I Was...

• 23 years old, enrolled in Summer semester at BGSU, including my first photography class
• Living in an efficiency apartment with a porch and accompanying porch swing
• Hardcoding my websites and eschewing all WYSIWYG editors
• Wishing I had my own webserver to play with, so I could learn more about PHP and dynamic websites, instead of hosting my shit on Geocities and Angelfire
• Beginning my first (still unfinished) novel on a second-hand Classic Mac (SE 30, I believe)
• Dating Aaron (my current husband) for three years running

Where were you seven years ago?

[inspired by Cameron Moll]

Twilight Sheen

I ended up taking a brisk walk around the neighborhood this evening, just before dusk. I'd strapped on my iPod, and the first podcast I queued up was On The 50 (a weekly podcast of drum corps opinion), and I'm sure that affected my mood on some level.

As I finished my first lap around the neighborhood, I'd also finished the podcast. The sky was that particular shade of blue that means the sun has set, and that it's going to be very dark in about five minutes. The stars had begun to come out, and a light breeze was cooling the sheen of sweat I'd managed to accumulate. Circles of light pooled under the streetlamps, spilling over curbs onto the street.

I queued up another podcast as I started my second lap, but my brain was still focused on a memory. Drum corps in the mid 90's.

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Thirty Years Ago Today

Several years ago, Mom gave me the small "baby diary" she'd kept during the first year after I was born. She started it in July 1976, when I was 10 weeks old. It's really a fascinating look into my Mom's life as a single 21-year-old mother in the 1970s.

July 14, 1976:

Today Bonnie and I went to see the lawyer. I know it will be hard for you to understand why your father doesn't want to admit you are his. I hope it can have a happy ending for all of us.

Well, we took you to have your picture taken. And you heard a squeeky toy for the first time. And you smiled real big for the man. Mommy was glad you smiled.

Your Uncle Donnie held you and you talked to him. He played a harmonica, but you didn't like it.

Good night,
Mom

(It's a small book. That filled up the whole page for July 14.)

Actually, now that I'm older than he was at the time, I can understand. I don't agree with his reaction to the situation, but I do understand. He was 25, messing around with his 20-year-old girlfriend. He wasn't looking for any of this. When he found out, it was probably easier to deny all responsibility. Although I don't know if I can understand his offering to pay to have me aborted. (Sorry, abortion rights activists, but I am pro-life by default. No matter what I might have said when I was 15, I truly am glad to be alive.)

It's been interesting growing up fatherless. I don't think I was scarred by it — of course, I really don't have a basis of comparison. I learned at some point in my youth when it was OK to talk about my parentage, and when I should just let people draw their own conclusions about how I came to live with my Mom and my grandmother. As I got older and more open with people, and as single parenting became less of a stigma, I began telling more people in more situations. Now I'm to the point where I can discuss my bastard nature with co-workers who are younger than me — and who, surprisingly enough, share very similar stories of their own unusual parentage.

I've never met my father face-to-face. It would be interesting, if awkward, to have a discussion with him about that stretch of time in 1975 and 1976 when he so vehemently denied being my father. I'm just curious if he really believes that he isn't the one. I wonder if he ever thought about it, years later.

On a lighter note, I look forward to reading this while I blog about my own (still unconceived) child's first year of life. Or maybe I'll get a little diary and write a few words in my own hand after she goes to sleep at night. I know I'm enjoying reading Mom's (and Memaw's, sometimes) handwritten thoughts, thirty years after the fact.

Update, 9:40pm: Continuing to read through the diary. Some of these entries are making me all misty. Dammit. ;-)

Cleaning Out Keepsakes #2

I was looking for this handkerchief over three years ago, when I was preparing for my wedding. I only just unearthed it yesterday:

I received this at an activity with the Young Women's group at my church when I was in early high school. It reads:

The purity of this white hankie
  is symbolic of your life.
Live, to always be worthy
  of being an eternal wife.
May its whiteness be a reminder
  to please stay clean and pure.
As the linen - May you be strong
  with a testimony sure.

As the lace - May all your life be
  filled with feminine grace
May the inner beauty of your
  soul glow in your eyes and face.
Someday, I pray, you'll be married
  to a clean and worthy he.
May it be in the house of the Lord
  for time and eternity.
Carry this hankerchief with you
  on that special, wondrous day,
As a symbol of the girl you are
  and will forever stay.

I was genuinely disappointed when I couldn't find this to carry with me on my wedding day. Not because I'd remained particularly clean and pure (especially by Mormon standards), and not because I was getting married in the house of the Lord, but mainly because I was so proud of myself for having held onto it for more than ten years for that particular purpose.

A lot of the buzz words will be lost on non-Mormons. If you're wondering what the hell it's talking about, just leave a comment and I'll be happy to add an explanation to my post. For now, I'm going to go on the assumption that you've read enough of my previous Mormon ramblings to understand most of the stuff about eternity and purity and all that.

I still can't bring myself to get rid of this hankie. Am I a packrat, or what?

Cleaning Out Keepsakes

I've been going through some boxes of crap I've moved from dorm to apartment to house, trying to clear out the small bedroom in preparation for painting sometime soon. It's slow going, as it always has been for me. I'm such a packrat.

However... digital photography has made it just a little easier for me to let a few things go. There were some items that I just liked having around for those times when I would go through the box of crap keepsakes and remember when. I photographed the small clock I got as a present from my high school band director, then threw the broken thing into the thrift pile. I almost did the same with my old marching shoes, until I tried them on and remembered how comfy Drillmasters are. *swoon*

Some things I photographed, but I have no intention of getting rid of. This is one of them:

This card breaks my heart every time I read it. In case you're not adept at Granny handwriting analysis, the card says:

With lots of love
your Granny + Charles
Sure would like to
hear from you
when you have the time

We love you
Kiss Diana for me I love her

I was in 8th grade, living with Mom and her first husband, Tom. Granny lived with my Uncle Charlie in Florida, and I hadn't seen her in a few years. (My family lived close to her from the time I was in 3rd grade through the end of 5th grade, and we'd visited once or twice since.)

I had better things to do than sit down and write a letter to my Granny. I was 13 years old, with a best friend and schoolwork and spelling bees.

I had no idea it would be the last Christmas card I'd ever get from Granny.

Granny died just after Thanksgiving of my Freshman year in high school. My choir had just gotten back from a performance at the Public Square lighting ceremony in Cleveland, and my family told me about Granny when they picked me up at the high school. I couldn't say I truly missed her, or felt a giant loss at the time... but later, not writing Granny would become one of the biggest real regrets of my life.

I hope that Granny understood. She had to have realized that I was a budding teenager, and not into writing letters to my great-grandmother. She'd seen a lot in her life, and having a great-grandbaby who wouldn't write was probably understandable, if disappointing.

Now that I'm old enough to appreciate what she might have had to say... I miss her.

Forty Pounds Ago

[Posted on Flickr by dianaschnuth].

As a reference, this is what I looked like when I was 40 pounds heavier. Amy, Aaron and I were going to the Dayton Air Show back in 2003.

I hunted down this photo because I'm thinking that I want to cut my hair and donate it again, and was wondering if I wanted to go with the standard bob again. I think it was cute, but man, I can't get over my hugely round face.

For Diana's Listening Pleasure

I found out pretty early on in our relationship that Aaron was a big music fan. We went to Ann Arbor for our third date, a triple-date with Mary/Drew and Heather/Garza. Aaron definitely tended to gravitate toward the record stores while we were there, and was bummed that he didn't have more money to spend on records (especially since I was jobless and had made him pay for my lunch at Amer's). So, naturally, I was curious about the music he was listening to, as I had never heard of ANY of it.

Before Spring Break, he made me a mixtape. The spine of the insert read: "For Diana's Listening Pleasure: selections from Aaron's CD collection." On the tape were the following songs:

Side A:

1. Wally Pleasant - Stupid Day Job
2. Sugar - Your Favorite Thing
3. Frank Black - Fazer Eyes
4. Catherine Wheel - I Want To Touch You
5. Pure - Lemonade
6. Mighty Mighty Bosstones - Someday I Suppose
7. Ash - Jack Names The Planets
8. Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - Blue X Man
9. Pixies - All Over The World
10. Man or Astro-Man? - Sferic Waves
11. Sebadoh - Magnet's Coil

Side B:

1. Dirty Three - Better Go Home Now
2. Folk Implosion - Lo-Fi Suicide
3. Pavement - Give It A Day
4. Clutch - Big News I
5. Henry Rollins - Breaking Up Is Hard To Do
6. Rollins Band - Right Here Too Much
7. The Amps - Tipp City
8. Afghan Whigs - Debonair
9. Sentridoh - Perfect Excuse
10. 24 Gone - Girl Of Colours
11. Sugar - Explode And Make Up

I listened to this tape nonstop during my week of Spring Break in Parma, so much so that my step-Gary would often get up without saying a word and just hit the stop button on my boom box, then quietly sit back down again.

Over the years, I continued to listen to this tape. This tape was so much a staple of my listening repertoire that I frantically performed cassette tape surgery with scotch tape when it got caught in my aging boom box. After that, I hesitated to play it very often, just in case the Afghan Whigs would get caught in the heads of my tape player again. I eventually stored the tape away with my other tapes, listening instead to the follow-up tapes of Rollins spoken word and Sugar and 24 Gone and Afghan Whigs and Catherine Wheel.

A few weeks ago, I unearthed the tape from a box in the bottom of a closet, and spent a couple of days hunting down digital versions of the mixtape songs. And now, I'm sharing all 100MB of 90's goodness with you:

[music_sampler.zip - 103MB]

I didn't include the Rollins spoken word, but everything else is there, in the exact version I have on tape. (Note: Three files are in iTunes .m4a format; the rest are mp3s.)

I now have this set up as a playlist on my iPod. Funny how things change. Funny how all things old are new again.

You Asked For It...

...And here it is. A sampling of photos taken during the Spring of 1996, hosted on Flickr as a photoset. These photos feature myself, Mary, Liz, Heather, Garza, Drew, Steve, and Aaron. Last names have been omitted to protect the innocent and those currently in the teaching profession. :-)

Feel free to comment either here or on Flickr. Feel free to sign up for your own free Flickr account and upload your own photos of our craziness! The more, the merrier.

Update, 9:45pm: As for a Where Are They Now sort of thing, I just wanted to mention that Steve appears to be an instructor at Ohio Technical College (as revealed by a Google search). This was as of June 2005.

Update: 10:00pm: Further Googling reveals that Liz was a grad student in theater design at the University of Louisiana at Monroe in the Fall of 1999. I believe I already knew that at some point, though, as I once found her e-mail address and contacted her, only to be smacked down with a "I hate that all my old friends are happy" e-mail. I haven't been able to find any more recent information about Liz.

Ten Years Ago Today

In the Spring of 1996, I had just returned to BGSU after a semester of Academic Suspension. I was assigned to live in Rodgers Hall, and my randomly selected roommate was Mary.

This is important. Follow this.

Mary was attending BGSU because she had followed her boyfriend, Andrew, up from the University of Dayton. Andrew was originally from Toledo and had returned there after he had — flunked out? Quit? My memory isn't quite sure of which. At any rate, he came home and his girlfriend came along, to be near him. And I was rooming with her.

Mary had recently gone to a party where a couple of Andrew's high school buddies were in attendance. Apparently, she had told one of the guys that he dressed like he was gay. This, of course, had pissed the guy off, and made him not want to be at any parties with his buddy's girlfriend anymore.

When Mary found out about my parentage (can girls be bastards?), she remembered an amusing anecdote about the young man she'd offended, and how he had mentioned that he needed to find a girl without a father. She decided to hook us up, kind of as an apology for telling him he dressed gay. At Mary's request, Andrew gave her Aaron's e-mail address to give to me.

And the rest is history. ^_^

Ten years ago today, I wrote about this new boyfriend of mine, and what we did and how I felt. I was fairly graphic, as I didn't want to forget any single moment, so there will be some judicious editing of explicit things that I (and Aaron, I'm sure) would not be comfortable sharing with the internet.

As a final aside before I get into the journal entry: at this point in my life, I still considered myself Mormon, but inactive. I was, in fact, a virgin, and I am not at ALL ashamed to admit that. Aaron, on the other hand, was totally wanting some nookie (by our third date), but got derailed when I told him that I was a Mormon and didn't have sex. Yet.

So, with all the backstory out of the way, on with our story:

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Five Years Ago Last Week

I've been re-reading my old diaries and journals, looking for blog-worthy tidbits to share from five, ten, or fifteen years ago. This one is just a little overdue for a Five Years Ago Today, but I'm going to share it anyway.

As a bit of a preamble: in the Spring of 2001, my step-Gary decided (for reasons best left to another blog entry) that he would go into business for himself. He hired me on contract for some graphic design work: logo, business cards, letterhead. Being in my final year of college as a Visual Communication major, I was grateful for the experience, and the pay.

This is one day's worth of that experience, unabridged, originally written five years ago:

(BTW, Mom? You should probably skip this one.)

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The Joys of Home Ownership

Granted, this particular joy isn't limited to only homeowners, but... I just got to clean up after my very first completely overflowing toilet! Yaye! :-P

I mean, I knew I had taken a pretty dense crap, but jeez.

I'd never actually experienced the kind of clogged toilet that actually overflows onto the bathroom tile. It's like one of those slow-motion "Ohhhhh nooooo..." moments. I managed to keep the rug from getting completely soaked, and the overflow was luckily *not* completely nasty toilet water.

Still, though... spending quality time re-mopping the bathroom floor was not fun.

(As a side note, I had a particularly memorable bad dream when I was maybe four or five years old about the toilet overflowing and filling up the bathroom to my armpits. While I mopped this evening, I recalled that bizarre nightmare, and how I and my dream-friend saved ourselves from being swept away or drowned by pulling out straws and drinking the overflow water. I was a weird kid.)

Farewell, Clock Radio (1986 - 2006)

Apparently the lifespan of a digital clock radio is about 20 years, give or take.

I got this alarm clock in 1986, for my tenth birthday. According to my diary from that year, my Aunt Sammie got it for me. I've used this alarm clock ever since. I've lived in six different cities; in a trailer, two houses, four dorm rooms, and five apartments; and my simulated-wood-grain clock radio has consistently lived on my nightstand.

Over the past few years, the buzzer has slowly faded to a weak-sounding bleating, so I've been setting the alarm to radio, instead. Usually, the click of the radio turning on has been enough to waken me, as I'm almost awake by the time my alarm goes off, anyway.

However, on Sunday, I awoke 20 minutes after my alarm was supposed to have woken me. I looked at the clock. It was silent. I hit the button to turn off the alarm, and it made the tell-tale click; it had been on, but with no volume. I was willing to accept that maybe I'd hit the volume knob with my book before I went to bed. Before going to bed last night, I double-checked the volume and went to sleep, confident that my clock radio would wake me in the morning.

This morning, I awoke five minutes before I was supposed to be at work. WTF? I hit the button that either turns off the alarm or displays the time at which the alarm will sound — and it read 5:06pm. Now, I *knew* I hadn't set my alarm for 5:06pm, and I hadn't reset the time recently, so it couldn't have happened by accident.

Time to get a new clock.

After a failed alarm clock hunt at Meijer over my lunch break, I went to Wal-Mart after work and got myself a new-fangled alarm clock. It is now time to plug in the new clock, and retire the old.

Sometimes I'm strangely attached to *things*.

Long Lost Media

I finally located some tapes I'd been missing for a while: the very first mixtape Aaron ever made for me, back in 1996, and three 8mm videotapes from 1999-2000.

As soon as I finish compiling mp3s to correspond with all the songs on Aaron's Music Sampler, you can expect to find a zip file of 90 minutes' worth of mp3s for your listening pleasure. You, too, can be introduced to fantastic 90's alternative like Frank Black, Sebadoh, The Afghan Whigs, the Pixies, Man or Astroman?, Catherine Wheel, and many more.

Eventually, you can also expect to find some mini-montages of the video footage from 1999 and 2000. Old RCC buds will appreciate RCC Fun Day 2000, and family will (possibly) appreciate Thanksgiving and Christmas 1999, including me telling CC Snyder's "Archibald Barasol" joke, Gary reading the infamous forward about The Best Fruitcake Ever, and general fun with decorations and snowball fights.

I'm tempted to plug the camera into the TV and watch them right now.

What the hell... I think I will. :-D

Update, 1:20am: Damn... I was one sloppy bitch six and seven years ago. I look *much* better now at age almost-30 than I did back then at 23-24. Same with Aaron (no offense, honey).

Even so, I think I'll be able to edit this stuff into something fun and amusing to watch later. Yeah.

Happy Birthday, Carrie (er, Carolyn)!

Carrie and I were best friends in Middle School. We sat next to each other in the first day of Choir in seventh grade, completely by chance, and ended up as friends. We were both awkward adolescents in our own ways, rejected by the majority of our classmates, and that fact was probably our biggest bond. I was a new kid at the school that year, too, and shy to boot, so finding friends wasn't easy for me.

As with all friendships at that age, we had our ins and outs. Carrie had a very peculiar sense of humor, and if you didn't know better, you might think that her jibes and insults were really meant. She liked to call me "Tech," because I always used long, technical words, and she often poked fun at me for my long strides and fast walk. At dances, the term "wallflower" somehow morphed into "Wall Idiot," her endearing term for my tendency to never actually dance, and especially not with boys.

She also never failed to badger me during the two months between her birthday and mine. Her mantra would be, "Ha, ha — I'm older than you!" (If you know how old I am, you can already see where this is going.)

During the summer after 8th grade, Mom separated from my stepdad, Tom, and so ended my stint in the North Central Local School District. Carrie (who opted to go by her full given name of Carolyn in high school) and I still stayed friends, visiting one another during the summers between school years. Even into college, I would borrow Mom's car and drive from Medina to Creston to visit during breaks, especially summer.

We started to lose track of one another later in my college years, especially as she became involved with her then-boyfriend, now-husband Jeff. Still, though, we made sure to keep in touch somewhat, always making sure that we knew how to reach one another, should the occasion arise.

Not long ago — well, over a year now, I guess — I received baby photos from Carolyn's mom, Candy. Shortly thereafter, I received an invitation to attend a baby shower for Carolyn. Of course, I Mapquested the directions to Carolyn's house in West Bumfuck, Ohio, and drove the two and a half hours out to see her and her new son, armed with a soft and fuzzy teddy bear.

The coolest thing about the visit, besides seeing Carolyn's new son, was hearing her call me her best friend again. It's like that, isn't it? Once best friends, always best friends, even if you have other best friends in the interim. Sure, we hadn't seen one another in probably four years, but I still have the right half of our "Best Friends" necklace from circa 1988. :-)

Tomorrow, I believe, Carolyn turns 30. I have a card all ready to send to her. My inscription?

"Ha, ha! You're older than me!"

I've been waiting over 15 years to say that. Now I just need to unearth her mailing address...

Update, 10:35pm: Found it. Had to clean (well, sort) my entire desk area, but I found the baby shower invitation. Carolyn's address is now in my Palm Contacts, synched to my iPod, so I won't lose it again. :-P

R.I.P. Panasonic Microwave (1990-2006)

My mom bought this microwave when she and I moved out of Tom's house after their separation. As I recall, it was the first thing "we" bought — even before we bought our refrigerator from those Jehovahs who kept leaving The Watchtower in our screen door for years afterward... but I digress.

When I went off to college, Mom kept the microwave, obviously; I certainly couldn't bring it into the dorm with me. Then she hooked up with Gary, who had his own microwave. The Panasonic got relegated to a back closet floor in their apartment.

Once I finally left the dorms and got my own place in 2001, I re-appropriated the microwave from its storage spot at Mom and Gary's place. When Aaron and I moved in together, I believe he ended up performing a "social experiment" with his microwave (i.e. putting it on the dumpster and seeing how long it took someone to pick it up), and we used my microwave instead.

Finally, after 16 years in service, the old Panasonic started making a louder-than-usual hum. And just like that, it was dead. Sunday evening's sauerkraut had to be warmed on the stove, and I cooked a week's worth of morning oatmeal in old-school fashion.

Aaron went out and bought a new microwave on Monday afternoon. He bought another Panasonic, figuring that they must be pretty good if the old one lasted for 16 years. As he stood at the Best Buy checkout, the cashier asked if he'd like the five-year warranty, which he declined. Of course, she pressed him, reminding him that the manufacturer's warranty only lasts for one year — and he informed her that our last microwave lasted 16 years before it finally died.

That shut her up.

Mechelle Dunphy: Where Are You Now?

One-third of the hits I receive on my blog are from search engines. Therefore, it makes sense to me that, if I put enough identifying keywords in a given blog entry, someone should eventually hit my site who knows a little more about where some of my long-lost friends are. If I dredge out all the forgotten details about my friends' lives and histories, not only should it make fun and nostalgic reading for my regulars, but it should eventually attract hits from searches about the same person. Hopefully that person will comment or e-mail and give me an update on said individual.

So begins the first in the Where Are You Now series: Mechelle Denise Dunphy, best friend, 1984-1987.

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2005: Year in Review

I've been kind of slack with posting blog entries this week. I just haven't been "feeling it," I guess. So, while I'm home from work on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and while Aaron is still upstairs asleep, I'm going to take this opportunity to blog about the major events of 2005.

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I Believe In Santa Claus

I remember the day well. I was six years old, and it was December 1982. I was sitting at the kidney-bean-shaped table in the front of my first-grade classroom, with the five or six other kids in my Advanced Reading group.

Mrs. Henighan asked us, "How many of you believe in Santa Claus?"

I raised my hand, of course. What was there not to believe? I didn't realize there was any believing or not-believing involved. Santa had magic keys to my apartment, and brought me toys on Christmas Eve. End of story.

Only one or two other kids raised their hands.

The teacher then asked that fateful but inevitable follow-up question of the nonbelievers: "Why don't you believe in Santa Claus?"

One kid said that Santa's handwriting looked just like their Dad's. Another said that they'd peeked out one Christmas Eve and seen their parents putting presents under the tree. I think one person said they'd never believed.

I was in shock and denial.

When I got home from school that day, I told my Mom what had happened, and asked her if Santa Claus was real. Of course, she then told me the story of Santa: how there once was a real man who gave toys to children on Christmas, and how we now celebrate Santa Claus as a symbol of the Spirit of Christmas.

It made sense, and the knowledge somehow made me feel a little older. A little less young.

Of all the things I don't believe in anymore, I still believe in Santa Claus, after all this time. With all my prickly annoyance at insipid Christmas music and my denial of the faith in which I was raised, I still believe in the spirit of giving.

I also find it amazing that so many different brands of myth and folklore could come together to create this magical, mythical caricature of jollity and charity. Saint Nicholas must have been one hell of a guy.

Portraits of Christmas Past

Since Aaron and I moved in together and bought ourselves our very own plastic prelit Christmas tree, I decided to initiate a new tradition: Christmas family portraits. This year, with the arrival of the new Nikon D50 digital SLR (read: fancy camera), I decided it might be fun to look at the photos of our Christmases so far.

It's interesting to see how we've changed, and how my craft has improved over the years.

I do have to mention, though, that one thing remains constant. After witnessing my mother trying to pose the two of us for portraits way back in '97, I know that the basis of getting a good portrait with Aaron is making sure he is comfortable. Mom can pose portraits well — she worked for Olan Mills for 10 years or so, and continues to work in a portrait studio — but Aaron's back doesn't deal well with the kinds of sitting and twisting she requests sometimes. Make sure Aaron's comfy, then fit me and the cat in the picture, and everything's on it's way to being good. :-)

BGSU Alumni: How do I know this name?

Jeremy Zawodny.

The name sounds familiar, but the face — even the older, early-to-mid 90s pictures — really doesn't ring a bell. I've been going through his site and his archives, trying to decide if he had a younger sibling, or if I just heard his name somewhere. Did he write for the BG News? Was he in band? Did I hear his name because he worked for UCS / ITS (University Computing Services, which later became Information Technology Services)?

He went to BGSU between 1992 and 1997, and went to St. John's before that. —Aaron? Is this one of your St. John's cronies I've heard spoken of? Maybe that's it.

Anyway, I know I've heard this person's name before, and it's driving me nuts.

Being Poor

Whether or not you have ever considered yourself poor, read this. I can directly relate to at least 30% of this list, and can completely empathize with most of it.

I am so lucky that my family somehow managed to get out of poverty.

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Remembering Drumcorps

I was just reading a column on DCI.org, and one particular section caught my attention:

It?s funny how we all easily forget memories that are so important to us. What would we do without each other to remind us of all the funny things that happened? Would we try and remember the day that our caption head fell right on his butt trying to imitate how horrible we looked during a phrase? Or would we simply forget and let the memories fade with time?

The last thought is the scariest for me that comes along with leaving the activity for good. My caption head, Jamie Oakley, always said that we will never remember the bad days, only the good. That our struggle in the heat and torrential downpours would make us better but would never be our first thoughts when reminiscing about the entire season with our friends.

Maybe I just haven't schmoozed with enough alumni from my years in Northern Aurora and the Bluecoats, but I find that I think equally of the bad and the good times. They were fairly evenly dispersed throughout my three years in Junior corps, but I wouldn't have it any other way. (Well, maybe.)

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Lachesis

One afternoon in early September 1999, shortly after we moved back into Kohl Hall for our third year as roommates, Amy and I discovered this interloper living just outside our window. We named her Lachesis, after one of the Fates (Clotho, the weaver; Lachesis, who measured the cloth; and Atropos, who cut the thread — rightfully, she should have been Clotho, but Lachesis just sounded cooler).

We and Lachesis lived in harmony for at least a week, until one morning she and her web had vanished. Amy and I maintain that she must have been power-washed off of our windowsill.

College Weirdness

As I was rifling through a box of old papers the other day, I came across some amusing documentation of college that hadn't yet made it into a scrapbook: the never-completed Amy & Diana FAQ, circa 1997, for all those fluffies in the dorm who wondered aloud outside our dorm room door what the fuck we were all about; The Rules of Life, also circa 1997, recorded as necessary on a piece of notebook paper just inside our dorm room door; and All The Rooms In Hell, recorded on a piece of notebook paper next to The Rules of Life.

These snippets of my bizarre college life I will now share with you.

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Freelance Work

It occurs to me that I haven't had particularly good luck in the past with securing paid freelance gigs. I've only had one real paying freelance job, which was so undercharged it may as well have been pro bono, and I had one potential client gasp in horror at my price and hire me on as part-time office help instead.

Hopefully my upcoming client meeting goes more smoothly...

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Me and my Mom

My Mom has been reminding me (every chance she gets) that I haven't posted her picture anywhere on my website yet. (Y'know, Mom, that's not entirely true; you were at my bridal shower.)

Anyway, to appease my mother, this is a Kmart portrait of the two of us when she was younger than I am now. :-)

(Oh, and yes, it did take some Photoshop skillz to remove that fantastic Kmart-portrait red tint. It's not perfect, but it's good enough.)

Flashback: My Bedroom

I'm not sure why I took this photo. I think it was mainly because of the cats on my desk. At any rate, I kind of enjoyed seeing this snapshot in time: Autumn, 1995.

During the summer before I went off to college, Mom and I moved out of the craptastic Walden Apartments in Medina to a nicer neighborhood on Jackson Street. We were on the third floor of a small apartment building—about eight units total, I think.

I didn't get to spend much time there before I went off to college—or did we not move there until I was *in* college? I think that was it. At any rate, I spent one year in college before I got put on Academic Suspension and had to spend a semester at home. No internet, no computer, and Mom's new boyfriend Gary was suddenly in the mix. This photo was taken during that time.

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My Memaw

My Memaw knew a lot. She wasn't particularly book-smart—I think she completed 8th grade—but she knew little, important things. How to keep my ballet recital costume from unravelling. How to french braid and how to do a french twist. How to make awesome fried chicken, and tuna croquettes, and dozens of other wonderful foods. How to grow an avocado plant from a pit. How to grow plants in general.

About plants: Memaw definitely had a green thumb. Not in that Jerry Baker sort of way, though; he knows all sorts of bizarre tips and tricks for keeping your plants and lawn green and healthy, like spraying it with a solution of dish soap and beer and ammonia and some other household chemicals. Memaw had the other kind of green thumb, the kind where she had only to stick a plant in soil (or in water first, to root it), then water it (from the bottom, always), and poof. Big, healthy plants. Or so I remember, anyway... I was still kind of young when Memaw's plant collection was in its heyday.

(Funny, isn't it, how we never seem to take pictures of everyday things, like our living room... but, years later, we find ourselves trying to remember details that we once thought we'd never forget. Like how many plants sat in our windowsill in Apartment A-13 when I was 7 years old.)

Anyway, I wish I'd been able to ask her about more of the little, important things. As I got older, and as she got older, I did write her letters and ask her about some of the little things. How to make tuna croquettes (which I still haven't attempted). How many different jobs she held, and where she worked (which I wish I'd written down, but I was in the car on the way to BG). And my Mom gave me the recipe for meatballs that Memaw had gotten from the Italian girl that worked with her at Bix's Restaurant.

How to grow plants, though... if she had a secret, I wish I could have learned it. I do well enough, and I certainly *have* enough, but sometimes I wonder. I think I managed to inherit some of that green thumb, but... you know.

Sometimes I miss her.

-----

Next Friday, I'll be participating in the American Cancer Society Relay For Life in Bowling Green. If you'd care to sponsor me, you can donate online all next week, until the event. Donations are, of course, tax-deductible, and will forward the fight against cancer.

Someday, I hope someone else gets more time to ask their own Memaw the questions I didn't.

Kindergarten Ethics

I have vivid memories of singing this song in my Kindergarten music class, back in 1981 or so:

I have a little pussy
Her coat is silver gray
She lives down in the meadow
Not very far away

She'll always be a pussy
She'll never be a cat
'Cause she's a pussy willow
Now what do you think of that?

Meow, meow, meow, meow,
Meow, meow, meow, meow—
Scat!

I came home and sang the song to my Mom. She was bothered by it, but I really didn't understand why.

I don't remember singing that song very much after that.

Bye, Sheryls...

Just got home from saying good-bye to my Sheryls at Campus Pollyeyes in BG.

Sheryls, who recently helped me select a new wardrobe.
Sheryls, who hosted my bridal shower / bachelorette party.
Sheryls, who drove me to multiple job interviews at Image Source before I had a car.
Sheryls, who got away with lots of RCC rule violations on my watch. :-)

*sigh* I'll miss you! Aaron and I will have to come visit you in Boston sometime.

Happy Birthday, Tom (1948-1995)

My mom got married for the first time when I was 12 years old. Tom, my stepdad, was the only real father figure I'd ever had, and I continued to spend time with him after he and Mom separated after just two years. Tom and I had a good relationship through my high school years, barring some weirdness here and there. He was an audiophile and an early adopter of technology—he had a CD player in 1987, and both a VHS and Betamax VCR, and jury-rigged surround-sound stereo. He had a distinctive sense of humor and an infectious, deep laugh.

The semester I was off of school, in Fall 1995, I don't recall getting to see him much. I spent most of my time either depressed at home or hanging out with my friend Mel. That October, Tom died.

Tonight, I spent some time going through my journal, hoping that (for once) I would have written something relevant. As it turns out, I did:

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Hunter S. Thompson, 1937-2005

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Hunter S. Thompson, a renegade journalist whose "gonzo" style threw out any pretense at objectivity and established the hard-living writer as a counter-culture icon, fatally shot himself at his Colorado home on Sunday night, police said. He was 67.

Thompson's son, Juan, released a statement saying he had found his father dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head at the writer's Owl Creek farm near Aspen.

Thompson, famed for such adrenaline-packed narratives as "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," turned his drug and alcohol-fueled clashes with authority into a central theme of his work, challenging the quieter norms of established journalism in the process.

I'd never even heard of Hunter S. Thompson before that Fantasy Lit class that Amy and I took back in... '97? '98? Anyway, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was on our reading list when we first bought our books for the semester, although we weren't slated to actually read it until much later in the syllabus.

I remember Aaron coming into the dorm room Amy and I shared, and seeing my copy of Fear and Loathing sitting atop a stack of books—probably on the floor, rather than on my desk. I think his first exclamation was, "Have you read that?!" When we answered that it was on our reading list for later in the semester, he asked if he could borrow it. Sure, no problem. Enjoy. I figured it must be a pretty good book if Aaron was that excited about checking it out, even if it was required reading.

Boy, was I right.

I loved that Fantasy Lit class: we got to read a lot of books that one wouldn't generally consider "fantasy," including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, some ill-received Robert Blake poetry, The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, and, of course, Fear and Loathing. And, since Amy and I were taking the class together, we got to have our own discussions about the books before the class discussions, which made things a little more interesting. Not that the class discussions weren't interesting in themselves, with the enlightened yet pleasantly cynical Brit, Iain, running the class.

Anyway, once we finally got to read Fear and Loathing, we understood why Aaron was so excited to read it himself. Thompson's state of mind, his imagery, and his surprisingly lucid thoughts on society in general really drew us in. I'd say that was one of my favorite books I read that semester.

Shortly thereafter, we heard that there was going to be a movie made from the book. We decided it would be worth seeing, even though there's no way they could possibly capture all the fantastic imagery and weird trips—and Johnny Depp was playing Hunter S. Thompson? Oh, boy.

Again, we were in for a surprise.

It turned out to be a great movie, using cinematic tricks and CG and fantastic acting to portray the book as near-perfect as a book-to-movie translation could possibly be. Years later, Aaron now owns the Criterion Edition of the DVD, in addition to having downloaded several of Thompson's Spoken Word shows.

So, Hunter S. Thompson, I salute you. I wish you would have told us why you felt the need to finally give in to your self-destruction, though—maybe left us one last note in your classic gonzo style, telling us why you thought you had to escape this fucked-up place.

This sucks.

Random Memory Catalyst

I was over by the filing cabinets today, filing away some returned mail, when I heard an oddly familiar sound: a triple beep. I couldn?t think of where I?d heard it before, or what it was, until I saw one of the IT guys walk behind me. He was carrying a black UPS (Uninterrupted Power Supply), almost identical to the one we used in the RCC server room back in the day (except ours was beige. Beige was all the rage back in 1997).

Funny how a simple thing like hearing a UPS beep can make me reminiscent of my college days... back when I was a true computer geek.

That Down-Home Dialect

Growing up, I never really thought about the weird amalgam of southern accents in my home. My Memaw, my Mom, my Aunt Sammie and I all lived together in the same household for some time: from as early as I can remember (age 3 or 4) up until my Mom got married (the summer after my 6th grade year). Anyway, my Memaw grew up in Florida, as did my Aunt, and my Mom spent her formative youth moving between Florida and southern Ohio. That made for some interesting pronunciations and vocabulary, not to mention the bizarre superstitions that Memaw had learned from Granny (but that's another post entirely).

For instance, the knives in the silverware drawer that one used either for buttering bread or for screwing the tinfoil to the antenna contacts on the TV were called "case knives." [I now know that most of the rest of the Western world calls these implements "butter knives."]

I could have sworn that the piece of furniture in which my socks and underwear lived was called a "chester drawers."

For years, I didn't realize that the room in which the TV and couches resided was not, in fact, the "lithing room" (with a TH like THis or THese), and was actually the room in which one lived, or the "living room."

I was also pretty sure that the outdoor faucet we used to fill up the kiddie pool was a "spicket" instead of a "spigot."

I'm sure there were countless other bizarre words I heard growing up, but those are the ones that come to mind. Also: the couch was always the couch, never the sofa; we drank pop, not soda; we usually cleaned with a sweeper, rather than a vacuum; and we peed in the commode, not so much the toilet.

Funny, isn't it, how things that seem perfectly normal when you're a kid can seem totally fucked up once you grow up and step back.

2004: Year In Review

This year has been one of a few large upgrades for myself and Aaron. Not a whole lot happened, but what did was pretty major.

In March, we bought our house. This necessitated a move from Bowling Green (where I worked at the time) to Toledo (much closer to where Aaron works).

In May, we adopted Mei. May was also our one-year wedding anniversary.

In June, I took a new job within Sky Bank, closer to home. In fact, it's practically across the street from where Aaron works. I didn't get a raise or anything, but working ten minutes from home instead of 35 was enough of an upgrade for me. That extra 20 minutes of Aaron-time made things so much better, as did the drastic reduction in petrol usage.

The summer of 2004 was the first time I'd performed with a drum & bugle corps since 1997, when I "aged out" of Junior corps. I joined up with the LakeShoremen Senior Drum & Bugle Corps, and drove my ass up to Michigan every other weekend to march in various parades. It had its good points and its bad points, but I still plan to march again in 2005.

On September 1st, I officially launched dianaschnuth.net, complete with Movable Type and CSS layout. September was also our one-year anniversary of being on Atkins.

Sometime in the Fall—September or October, I forget which—Mom and Gary bought a house and moved down to Fort Worth TX. Before they managed to actually close on the house, and while they were living with Gary's folks, Gary's German Shorthair Pointer, Joshua, died. The dog going didn't really affect me, but it really affected Gary, of course. Their moving affected me a bit, though, as it isn't quite as simple and straightforward to go and visit my family now.

Apart from that... I can't really think of any other life-shaping events that happened during 2004. No new cars (that was December 2002), no new kids (that's not until... well, whenever it happens), no deaths (that was 2003). I'm sure someone will remind me of something, though.

Merry Christmas 2001

As I was digging through old VHS tapes, I found a tape of this-n-that from my Media 100® workshops and video classes. I watched through it, just for shits and giggles... and then I found a video I'd forgotten I'd made.

Back in 2001, I was about to graduate college, living in an apartment on my own, and I was really broke. That Christmas was a creative one, mainly making gifts for my family and friends instead of buying them. And, for Amy, I made a video of our four-year Reign of Terror at BGSU. I didn't have time to copy it for her; I barely managed to squeak enough lab time to create the video and drop it to tape in the first place. But, when she came to visit and exchange presents, I showed it to her.

Then, tonight, I found it again.

So, now that we have a capture card, I am encoding it and posting it here for your viewing pleasure. Amy, of course, will enjoy it the most... but I think most of you will certainly appreciate it.

small version (10.2MB) | large version (33.5MB)

Party Pix

Finally... pictures from Aaron's surprise party!

Since the slideshow doesn't have captions, I'm also posting a Cast Of Characters:

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The Bad Old Days

I've been spending my breaks and lunches at work thinking about my novel / story / whatever, scribbling down one-page scenes and ideas and such. My main plot is currently being overshadowed by my romantic subplot, since I don't know yet how to really get into the thick of my main plot. I've figured out how it goes at the end, pretty much, but I don't know how my protagonist manages to even get into the seedy underworld he needs to in order to solve the mystery, much less how he ends up actually solving it.

So, anyway, I came up with a romantic subplot, one that strengthens the other subplots involving my MC's ethnic heritage and his morality and why he's at university, et cetera. This subplot involves playing one woman against another—or, at least, neglecting one woman while thoroughly enjoying another's company, then feeling like a total ass about it and not knowing how to rectify the situation.

In order to give myself some perspective on how it feels to be in such a situation, I pulled out a couple of my old journals. It wasn't something I was looking forward to, because those times in my life were some of the worst and most stressful and depressing times I've ever experienced... but I figured that remembering how that felt would improve the believability of my writing.

Flashback: Spring semester, 1995. I was such a ho. Not literally, of course, and perhaps not in the view of others; but even looking back on it now, I agree that I was quite the virgin ho. During this semester, I "went out" with four guys (not including Ted, aka "Mr. Winkie"). And, yes, all four (or five) of these guys I met on the BGSU IRC. All names and nicks will be withheld to protect the innocent and the guilty stupid.

Guy #1 was seven or eight years older than me, quite the Christian boy—and, like me, had never french-kissed before. He just had too many mental issues, though, and was even more socially inept than I was (and, honestly, his face wasn't very aesthetically pleasing). We ended up being "just friends" after not going much farther than kissing.

Guy #2 was my age, and was really the Boyfriend Starter Kit for me. Unfortunate, though, as the thing I most remember about him at that time was that he thought my shoes were ratty. At the time, all we really did was look over each other's academic papers and make out. After a month, he decided that he didn't have time for a relationship, and we decided to be "just friends."

Guy #3 was the bassist in a local college band, and pretty much ended up being a fuck-buddy (minus the actual fucking). Every few days we'd get together, be silly with a friend or friends, then he and I would go up to his room and have make-out-like-monkeys time. This was usually either prefaced or concluded with him sticking his socky old feet in my lap while he played his guitar. And I liked it.

After Spring Break, Guy #3 "broke up" with me over IRC, saying he had been interested in another girl for a good three weeks before he and I had gotten together. Unfortunately for him, this other girl didn't want anything to do with him, but he wasn't giving up the chase. Strangely enough, even though our relationship was mainly physical, that breakup really shook me bad—for about an hour, that is, until Guy #2 showed up (in person, not over IRC) and we ended up deciding to have an "open relationship." Confusing, but still not entirely bad.

Not even two days later, Guy #4 enters the scene. Slightly older than me, more mature than the other types I'd been seeing, and the first to really make my heart do a little pitter-patter. I had more in common with him than with Guys #1 through 3, and I figured... hell, Guy #2 wants to see other people, so here I go, seeing other people. Only thing is, after several hours-long dates and hours-long phone calls, Guy #4 admitted that the only thing that would really piss him off would be cheating.

So much for the open relationship with Guy #2.

Guy #4 was SO much cooler than him. I ended up totally blowing off Guy #2, never calling him, never e-mailing him, in favor of Guy #4. Until Guy #2 called and wanted to go to Cosmo's with me. I was so torn, and I felt so bad for doing this, but at the end of the evening, I told Guy #2 all about Guy #4 and how he made me feel. And Guy #2 was surprisingly understanding about the whole thing. Agreed to remain friends. Even gave me some friendly advice, telling me that if Guy #4 had a problem with me having guy friends, then he was just a pain in the ass and he wasn't worth it. I agreed with that.

Not even a week later, Guy #2 declared that he wanted me back. Which confused the shit out of me. And we were both horny bastards, so I let him spend the night in my room. (Incidentally, neither of my Freshman year roommates actually *lived* in our room.) That little fling really cemented the fact that I preferred Guy #4 over Guy #2, though. Their personalities and styles were just so different, and I knew who I preferred.

Not even a week after *that*, Guy #4 told me (over IRC) that he wasn't ready for a relationship.

Good grief.

So, to avoid dragging this whole soap opera out any longer, here's the Reader's Digest Condensed Version of the rest: I told Guy #2 what happened—and after some "am I only second best?" rhetoric, we agreed to "try to make it work." I went to Guy #4's frat party as a "friend," and had to correct everyone who asked if I was his girlfriend. Guy #3 managed to make a repeat appearance during the last night of the semester when I agreed to one last make-out session in my room "for old times' sake."

Then I spent the summer in drumcorps, and the fall at home in Parma under Academic Suspension. When I finally returned to BGSU, I learned that Guy #2 had gotten himself another girlfriend without having the decency to break up with me first. No big loss, though, as it left me unfettered during the pivotal Spring 1996 semester (when I met Aaron).

Why am I spilling my guts like this? Good question. It's actually kind of awkward, now that I think about it, though it's also a touch cathartic. Getting in touch with my former ho-ness, all for the sake of my art.

Point being, in the end, that between all the crazy, fucked-up feelings I had that semester, I can certainly remember one that would be appropriate to what my main character will be feeling when he realizes that he's cheated on his girlfriend back home.

Journaling

When Mom came to visit a couple of weekends ago, she brought with her the final two boxes of my stuff still living at her and Gary's apartment, including all my journals and diaries from age 7 through early college. I had been thinking this evening that it would be fun to quote from one of them, on today's date however many years ago—but I apparently never wrote on September 9th before. *shrug*

Looking through them again reminds me that I wasn't terribly good at recording the most important things in life. For instance: When I was 14 years old, my stepdad Tom (above left, circa 1989) threw a giant yelling fit and kicked us out of the house. It was the beginnings of Mom and Tom's divorce, as the only time we returned to the house after that night was to pack up our stuff and move out. Scary, traumatic time for everyone. Did I write about it in my journal? Nope. There are some entries in July 1990 where Mom and I were visiting Grandpa and Grandma Cook in Centerville, with no mention of Tom; then there are some entries in August where I talk about church Girls' Camp and various dreams I had; then, finally, on September 7, my entry starts with, "I never mentioned—Mom & Tom separated. I go to Buckeye H. S. now."

WTF? I didn't feel the need to mention the surreal scene in the kitchen with Tom banging his palm on the table, his nose inches from Mom's face, insisting that we leave even though Mom's welfare check had paid the rent for that month? Nothing about my messy bedroom being the straw that broke the camel's back? No hysterical frightened tears, nothing about staying with the Thomases from church for the weekend while we found somewhere to live? That was all really kind of important at the time, and is something I hope I never forget. But not a word about it in the journal.

What made me think about all this in the first place—journaling, I mean, and the importance of it—was my thoughts today at work about where I want my blog to go and what I want it to be. I mean, it started out as a means to communicate with all my out-of-town friends, all at once. But now that it looks moderately more impressive, do I want it to be something else? Do I need to write well-thought-out essays on Life and Philosophy and Web Design and things like that?

I seriously considered it.

But, no. I know my audience, and I'm not expecting a bigger one anytime soon. I'm kind of playing a Sour Grapes kind of game with myself by convincing myself that wanting a larger audience would make me somewhat of an exhibitionist. Nope—y'all are my audience, and y'all get a cool new design, just for being you. And I'm going to continue to write about the important (and not-so-important) things in my daily life, as if I were writing to any one of you. (In fact, I've been known to take e-mails I've sent to Aaron or Amy and repost them as blog entries, in case you hadn't noticed.)

So, the interface looks kind of cooler, and the content-management is kind of sweeter, but the content itself stays basically the same: normal, everyday Diana-type stuff.

And I'm OK with that.

Mr. Jay Falls, English Teacher Extraordinaire

On one of my essays, my eighth-grade English teacher, Mr. Falls, wrote: "Like a world-class athlete, a writer like you should write every day!" (It was something close to that, anyway—I can't seem to locate A Day in the Life of a 40-Year-Old College Freshman right now. I do still have it somewhere.)

Mr. Falls was a bit of in inspiration to me; at the very least, he was a wake-up call of sorts. I'd been fairly good at writing ever since that experimental creative writing course my school system tried when I was in third grade—the Developmental Writing Program, it was, or DWP. We learned to use adjectives and adverbs and big vocabulary words and our writing as a class became insanely flowery. By eighth grade, though, my writing style had finally begun to gel, and Mr. Falls noticed and encouraged that.

He was the teacher who passed out the list of "Demons" —I forget how many there were. Twenty, or 40. Anyway, they were the two, too, and to; which and witch; who, which, and that; there, their, and they're; lay and lie; allot and a lot; et cetera. He was also the teacher who read Poe's The Telltale Heart aloud and with such dramatic fervor that the entire class could practically hear the disembodied heart beating beneath the floorboards. He was the teacher who told us about the girl who chewed gum while playing volleyball and choked and died—and on a team he coached or assisted, I believe. He was the teacher who called me out in front of the class for ordering too advanced of a book (Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451) through the Scholastic Book Club, and made me defend my selection. He was the teacher who told us about the Kent State shootings and made us all cry at the injustice of it all.

He also took me and a group of other decent writers, both from our advanced class and from the "normal" class, to the Power of the Pen contest. In this contest, each student had 40 minutes to write a coherent essay on a topic which wasn't revealed until the beginning of the time limit. None of us placed, but we all felt like we'd accomplished something just by having been asked to be on the team. —Come to think of it, though, the team did attend the regional competition in Kent; so, we either did better than I recall, or the regional wasn't an invitational sort of competition.

That regional competition yielded one of the best alliterations I've ever come up with, mainly because it was a 20-minute-long collaboration amongst the whole team. We were sitting in the auditorium before the competition, waiting for Mr. Falls to go onstage, collect our folders, and return to pass them out to us. As he proceeded up the stairs with the throng of other middle-school English teachers, he caught a toe on the stage and tripped. Of course, we were all watching him and giggled, saying, "I hope Mr. Falls doesn't fall!" Which, after some giggly discussion (yes, even the boys giggled), became:

I hope Mr. Falls doesn't fall through the floor with his folders because of the flab that runs in his family.

And the fact that I can still remember the exact phrase after 15 years should tell you how impressed with ourselves we were.

Anyway... Mr. Falls, wherever you are, here's to you.

website update

Why won't my LJ client upload my entry?! Gah. Must resort to posting from the LJ website.

Anyway, just so y'all know...
- my LJ is now integrated into the.details
- my gardening section is now up
- the photos from the U-Haul moving debacle aftermath are posted

And here's a little something for Sheryl.

Bye Bye, Blue...

Step one of the website overhaul is accomplished: I have changed the color palette for the entire damn site. It doesn't have as much contrast as the last version, and I may have to do something about that. The dynamic contrast was what kept the site visually interesting for me, despite some sub-par header graphics from time to time, and I'll miss that if I don't re-implement it somehow.

My Mom always used to say to me, before I would go out with my friends, "Just remember who you are and where you come from." At the time, it was a pleasantly sappy way for Mom to remind me to be good, and I took it as such. Remember, people know you're a Mormon, and are watching you, so don't mess up. That sort of thing. But recently, I find I've forgotten Mom's advice (which, incidentally, was given to her as a youth by Memaw). I frequently forget who I am: web designer, amateur photographer, et cetera, and how I got to be where (and who) I am today. It's not until I get into conversations with people who don't know who I really am that I remind myself.

There's a guy at work, name's Mike, newest member of our department (about a month newer than me, though he's worked for Sky longer). I think some people think him simplistic or goofy or whatnot, but I find him pleasant and honest and funny and forthright, which is refreshing in the corporate environment. He's maybe a couple few years younger than me, I'd guess. Anyway, we always end up taking our morning break at the same time: around 9:45am, I'll go into the break room to read whatever book I've brought with me that day—and shortly thereafter, Mike will come in to buy his can of Mountain Dew. We don't plan it that way, and it doesn't always coincide like that... but when it does, Mike's quite the talker. :-)

Today, through a series of random topic changes, we managed to start talking about my time at BGSU. I'd mentioned that I had supervisory experience, but that I was no good at disciplining employees (Sheryl... ahem). He asked about my job there, and I explained how I moved up through the ranks of RCC, from peon to supervisor, but had to leave when I graduated. Mike was surprized and amused that I knew more about computers than I'd let on. (When at Sky did I have the opportunity to flaunt my computer skills, I wonder?) He wanted to know why I never tried to get into the techie programming section of Sky, and I had to explain that I'm more of a designer than a programmer. I ticked off the media qualifications I got with my VCT degree: web design, photography, multimedia, video, print...

And I remembered who I was and where I came from. And I was ashamed that I had forgotten.

OMG Gibby...

Ahh... sitting at my computer—no, make that my computers—listening to mp3's, with Outlook Express open, posting to my LJ. Cheerfully ignoring my external Mac CD burner giving me a tracking error; remaining happy nevertheless. Trying to decide what to work on next. Thrilling in the quick response of mouse and keyboard and a two-point-something GHz processor.

So, work has been so slow that I've been frequenting all the news sites: CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, Channel 13 out of Toledo. See, news sites are allowed, while blogging is not. A almost got canned when she tried it, but only because our supervisor saw and tattled on her. Not from any sort of monitoring, which makes me feel a little better.

Anyway, I found an article that you might find... intriguing. About binge drinking and its effect on brain functions. An excerpt reads:

Brain scans show clear damage, and tests of reading, balance and other function show people who drink more than 100 drinks a month have some problems, the researchers said.

Now, this might seem like a lot, but think about it in terms of college party-goers. One hundred drinks a month equals out to 25 drinks in a weekend. For the average college student (of the heavy partying variety), the "weekend" consists of Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. Heavy binge drinking would then be about 8 or 9 drinks in a night. That's completely within the realm of possibility. That's about how much I drank at my bachelorette party, although I can count on one hand how many times I've been that drunk. Some people really do get that trashed every weekend, though (and Amy and I used to live nextdoor to some of them in the dorms).

Doesn't this explain some things?

"Oh my God, Gibby, we're not brain damaged! Why won't you wake up? You're passed out in your own vomit!"

Ah, the memories...

Where were you when...

filched from Sheryl:

When Mt. St. Helens blew (18/5/1980)
Not quite in kindergarten yet. :-)

When the space shuttle Challenger exploded (28/1/1986)
In Mrs. Canady's fourth-grade class in Riverview, Florida (near Tampa). We were watching it live on TV, and there was a collective gasp as the shuttle exploded. Our classroom was connected by one of those accordion-walls to Mrs. Bateman's social studies class next door, and Mrs. Canady quietly went to the back of the room where the wall was always partway open. She called Mrs. Bateman from her class to the back corner of the rooms and told her, "The space shuttle just exploded." And I distinctly remember Mrs. Bateman saying, "Oh, my God."

When the 7.1 earthquake hit San Francisco (7/10/1989)
Eighth grade—I recall the news coverage, but not precisely where I was when I first heard.

When the Berlin Wall fell (7/11/1989)
Again, eighth grade, although I didn't really grasp the significance until the following year.

When the Gulf War began (16/1/1991)
Ninth grade when the actual declaration came out, but my more vivid memory is of being in eighth grade and hearing about Operation Desert Shield, which had an ominous foreshadowing about it. I recall being freaked out by the prospect of war, and rising gas prices, and death, and everything else that would come with war. As war was declared, when I was in high school, I was still apprehensive, and began wondering about what would happen if the school buses couldn't run because gas was too expensive.

When OJ Simpson was chased in his White Bronco (17/6/1994)
Summer before college. I only vaguely recall seeing the news coverage. What I recall more vividly was the OJ verdict, which was announced during my semester at home from college. I spent a lot of time at home, laying on the cream-colored carpet of the living room, writing and reading and listening to the radio and watching the OJ trial.

When Princess Di was killed (31/8/1997)
Just home from my final season of drumcorps and back at college with my roomie Amy. I don't recall any specifics about the news coverage, although it didn't take long to get sick of hearing Elton John singing "Goodbye English Rose."

When the shooting at Columbine occured (25/04/1999)
It was early afternoon in Kohl Hall, and for some reason, Amy and I weren't playing video games. I think we heard someone in the hallway talking about turning on the news, so we did, and we watched the scene unfold. Shocking, frightening.

When Bush was first announced President (7/11/2000)
Living on-campus, by myself, the semester after Amy had graduated. Beyond that, don't know, don't care.

When terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center (11/9/2001)
Living off-campus on Ridge Street. It was a Tuesday, and I had no classes that day, but I hadn't turned off my alarm. I automatically wandered across the bedroom to shut it off, but hearing Tom Brokaw's voice instead of bad music stilled my hand, and I listened for a moment. As soon as I woke up enough to almost realize what was going on, I turned off the clock radio and turned on the TV in the living room. I forget who called first, Aaron or Beth, but I was on the phone with Aaron as the second plane hit. I believe the quotable of the moment was "Holy shit..."

When Columbia disintegrated during re-entry over Texas. (1/2/2003)
Living in the duplex on South Grove with Aaron. I don't remember the day or the time, but I remember being shocked and saddened to have seen two shuttle accidents in my lifetime.

Staying Current

While updating my online portfolio, I sifted through my old VCT projects and located my Director portfolio from 2001. What fun! I'd forgotten that I knew how to do cool things. Shit was changing color, flying around the screen, zooming in and out — and I'd made some cool-ass icon graphics to illustrate. I made them! I didn't steal them. Sure, some of the stuff didn't work, and you could tell where I started running out of time to complete the project, because objects on-screen didn't do as many cool things anymore, and there were some flubbed links to movies and such... but, damn, I forgot that I knew something cool!

Pathetically enough, whenever I think of cool things I've managed to throw together, my thoughts usually turn to Tim Schavitz. Yeah, yeah, I know... I shouldn't have to compare myself to anyone... but sometimes, you just need a yardstick to measure up with. Back in college, when I felt like academia was dragging me down, and my lack of creativity was dragging me down, Tim was one of the only design influences who pulled me up.

He and I had enough classes together during my last year at BGSU that we compared notes and fed off of each other. ...OK, truth is, I fed off of him. He was everyone's starchild, and rightly so, although he'd deny it if given the chance. Anyway, we'd look at other people's projects, and critique them privately amongst ourselves, and wonder in amazement at how many of our classmates were sub-par designers (though, in retrospect, given the VCT curriculum and focus, it's not surprizing).

Among what you would expect from design students — that is, lumping VCT students in with Graphic Design students — I'd have given most VCT students in our general age range at the time a 4 out of 10. Myself, I'd give a 7 out of 10. Tim, 9 out of 10. Most Intro Graphic Design students and Typography students I studied with, I'd give them a 6 or 7 out of 10. Some rated a 5, some rated an 8 or 9. Graphic Design students just seemed more immersed in design than VCT students, who were more immersed in the mechanics and process of "how" than the overall plan and scheme of "what." Like Sean used to say, you can't make chicken salad out of chicken shit. You need good ideas, good media, good footage, to produce a good product. Ideally, anyway.

Usually at this point in the "I suck and I should be destroyed" rant, Aaron (or whoever's handy) will smack me around and say, "You don't suck! Look at the shit I made! Now that sucks!" Very well. I will accept your compliments with thanks, and continue with my rant.

So, looking back on all this — my Director portfolio, my designs, my wares in general — I have decided that I need to find more foo-foo projects to embark upon, to sharpen my skills. Now, Tim used to do this all the time, making funky Flash stuff that didn't really mean anything too deep, or do anything too amazing, but it was cool to look at and probably fun to make. With that in mind, I sought out a source of design inspiration... and came up frighteningly short. All the old, bleeding-edge style that used to make our entire group of self-proclaimed VCT Elite spontaneously mess in our drawers — that stuff just doesn't do it for me anymore. 2advanced, meh. I'm having a hard time finding anything that takes my designer's breath away these days. And if I can't find it, if I can't even identify what it would be, how am I to produce it?

Links I've found to mildly get my juices flowing:
+ Designs by Mark (great Photoshop tutorials)
+ THREE.OH: Digital Design Journal
+ We're Here: Intelligent Design & Development
+ The Shodown Forum: Graphics & Web Dev

P.S. - I know I had another weird dream last night, but I forgot it before I could write it down.

Blog Entry, Take Two

Dammit. I had a great start, then my computer locked up on the fucking History Channel website. I guess that's what I get for wanting to put goddamned hyperlinks in my blog. Well, let's see if I can get unpissed and recreate what I had. *deep breath*

Well, then... I've spent all evening watching VH1's "I Love The 80's Strikes Back" and playing Civ III. Fun at the time, but now I feel like I've wasted the whole goddamned day. I mean, I'd planned to post some stuff to eBay, and clean the computer room, and work on cataloguing my Smurf collection.

Yes, my Smurf collection. All 100 of them.

Two things recently prompted me to dig out my Smurfs and catalogue them for either general collecting or for eBaying. One was my thrift acquisition of a new knick-knack shelf: one of those typesetter's cases that's been converted to hang on the wall and hold trinkets. The other thing was finding out that Kris is looking to start liquidating his old Transformers and Star Wars figurines (still living at his parents' house... come on, man, you're 30 now!).

So, last night, there I was, sitting on the living room floor, watching a special about the Salem Witch Trials on the Discovery Channel and sorting Smurfs.

It's going to take me forever to catalogue them the way I want to, but I'm going to do it anyway, because I'm curious as to what I have. I have the little guys all sorted out into a.) Smurfs to keep, b.) Smurfs to eBay, c.) Smurfs to thrift because they've been dog- or cat-chewed, d.) Smurfs without accessories, and e.) random accessories. Blueimps.com has been quite the find, as has MushroomVillage.com — they each have a great way of locating the official names and serial numbers of each Smurf. At Blue Imps, I can browse the images and say, "Is that him? Yeah, that's him." At the Mushroom Village, I can type in a word, like "ball," and get photos and descriptions of Smurfs with, well, balls. (Bowling balls and soccer balls! Be nice!)

I only have 20 Smurfs catalogued in my little Excel file (with name, ID, variation, and notes), so I've quite the haul ahead of me. Oh, and if you're checking up on me at eBay to see what I'm selling, my ID has changed to reflect my married name. I am now dschnuth on eBay. (And, yes, I've got some stuff up right now. I'm selling the beginning of my closet junk: old McDonald's Happy Meal toys.)

In other news... I managed two culinary feats today. I made dinner (yes, it's a feat) and I hardboiled some eggs. Now, wait, let me tell you all about it. As for dinner, I steamed some cauliflower and baked a chicken breast. But since dousing the chicken in lemon or soy or a concoction of the two plus some honey (which I'd come to enjoy) is out with Atkins, I discovered the art of mixing Worchestershire sauce into some mayo and using it as a glaze of sorts. It was actually quite yummy. So, culinary feat #1 was a success. Mmm.

Culinary feat #2 was not so much. I put some water on to boil for eggs, and didn't forget about it for too long. Which is more than I can say for the eggs. Here I was, playing Civ III, when I glanced at my watch and realized that the eggs had been boiling for twice as long as necessary. Like, 45 minutes. I freaked out and ran into the kitchen, which was thankfully not on fire, and rescued the eggs. I ate the one that had cracked when I'd first put it in — and it tasted burnt. Hell, it even looked a little burnt inside. I'll bet you didn't know you could burn a fucking hardboiled egg, did you? Me neither. Well, luckily enough, the rest of them just seem to be a touch overdone, not nasty or inedible. I feel like a fool, though, just the same.

And at work, things are a little happier. Andrew and Ruth (our boss and his boss) had private meetings with all of us, except the newest temp and Loni. The newest temp, A (yes, another one), wasn't progressing fast enough, so they "cancelled" her. That's the polite term for firing a temp, since you cancel her services through the company, and they call her to let her know she'll be getting a different assignment as soon as one becomes available. Not like I've been on the receiving end of that or anything... ahem. So, Dawn realizes that we didn't fire (sorry, cancel) the old new temp — that is, Lorna, the one before "new" A — just because she wasn't catching on. It was her absenteeism that really did it. So, Dawn has been quite pleasant the past two or three days. It amazes me that she can turn it off like a switch, though.

It must have taken a lot of energy to be that pissed off for an entire month, considering that she can just blink and be back to normal. I don't know about you, but if I'm pissed at someone for a whole damn month, to the point of not speaking to that person, it's going to take more than just being told I made an incorrect assumption for me to get back to being OK with that person. Of course, you know me — I find it hard to hold a grudge for more than a few days at a time, unless it's something big. Like with Dan's brother, Matt, the time that he nearly stiffed me for the fifty bucks he offered me to make his new drumcorps' website, and then told me that he'd hired someone else to completely redesign my just-launched site, and informed me that they would be using the same page structure and copy that I'd written basically out of thin fucking air. That pissed me off, and I still don't think I've quite recovered. And that was damn near seven years ago, I think. I don't take kindly to being used... and being paid fifty bucks (most basic sites cost $200 or so) to fabricate a website from a single brochure, then having that copy stolen and being told, "thanks anyway," that qualified to me. It still does. Not that I'm bitter or anything. :-)

Wow, I kinda rambled for a while, didn't I? Ah, well. I need to go wash some dishes so Aaron doesn't come home to a sinkful. I'll at least do the stuff I dirtied, if not all of it. I'm trying to get better at that, but I still suck sometimes. At age 27, I'm still very much a wife-in-training.

OK, I'm going to go now before I get too down on myself for my poor housekeeping skills.

P.S. - I think we have a CD around here that Kris made us of all his old tunes, including Schnuth, Put the Hamburger Down. I'll ask Aaron if he knows where it is.

Memories

Do you ever get the feeling that High School wasn't just a part of your past, but more of a different life? Hell, sometimes I feel like that about the first year of my college career.

I had just been thinking of the music that put me through high school. For all you young whipper-snappers who read my blog, my high school years were 1990 through 1994. Alternative music came into its own whilst my appreciation of "popular music" was in full blossom. Though I must admit, I discovered the Cure in about 1989, seeing the "Lovesong" video on VH1. But I digress. Here's a blast from the past (I know some of you still listen to these artists regularly — don't take it as a rip on you, 'cause so do I):

Oasis * Collective Soul * James * Pearl Jam * Toad the Wet Sprocket * Bad Religion * Radiohead * Bush * The Lemonheads * Nirvana * Smashing Pumpkins * REM * Matthew Sweet * The Cure * The Sundays

Sometimes I think high school was the worst experience of my life overall (except for 6th grade). Sometimes I think it was much, much better than I give it credit for. And generally, I assume I didn't get enough out of my teen years. Or, at least, as much as I could. Not that I would particularly want to experience those years firsthand again, but I find that, depending on my mood, I can see a great deal of either spectacularly priceless moments or of amazingly pathetic and depressing happenings.

Sometimes I wonder if and/or when I'll look back on my college years or my newlywed years (yipes) like I look back on high school: Something I enjoyed, something I should have taken more advantage of, something nostalgic. I wonder if the music I listen to today will set off memories of sitting at my computer, blogging, the day before my bachelorette party.

(I know it's a disjointed entry... it's 1:20am, and it's technically not even the 25th anymore. Cut me some slack.)

P.S. - There is talent in Bowling Green. Who knew? Check out Mac Hall.

A Letter To Myself

(To Myself eight years in the past: February 1995)

Dear Self,

If this letter reaches you when I hope it will, you will currently be failing all of your classes except Athletic Band, attending camps for the Northern Aurora Drum & Bugle Corps, IRC-ing too much, racking up too much credit card debt, and trying to get into a relationship without getting laid. Life is pretty fucked up for you right now. I know.

If I told you everything you needed to know to straighten out your life in the next few years, then I wouldn't be here later to tell you about it. We don't want some weird Back to the Future II paradox going on... so I'll tell you about the little things, and advise you about the bigger ones. I wouldn't want the major things to change, anyway... but you'll find out why later.

First off, I know you've been seeing guys from the IRC [internet relay chat]. I think you've already found this out the hard way, but always meet guys in public. Never go to their house to watch a movie the first time you meet. And don't feel obligated to go further than you want. Oh, yeah... and watch your roving hands. They could get you in trouble.

Matt is a dork, but he's harmless. He'll go away eventually. Jon isn't worth the heartache. He's too old for you, and no matter what it may seem like while you're together, he's really not your type. Don't sweat it if nothing ends up happening between you two. Adam is a total dork, too. I don't care if he is a bit of a local celebrity. He's called the Virgin Freak for a reason. Don't go to his dorm room, and don't make out with him. It'll just cause an IRC soap-opera, and you'll end up being weird about each other. Better off just to be IRC buddies and leave it at that.

Bryan is a different kind of dork — he's got more relationship experience, and he's more "normal." If you're going to make out with somebody, he's probably the one to make out with. As far as physical stuff goes, he knows what he's doing. Even if he does make fun of your ratty old shoes. — And don't be afraid to stick up for yourself. Tell him to buy you new shoes, and tell him you wear a size 10. See if he does anything about it.

And don't be such a prude. Don't be afraid to let guys touch you in your bathing-suit area. Sure, wait on sex, but don't be afraid of physical intimacy.

On a different subject: I know it's early in the semester, but I regret to inform you that you're going to flunk out. No, no, not permanently, just for a semester. It's OK... this is going to be the best thing for you so far. You know you're getting sick of school — admit it. When you come back almost a year from now, you'll be ready to be here. While you're home, you might consider getting a job. Don't wait for Gary to goad you into it.

Oh, did I mention Gary? He's Mom's new guy. Get used to him; he'll be around awhile. You'll think he's a total dick, especially when Mom starts bringing him home while you're living there. He'll try to start treating you like his own kid, and trying to "raise" you or something. Don't be all pissed off about it. You won't want to admit it, but he's got some valid points. For instance, your job (or lack thereof). You're not going to find something you really like, not at age 19 with no experience. You just need something to get you some money. Save up for drumcorps next year.

Drumcorps is going to be the most kickass thing in your life for quite a while. You'll wish you'd gotten involved in it sooner — as it is, you'll only have three years of marching eligibility. Make 'em good ones. Talk to people. Make friends. Don't be afraid to be a dork. Get in shape before you get there. Go check out the Rec — it's right across the street, and it's actually pretty cool. Go jog or something. Being in shape will help you enjoy the experience more. It's totally intense, as you already know. And it gets better.

Off-topic: Steve Perkins is an asshole. He might be fun on the trips up to Saginaw, and he might like some cool music, but he's generally an asshole. If you ever consider him to be attractive, smack yourself. You're too desperate. Something better will come along soon, I promise.

What else...? Oh, yeah. Stop using your credit cards now. Use the job you get in the Fall to pay them off a little. You might want credit sometime in the next seven years, and it'll suck to be without for that long.

Take pictures of everything. You never know when it'll be gone, and you'll want to remember, and you'll be frightened at how much memory has passed you by. Take pictures of friends and loved ones, of places and events and buildings. Take pictures of Tom and of Memaw. Take pictures of your boyfriends (and I use the term loosely). Chronicle your life, so you won't forget the bad parts. Or the good parts.

Something else: when you come back to school next Spring, your roommate will be a little weird. Be ready for it. She's cool, but she's weird. She's got cool friends, too.

Now, not to get you too excited, but... you're going to meet somebody. Somebody Special. You might not know it at first, but he's different. He's not going to try to get you in the sack on the first date. He's funny, and honest, and tall. He will love you to the ends of the earth. It'll be cool. Only thing is... he can't sing, and he doesn't like drumcorps. :-)

I don't want to give you too much to think about at one time, so I think I'll leave it at that. Just remember, when things seem totally fucked up, and all you want to do is sit in your room and eat and be miserable, and Life seems intent on fucking with you, and you think you'll never get out of your funk... remember that things always work themselves out eventually. It sounds like so much crap, but it's true. It's just a matter of sticking it out and doing what needs to be done.

Things are going to look up for you. It'll be a rough year ahead (except the kickass drumcorps part in the summer), but it'll work out. You'll see.

— Your Future Self

Bands Of America vs. Drum Corps International

One activity I look back on with nostalgia and remembered excitement. One activity I look back on with passion, longing, and tears.

I think it's the difference between a high-school crush and a lifetime soulmate. They're both desirable. They're both positive experiences. And, until you experience the latter, the former seems to be the most amazing experience possible.

In High School band, we had a tradition. As we stood at attention, ready to dismiss, our band director would call out the various facets of our posture that we should remember. He would call, "feet!" We would answer, together! "Back!" Straight! "Shoulders!" Up! Back! Down! And the final call was, "Eyes!" Louder than any reply, we would shout, With Pride! It meant the beginning of an era, of a legend: our band hadn't been worth anything two years before, and now we were winning competitions and making State Finals. We had pride in what we had become, and what future generations of Buckeye Bands would accomplish by building on our meager 30-member foundation.

I recall that being the most powerful experience in "oneness" with an ensemble... up until that point. In the Northern Aurora Drum and Bugle Corps, we had another tradition, one that transcended "Eyes With Pride" for me. At every corps dismissal, be it at camps, circled up after a show, or following rehearsal, the drum major or corps manager would call us up: "Corps — Ten-Hut!" We would snap to attention, horns snapping to shoulder-level, flags snapping straight, drumsticks snapping into position. The drum major would then call into the silence: "Corps! Dismissed!" and we would answer, "One!"

During every winter camp at NA, when potential new members would be attending, the corps manager would explain that this word referred not to a placement or a ranking, but a feeling of unity with our corpsmates. I refused to join in the response until the camp when I was officially signed as a member of Northern Aurora. At the dismissal of that camp, I answered the call as one member of a team, of a family. It was just as powerful then as it was through the two years I marched in NA, all the way through until our last dismissal at Division III Finals in Orlando, Florida in 1996.

My point? I don't know. I cherish my time spent both in marching band and in drumcorps. But what still brings me passion, what stirs the fire, what makes me long to relive each and every moment, is drumcorps.