Tag: me

Photo from October 1990, poem by Gary Soto

Another good one taken by Cindy.  That’s me on the left and H on the right in Pleasanton, California where we traveled with the marching band for competition during the autumn of our sophomore year.   I’m wearing fishnet stockings with zebra striped glow-in-the-dark Converse high tops. My friends and I were prone to wearing the fishnet/Converse combo from time to time.  That was the band trip that H arranged for all the boys in the band to sing “16 Candles” to me on my 16th birthday.

Also in the same photo album a poem/snippit of a poem by Gary Soto that I really liked when it was handed to me by Mrs. Brown, my awesome ninth grade English teacher.  Thank goodness I kept it, because I can’t find it anywhere online.

Photo from August 1994

In my digression, I found this photo, which I’d been looking for now and then for the past few months.  This is boyfriend #4 and myself, shortly before I went back for my second year of college.
We both loved our hair, that boyfriend and I, and I think it was hard to tell if we loved the other’s hair any more than we loved our own.  I’d had a fantastic summer with him, the kind of romance that everyone should have at least once in their lives.  I really didn’t want to leave to go back to college, but I didn’t really want to stay either.  So I had my friend Cindy take our picture, us sitting on the back deck at my house, squinting into the sun while she framed the photo.  This is the first photo of me as part of a couple that I have in my possession.  I wasn’t the type of  high school girl who handed off her camera to her friends saying, “Take a picture of us!” while I snuggled into an embrace.
I’m very tan, because I was a lifeguard three days a week, working as a cook at Pizza Hut the other four days.  I had 24 hours off between the end of work on Saturday (6pm) and the start of work on Sunday (6pm).  I’m wearing Tevas (my first pair) which I wore while lifeguarding and gave me a wicked Teva tan.   My baggy t-shirt says something witty and I’m betting I have on the plaid shorts I stole from boyfriend #3.
Boyfriend #4 is 17–there was almost a two-year age difference between us–has just graduated from high school and spent the summer doing this and that.  He didn’t have a job, which bugged me, but in hindsight it was convenient, because we only had to plan around one person’s work schedule.  He is not tan, because he didn’t do much outside stuff, and is wearing socks and sneakers, despite the heat.  He wasn’t a sandals type of guy.
Like most of the relationships from that time period, I managed to mess up the breaking up part and spent a good year incredibly angry at him, for which I’m very sorry now, as I realize he was doing what he needed to do.  But at the moment when this picture was taken, I was happy, and some part of me realized this summer was one to be remembered.

A bit of a digression.

I assumed that I had run out of the material I was using to make the bias tape for the Laurel dresses, but after (it’s always after) I finished the dresses using a different bias tape for the neckline for one of them, what should I discover but a whole bunch more of said material.

This led to a massive overhaul of the closet, when I was supposed to be doing other things.

Which led to peeking into bins, which led to the discovery of this box, which was a gift from my high school friend, sent to me during college.

It even included fun pictures, of me with her nephew (who is now in his 20s) and a picture of the jazz band my senior year.
I rearranged the closet and even organized my material and patterns.  So that was a good thing.

Quoted on Filmspotting. About Channing Tatum, of course.

Filmspotting is a recent discovery, I stumbled across it last fall and really look forward to the weekly podcast, as well as dipping into the archives.  The hosts, Adam and Josh, spend a good 20+ minutes chewing over the movie they’ve chosen to review every week and there is always a top-5 list.  One of the other features is a reader poll.  Every other week they announce the results and read comments.  I’m excited to say I’ve been quoted twice before (both times talking about women and movies!) but the poll for this week was about Channing Tatum.  So you know I had stuff to say about that.  They even linked to my Channing Tatum Personal Film Festival blog post.

http://www.filmspotting.net/reviews/1180-496-top-5-films-of-2014-so-far-the-rover.html

If you would like to listen, click on the above link and then move along to the 25:40 minute mark.

Thanks Filmspotting for making my to-see movie list long, giving me something to listen to when I clean the house and also making me famous!  You know, in that internet way.

Kid thank you

So sweet.  This is from one of the K/1 classes.  My favorite is “she has her own style” which is a comment that another co-worker also got.  I laughed because the other co-worker has a very fun sense of style, while mine involves wearing the same thing every day of the week.  But to a K/1, I guess that counts as “own sense of style.”

Ah, the illusion of control

It’s summer!  And that means I have things to do at work.  So I’ve put things in order and have goals for all the weeks I’ve worked.  Nicole, from First Unitarian introduced me to this planning method. It’s great for when you have specific tasks to do over a set amount of time, not all of which are date specific. My summer tasks mostly just need to get done, and some can’t start before I finish others, so this system works fabulously for me.  Whatever doesn’t get done in a given week gets moved down to the next week.  The trick is to keep July 21-25 from getting to full of too many un-done post-it notes.
Another way to do this is to use index cards instead of post-its.  Then you can save the index cards, make notes on the backs, and throw them in a folder to retrieve for the next summer.

Sorting the letters.

Along with the journals, the letters from the first two years of college were recovered.  They are all a jumble and I’m sorting them.  I have another tub of letters which I went though a few years ago, so I hope to get everything in neat piles of people.  It’s been fun to see what I can find.  They are especially nostalgic because after my first two years of college I got an email account. Though the letters still arrived, it wasn’t with the same frequency.  All of that early electronic communication has been lost and I mourn it.  That makes these letters all the more wonderful to read now.

KRPS schedule in 1994

Just in case you need to know what I was listening to my first two years of college.  Friend Sue and I especially enjoyed the Bob and Bill show.  That’s the first time I can remember a radio show giving an email address to write to, along with the regular postal service address.  We also loved the Radio Reader, though Friend Sue got to listen to him more than I did as she was always doing something in the Art building, whereas my hours were spent in the library.

Exercise goal for April.

I get a goodly amount of exercise, but I would like to do better.  My goal for April will be to average 60 minutes of exercise over six days.  I’ve just tallied up my exercise for the 12 weeks since January 6, and I averaged 45 minutes per day.  So I have a good foundation built.  Exercise can be anything but will most likely be the following things I do:  walking, jog/walk, Pilates, exercise class.  The only thing I’m not counting is restorative yoga, which I love, and is very good for me, but I cannot in good conscious call exercise.  I don’t have to complete 60 minutes all at once, can break the sessions and scatter them through the day.

I’ll check in at the end of every week.

Week of March 31
I did 370 minutes of exercise over seven days, but since I’ve decided to divide 370 by six and not seven, I made my goal.

Week of April 7
380 minutes over six days.  Goal achieved!  Also, I walked home from work for the first time.  It took 85 minutes.  Which is not really that long, in the grand scheme of things.  I might think about doing this more often.

Week of April 14
365 over six days.  I took Easter off.

Week of April 21
Despite the fact I did no exercise on three days, I still clocked 360 minutes this week.  This makes me think that 360/week is a reasonable number to shoot for on a regular basis.

Week of April 28
Although this week I only did 165 minutes over four days.  I did run a 5k on Saturday though, which meant I skipped my walk to the gym and the gym which meant 80 minutes of usually automatic exercise I did not obtain. Not such a great finish to the experiment, but still successful enough that I will continue to strive for 360 minutes of exercise per week.