Posts tagged as memories
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- Wednesday, June 05, 2013:
Time-lapsed Blogography Day On June 5, 1996 , my senior year of high school was coming to a close, so I took the day off and went into work with my dad. The purpose of this trip was an interview at the nearby PEPCO headquarters, after which I accepted my infamous "computer science internship without any computers". June 5, 1996 8:59pm Wednesday By the way, Whitney wrote in my yearbook that I'm a fun guy when I'm not so shy. Adrienne wrote that she was glad she got to know me better and Ada wrote that I'm an incredibly nice and very funny person. On June 5, 1999 , I went to the T.C. Williams senior prom and wore musical suspenders. Everyone says that juniors must be really cool to get to go to the se... - Wednesday, May 29, 2013:
Stuff In My Drawers Day This picture was drawn in May 1986, which would place it in the "first grade" bucket. There are enough noticeable things wrong with it to qualify it for one of those "Spot the Errors" puzzles in the newspaper. For example: People in the North don't hunt with handguns. Ponds don't have tides. A compass is irrelevant when you're in Street View mode. There's also a solid art trick on display here: if you mess up one of your frogs, cover it with grass and say that it's hiding. - Wednesday, May 22, 2013:
Memory Day: Ten Years Ago Thursday, May 22, 2003 It's been raining incessantly here which has kept me indoors for the most part. I'm slowly settling into an apartment routine and I've even been doing some real cooking for dinner a few nights a week -- everything from chicken and mushrooms to bacon & cheese meatloaf. Ten years ago, I had just cut the cord to perpetual adolescence through graduate degrees and moved back to Virginia to work full-time. Having spent the previous two summers getting up progressively earlier to avoid traffic, such that my core hours were 5 AM to 1 PM, I finally resolved to live closer to the office (which was in Dulles at the time). After visiting three separate apartment complexes... - Wednesday, May 15, 2013:
Memory Day: Snapshots This picture was taken in 1983. I suspect that my expression was caused by my suspicion about the reality of the porthole in front of me. - Wednesday, April 24, 2013:
This Day In Spending pre.money { background-color: #ffffff; display: inline-block; padding: 5px; } April 24, 2004 SFW / Cash -$ 35.17 As a young, single professional, I was frugal enough to be able to buy a week's worth of groceries at Shopper's Food Warehouse and still get cash back. April 24, 2005 Stanis Furniture -$1352.40 This was the day that I purchased a classy black bedroom set . April 24, 2006 Bowling -$ 19.50 Capitol City Brew -$ 24.00 Monday night in Shirlington was pretty happening. April 24, 2007 Dominion Power -... - Tuesday, April 23, 2013:
Stuff In My Drawers Day My audition form from All-District Band tryouts in 7th grade, or "best ways to burn a young musician when you're in the Army band but have to spend the weekend slumming as an audition judge to pay the rent." - Wednesday, April 17, 2013:
Memory Day: Snapshots These pictures were taken fourteen years ago today, on April 17, 1999. The lot of us, Jason and Rosie, Doug and Becky, Jen, and myself, took the weekend off from school and went to Busch Gardens. Because we stayed up until 3 AM playing Pictionary at Rosie's parents' house in Newport News the night before, we didn't actually get to the park until 10. And, we were so tired that we left by 6, officially making it the least cost-effective theme park visit of all time. I made a detour to my own parents' house in Alexandria on the Friday before this trip. My dad handed me this new "digital camera" invention he'd just bought for the first time, and told me to give it a try in the park. It took pictures at 600x450 pixel... - Wednesday, April 10, 2013:
Memory Day: Snapshots This picture was taken in either 1978 or 1979, in the days when it wasn't dangerous to put your kid's name on their clothing. BU was not yet in the narrative. Update - I have just learned additional context from the authoritative source: The photo on your web page today is actually from March 1980. We left you in the care of a babysitter whose name I do not recall but she lived on N. Owen. Ellen was feeling a bit neglected since your arrival in January 1980 so we took her to the Ringling Brothers Circus at the DC Armory. - Wednesday, March 27, 2013:
Memory Day: Twelve Years Ago Today March 27, 2001 was a Tuesday in my final semester at Virginia Tech, a semester with a grueling 13-credit courseload that accurately reflected my public school abilities. With an 8 AM math class which I reguarly missed by virtue that it was at 8 AM, in a different room 33% of the time, and had no parking spaces within a one mile radius, my days mainly consisted of dicking around with music. That being said, March 27 was one of busiest days of the semester. This particular Tuesday opened with a private lesson at 11:00, in which Dave McKee gave me conducting tips for my recital, followed by a fettucini alfredo lunch at Shultz Dining Hall. I spent the next hour at the music major couches where Liz was ... - Wednesday, March 20, 2013:
Stuff In My Drawers Day This picture and accompanying story were created in Mrs. McClung's first grade class in the first half of 1986. I'm Brian Uri. Check out my contractions. That's some Mystery Sneakers -level grammar. My freinds are Tony C, Micheal B, Josh R, and Micheal R. I like my things. Typical American. Has all of these friends but likes his things. I won the Halley Comet Trivia (I got a T-Shirt). This summer, my sister and I are going to our Grandma's house. (Our parents won't be there). Our parents will be going to Wisconsin, Texas, Canada, Niagra Falls, and Ontario. Parentheses and a correctly spelled ... - Wednesday, March 13, 2013:
Memory Day: Snapshots This photo was taken in 1984 in our backyard. The tree in the background was the backdrop for a large percentage of pictures, probably because of contrast, pattern uniformity, and other thing a photographer used to have to care about before Photoshop. On the far left is my sister at age 8. Next is Gina, my kindergarten girlfriend, me at age 5 in Kangaroos and my sister's hand-me-down jacket, my kindergarten best friend, Yunus, and his sister, whose name I don't recall. Having skipped preschool, kindergarten was my first structured school experience. I went to William Ramsey Elementary because it was the closest school to our babysitter, Rosa. My Dad would drop us off there really early in the mo... - Wednesday, February 27, 2013:
Memory Day: Thirteen Years Ago Today On February 27, 2000, Shac and Kelley had a student recital in an interminable line of student recitals. Using my newly discovered Photoshop skills, I provided them with a set of incredibly pretentious recital posters, including one which just called it "The Recital". I probably turned pages for accompanist, Jim Bryant, on this recital, as that was my go-to way to get better at reading piano scores and learning not to write block chords with 11 notes in my own piano parts. I also performed anonymously in Intrada by Otto Ketting. Intrada was one of those weird solo pieces where the composer believes that people want to sit through a trumpet player talking to himself with dissonanc... - Wednesday, February 20, 2013:
Memory Day: Snapshots This picture was taken eighteen years ago today, on February 20, 1995 . I was a junior in the marching band and we were marching in the George Washington Day Parade in Old Town Alexandria. In addition to the ludicrous design of the uniforms as you see them here, each coat also had a cape that hung from just one shoulder, like it was designed by Superman if he only flew to his right. - Wednesday, February 13, 2013:
Time-lapsed Blogography Day On February 13, 1996 , I was a high school senior at the awards ceremony for writing this short story in the Reflections Contest. With 2nd Place in the bag, I got to shake the hand of Alexandria Councilman Bill Cleveland. This might have been a big deal at some point, but I feel like I was shaking this guy's hand every other week with all of the crappy awards I kept winning throughout my childhood. On February 13, 2002 , I went to the theaters with Kathy to watch Gosford Park . Luckily, our friendship survived. On February 13, 2003 , all of my ear-training students descended upon me en masse to ask for letters of recommendation wh... - Wednesday, February 06, 2013:
Stuff In My Drawers Day If we're being completely honest, there were probably signs as early as kindergarten that I would not make it as a professional artist. And, third grade was the nadirial zenith of my poetry career. The rhyming scheme in this award-winning sample is known as ABCDEF. - Wednesday, January 30, 2013:
Time-lapsed Blogography Day On January 30, 1995 , I was in the midst of a five-day Band Trip to Disney World (as a junior). We spent this day in Epcot Center, starting with a workshop where we played music from Aladdin like we were a studio orchestra, and then wandered around the park for the rest of the day. I felt that the 3D "Honey, I Shrunk The Kids" ride was the best. After a really awful Polynesian Luau, we returned to the Disney hotel and partied late into the night. Actually, everyone else partied and I took it upon myself to be the chaperone-lookout so no one would get caught. What a nice guy! On January 30, 1999 , I went with Shac and Philip to the movies in Christiansburg. For some reason, we always let Shac pick t... - Wednesday, January 23, 2013:
Memory Day: Snapshots This picture was taken in the Spring of 1992 at the Alexandria City Science Fair. With a dad who was an economist, our science projects always had to involve statistical significance and run for about 18 pages longer than the teacher was actually expecting. This year's experiment was a survey of students to see if they would buy the larger bag of chips or the smaller single-serve bag of chips, and why. The overall conclusion was that kids will buy the cheaper one and don't care about the environment. The worst part about this science fair backboard is the clash between the 2D construction paper border around the title and the 3D construction paper effect on the rest of the boxes. This is probably why I didn't no... - Wednesday, January 16, 2013:
Memory Day: Eleven Years Ago Today On January 16, 2002 , I had just started my second semester at FSU, and spent much of my time noting how disorganized our Pedagogy of Music Theory II class was, especially in comparison to the first semester. I was in the middle of writing the second movement to my string quartet, Outlooks , called " The Optimist ". I had plenty of free time, because my graduate assistantship involved proctoring an electroacoustic music lab that was never actually built because of 9/11 budget cuts. Meanwhile, Kathy was noticing a scope increase in her own assistantship: When not complaining about Pedagogy class, where we did undergraduate ear training exercises and ultimately learned that "teach... - Tuesday, January 15, 2013:
Chompy Day In memory of Mike's dog, Chompy, who passed away on Saturday, here are a few brief recollections... Mike got Chompy on March 3, 2002 from a rescue agency. Her original name was Ginger which, at the time, had not yet morphed from the secret codename for a Segway to a redhead in Britain. Chompy made chomping noises with her jaw as a form of communication, not unlike the Xhosa language. For about a day, she was called Chompsalottapuss. Chompy mainly liked me because I was willing to chase her around the pool table for longer than five minutes at a time. She played games of keep-away alternating between a hard hunk of plastic almost resembling a dinosaur, a piece of comically larg... - Wednesday, January 09, 2013:
Memory Day: Ten Years Ago Today On January 9, 2003 , I was in my final semester at Florida State. I had no classes other than composition lessons, and my sole responsibilities involved teaching two sections of Sightsinging and Ear Training (MUT 1241) while proofreading my Master's Thesis . My two classes embodied the life-long struggle between haves and have-nots. One was taught in a giant echo-y clsasroom with a single (unstaved) blackboard and a tape deck. The other was taught in the state-of-the-art music dormitory, in a classroom with full audio capabilities and whiteboards. On this particular Thursday, I had just given out the first official homework assignment for the classes: Login to the lame, b... - Wednesday, December 19, 2012:
Memory Day: Christmas Twenty Years Ago On Christmas in 1992, I was 13 years old. My stash consisted of the following goodies: The boardgame, Hero Quest, and an expansion pack The Super NES games, Battle Clash and Super Mario Kart A Super NES Game Genie The Game Boy game, Super Mario Land 2 The computer game, Gobliiins A microscope, and many assorted microscope accessories A pack of Bubble Yum grape gum CDs by John Barry and Ray Stevens A Foxtail, which we never actually played with The books, How To Play With Your Food by Penn and Teller, and Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams Two books on progr... - Wednesday, December 05, 2012:
Time-Lapsed Blogography Day On December 5, 1994 , I passed out this Christmas poem to my inner circle of high school friends. (To get the full experience, you'll just have to imagine it as an Inkjet printout with Print Shop clip art of a Christmas wreath because I no longer have the hard copy). On December 5, 1995 , I finished composing Neckbone and showed it to my band director. It would go on to become a regular part of the lineup for future high school jazz gigs. On December 5, 1999 , I played a trumpet fanfare with Kelley, Shac, and Stephanie at an Early Music Ensemble concert, which involved us performing antiphonally from various perches in the Recital Salon and th... - Wednesday, November 28, 2012:
Stuff In My Drawers Day: Mail Edition Sixteen years ago today , I was a freshman in college and heavily into online chatroom roleplaying. I frequented the "Inn of the Weary Traveler" on the Webchat Broadcasting System. A competing chatroom that got more publicity was "Glenshadow's Tavern", and this guy, _R_, was not a fan. In the email, he is proposing that the characters in IWT "travel" to the tavern and "kill" Jase, figuring that Jase is so invested in his character that he would refuse to die, thus being labeled a "zippy" by all of the serious roleplayers. I remember a time when my emails were dependent on * insert action or acronym here * for comprehension. Now, I can't even try to put asterisks in an email without cringing.&nb... - Wednesday, November 21, 2012:
Memory Day: Wii U (and sometimes, Why?) Growing up, our household was always a Nintendo household. We had a NES (two years after everyone else in the neighborhood did), followed by a Super NES, and I can still remember the innocent years when I thought a game was good because "Nintendo Power gave it a 5 out of 5!!". My sister and I had matching Game Boys, which we used to play games that no one had ever heard of (like Dedalus Opus) until the "monochrome bars of death" covered up too much of the screen to be playable. We never owned any of the systems from Sega, Sony or Microsoft, and that embargo continues today for no particular good reason. The Nintendo love decreased in college and beyond: I bought an N64 when I lived with Rosie and An... - Wednesday, November 14, 2012:
Stuff In My Drawers Day: ICQ Chat Logs Not a lot happened on November 14 in any of my past logs to warrant an "X Years Ago Today" post, but I did stumble across these ICQ chat logs from the year I lived with Kelley in East Ambler Johnston. He was usually on the road representing his cult, so we mainly used ICQ to leave messages for each other. Apparently, I was home ALL OF THE TIME because I was a Computer Science major, which also made me his personal secretary. div.icqBox { background-color: #ffffff; font-family: 'Courier New'; font-size: 9pt; -moz-border-radius: 6px; border-radius: 6px; padding: 6px; margin: 6px; } -------------------------------------- ICQ History Log For: 101330505 Kel... - Wednesday, November 07, 2012:
Memory Day: Snapshots Apparently in 1987, I stole my smile from a sock puppet and my pants from a jester. - Tuesday, October 23, 2012:
Survey of Jazz History Between 1994 and 2002, jazz was the primary type of music I listened to. I was that annoying kid that had 90.1 FM blaring in the car until they ran out of money and stopped playing jazz before 11 PM. I own at least twelve CDs by the Stan Kenton Orchestra, and stayed home learning the chord changes to Eager Beaver while all of the other high school senior boys were searching for eager beavers of their own. I lost some of my interest in college, after multiple semesters of failed jazz band auditions while watching some obliviously horrible trumpeters make the cut -- apparently Chip McNeill was not a fan of my mellow tones. He did, however, teach me one important lesson: always take courses taught by the jazz faculty... - Wednesday, October 17, 2012:
Stuff in My Drawers Day: Mail Edition Thirteen years ago today was the day after the VT-Syracuse game which we won 62-0. It was also Homecoming, Alumni Day, and the Marching Virginians' 25th Anniversary celebration. I'm sure that Dave McKee just sent this email out in relief over the fact that we had exceeded extremely low expectations for behavior, and no one had died from acute alcohol poisoning while cameras were rolling. Twelve years ago today was the day I finalized my list of music grad schools to apply to. I actually had to think for a few minutes to remember the schools -- the list included FSU, UT Austin, U Kentucky, Northern Illinois, U Maryland, and one of the Michigans. Ten... - Wednesday, October 10, 2012:
Memory Day: Ten Years Ago Today October 10, 2002 was the first death knell for my adolescence-prolonging grad school career. It was on this date that I sent an email to the company that I had interned at for three summers to see about a full-time position: (This is not a date I celebrate regularly with paid time off and a parade -- I just happened to be doing a search through every email I've ever written last night, and it turned out that this was the only email sent on the particular day). My reasons for switching from music to computers were outlined in this post , but the gist of the matter was that I was, and still am, a lazy introvert (albeit an extremely efficient one), and the amount of non-compo... - Wednesday, September 26, 2012:
Memory Day: Fourteen Years Ago Today September 26, 1998 was a Saturday in my third year at Virginia Tech. I was living with the messiest of my college roommates, Nathan Egge, in East AJ and regularly wore a hand-me-down Members Only jacket to embellish my intentional wardrobe of clothing that didn't quite fit. This Saturday was Band Parents Day, which meant that my parents were in town to watch the band spell DAD and WOW on the field, and my dad was tailing everyone in my band rank, trying to get them to look at him for picture-taking purposes (candid shots were rarely a part of his photographic palette). The VT football team was doing rather well, with Al Clark leading them to a 27-7 victory over Pitt, but I cared ab... - Wednesday, September 05, 2012:
Memory Day: Nineteen Years Ago Today September 5, 1993 was the Sunday before Labor Day. I was 13 (going on 14) and just about to start 10th grade at T.C. Williams High School (in the days when junior high went from 7-9 and high went from 10-12). This particular Sunday was thematically Scouty, starting with a merit badge and ending with a Boy Scout award ceremony. I was in the process of earning the Beekeeping merit badge, and got up early to travel down to Stafford. A guy that worked with my dad, Doyle Johnson, lived on five acres of land with his eight kids and numerous beehives, and I spent five hours dressed up like an Outbreak scientist, learning to steal the honey from the bees and process it in Doyle's garage. F... - Wednesday, August 29, 2012:
Memory Day: Snapshots I have no idea where this was taken, but I remember my parents wearing those goofy cloth hats throughout my childhood. Update from my Dad : "The picture on your web site was taken on the playground at an elementary school in Arlington on the Fourth of July 1983 or 1984. We were with Rosa Lopez and her sons waiting for the fireworks to begin." - Wednesday, August 22, 2012:
Memory Day: Thirteen Years Ago Today August 22, 1999 was the Sunday before the first day of classes in my fourth year at Virginia Tech. I had just finished a week of band camp and had moved into East Ambler Johnston with Kelley Corbett and his eight hundred towels. I had a 19 credit schedule lined up that included Physics, Intro to Human-Computer Interaction, Conducting, Counterpoint, Trumpet lessons, Composition lessons, Flute lessons, and Marching Band. The pictures on the right were taken at the End-of-Band-Camp festivities with a brand new 2 megapixel camera. You can also date the images by the classy shadow-bevel effect, which meant that I was still using Paint Shop Pro for all of my graphics needs. Sunday the 22nd op... - Wednesday, August 15, 2012:
Memory Day: Eleven Years Ago Today August 15, 2001 marked the formal severance of my Virginia residency, an act of abandonment that would allow me to get in-state tuition rates a year later at Florida State. At the time, I had no idea how much I would end up keeping in touch with college friends, and didn't know if we would just naturally scatter to the winds like dandelion tufts bound together by nothing more than proximity and Killian's. It was for this reason that I originally started a blog, and you can see from the relative innocence of those early "this is what I ate for lunch" posts that I really had no particular goal in mind. Before this trip, I had only been to Tallahassee once, with my dad, to lease an apartment a... - Wednesday, August 08, 2012:
Memory Day: Eighteen Years Ago Today August 8, 1994 was a Monday, and the second day of Penn State Science and Energy Camp, which was held at Boy Scout Camp Goshen. By now, I was already an Eagle Scout and had no further need of merit badges , but this camp allowed me to earn five more badges whose requirements were too annoying to do on my own. There are three approaches to earning a merit badge in Boy Scouts: Buy the merit badge requirements pamphlet, find a registered counselor in your home town, and fulfill all of the requirements. Get your uncle who owns a farm to register as the "Rabbit Raising" counselor and earn the merit badge by spending the summer on his farm. Go to a week-long Boy ... - Thursday, August 02, 2012:
Memory like a steel trap. Our house, "At Last", is directly across the street from the Wright Brothers Days Inn, which is useful for both its easy beach access and unsecured Wifi. The building looked very familiar to me, and I confirmed yesterday that this is, indeed, the place where my family stayed on our very first Nags Head trip in the late 80s. Our room had a kitchenette so we never had to eat out, and we went through an economist-sized allotment of canned dinners. It rained at least two of the days we were there, and we played five-card draw with plastic poker chips stored in a Planters peanut can. - Wednesday, July 25, 2012:
Canada Travelogue, Part III of III At one time, it seems like Mont-Tremblant might have been three separate towns, a commercial strip along the highway with your standard gas stations and chain restaurants, an old town full of B&Bs and affordable local restaurants, and a bizarre ski resort town where a burger is $20. Nowadays, all three sections are renamed "Mont-Tremblant", resulting in an array of unhelpful, identical highway exit signs which anxiously hope to direct lost souls towards the priciest portion. This devious Canadian trap might work if the locals at the numerous information offices weren't so friendly, disdainful of the resort, and careful to point you to the more charming areas where "the food and the prices are honest". For... - Tuesday, July 24, 2012:
Canada Travelogue, Part II of III From Quebec City, we drove back down Route 40, catching a funny episode of This Is That (3.4MB MP3) on the radio and stopping briefly in Trois-Rivieres for a lunch of barbeque poutine. Trois-Rivieres was a quaint town, but didn't seem to have much to offer for more than a few hours of entertainment. On the other hand, they were setting up a giant pool on the boardwalk for a wakeboarding competition, and a live chess competition was in progress . Nonetheless, we were back on the road as soon as the poutine was digesting, and made it into Montreal in the late afternoon. Montreal was definitely a more urban venue than Quebec City -- in my sheltered suburban mind, a city is characterized by graffit... - Monday, July 23, 2012:
Canada Travelogue, Part I of III Our trip to Canada came about because we were too busy with school and work to plan our summer vacation earlier this year. Once May rolled around, flight prices were skyrocketing and choices were slimming. A Montreal-Quebec trip turned out to be the perfect antidote, and was easily one of the best vacations we've ever taken. Plus, the Canadian dollar is slightly depressed right now, so every time I withdrew $200 CAD from my bank account, I had the bonus euphoria of seeing only $195 US removed online. Thanks Canada! Two Wednesdays ago, we woke up at the incapacitatingly early hour of 4 AM to fly into Montreal (by way of JFK). After an uneventful flight, we hit the road for Quebec City around noon. Driving in Cana... - Wednesday, July 11, 2012:
Memory Day: Eleven Years Ago Today July 11, 2001 was in the heart of the limbo summer between undergrad and grad school. I was living with my parents in Alexandria, while commuting thirty miles one-way to Dulles every morning for my second summer internship at FGM. Because traffic did not gel with my master plan, I took to working from 5:30 to 1:30, which was nearly opposite of almost everyone else in the building. FGM had recently hired a Java guru who spent most of the day comparing design patterns to coffee filters, which inevitably led to several hours of refactoring code. My project for the summer was to design a reusable set of graphical elements that could replace the heavily duplicated, hard-wired UI in the existing software. Some mig... - Wednesday, June 20, 2012:
Stuff In My Drawers Day: Eleventh Annual End-of-the-Year Party Seventeen years ago today was the last day of my junior year in high school. As was customary, I had one of my rockin' parties , complete with a Trezur Hunt. Here are the knocking instructions that adorned the front door for this party: Here is the final clue from the Trezur Hunt for one of the three teams. There were 15 guests at this party. Are you smarter than a junior? - Wednesday, June 13, 2012:
Memory Day: My First Job My first job, paying $5.50 an hour, was an internship at Potomac Electric Power. It was just after high school graduation sixteen years ago, and took place in the aging power plant that looked as if it would tumble into the Potomac River during a mild earthquake. I was too young to legally have a job the summer before, and did nothing during my senior year other than occasional Alexandria Symphony stage crew gigs (and our family was of the "your job is to be in school" mentality). As I've mentioned in previous posts, the PEPCO internship was billed as a computer-oriented position for an up and coming computer science major. I arrived at work at 7 AM every morning, had 30 minutes for lunch, and then left at 3:30 PM... - Wednesday, June 06, 2012:
Memory Day: Sixteen Years Ago Today June 6, 1996 was the last full day of the school year at T.C. Williams. Being a senior at a public school where senioritis started manifesting after Advanced Placement tests at the beginning of May, I had been coasting for quite some time. My biggest worry was probably whether the twenty-one students with higher GPAs (measured to the hundredths place) would screw up, forcing me into one of the speech-giving roles at graduation. (This is probably how Ray LaHood feels, anytime the President and Vice President hang out). My breezer of a schedule included the following highlights: First period : We had a substitute in Music Theory I who didn't know anything about music. Free period! &nbs... - Wednesday, May 30, 2012:
Memory Day: Training Drum Majors Fourteen years ago today, on May 30, 1998, I was home for the summer from Virginia Tech. I had just finished my sophomore year, living with Beavis and taking that stupid engineering class where you fill a box with wires to get the result of 1 plus 1 (the answers was 10). I still wore huge glasses, which allowed me to see twice as much as other mortals, and a hand-me-down Members Only jacket. May 30 was a Saturday which I spent giving a workshop to prospective drum majors from my old high school, because it is totally cool and not creepy at all when a college guy comes back to visit his high school band all of the time. However, my workshop was more than just an afternoon of conducting -- it was a way of life... - Wednesday, May 23, 2012:
Stuff In My Drawers Day This is a story I wrote in the first grade on February 12, 1986, which was graded by my surrogate second grade teacher, Mrs. Uhler. If I recall correctly, she identified superb work with a grade of "S", although one could be forgiven for thinking she was grading it as "Satan", based upon the pointed ears and eyes. I had fun in the snow. I and my sister made 2. snowmen. What fun it was! And I throuh a snowball at my sister's face. And made a little hollow fort. And throuh snow in the air. I went out two times. Ellen went two tomes to. It snowed hard yester day. I did not know where the Animals were hibernating. I went in than I had hot dogs and Potato rounds inside. I walked on ice with out slipping there.&... - Wednesday, May 09, 2012:
Memory Day: Snapshots This picture was taken in 1983, somewhere along the Potomac River ( update: Pohick Bay Regional Park ). I'm wearing that exact outfit in so many pictures from 1983 that only one of two conclusions can be drawn: I only owned one outfit, or all of the pictures were taken on a single, extraordinarily busy day. - Wednesday, May 02, 2012:
Memory Day: My Car This week is the final week I'll be driving my 2001 Honda Accord on its ridiculously short commute to Reston (7 miles one way). If all goes according to plan, I'll be getting a new 2012 Accord on Friday, gracefully retiring this ugly plain-jane vehicle for good. Black-green is an awful color for a car in any circumstances, but moreso when you are red-green colorblind and the car is rendered invisible. The next car is expected to lean heavily towards primary colors, not unlike most websites I design. A habit I inherited from my Dad was to record the date, mileage, amount, and price of gas throughout the life of the car. This provides a historical record of how many miles per gallon you're getting, although I ... - Wednesday, April 25, 2012:
Memory Day: Calculator Games I enjoy rereading Steven Levy's book, Hackers , on occasion, but am sometimes disappointed that I was born just a few years too late to really appreciate the evolution of the personal computer. Though I probably gained some retroactive credibility by publishing my text adventure game (fifteen years too late), I never threw together a stick-figure game and sold it in a Ziploc bag -- my 1980s resume consists of reams of unfinished BASIC games and an MS-DOS batch file that I modified for Jack Wilmer so it would insult his sister whenever she tried to play Sierra On-line's Eco-Quest . There was only one area where I was ever legitimately a technology pioneer: video games on graphing calculators.&nbs... - Wednesday, April 18, 2012:
Memory Day: Snapshots This picture was taken in 1993 when I was in 9th grade. I started out playing cornet because it was more amenable to the handspan of midgets. Our junior high band, the Francis C. Hammond Admirals marched in the GW parade yearly, but that was the extent of our outdoor activities. - Wednesday, April 11, 2012:
Memory Day: Ten Years Ago at FSU The entries from the URI! Zone from ten years ago are a little bland -- starved for content, I was doing full week reviews of the music of Steve Reich, followed by a montage of young adult authors I enjoyed as a kid. Off the web, I was closing out my first year as a music grad student at FSU. On the night of April 10, 2002, Kathy and I had our near-weekly ritual of Movie Night. The number of movies I went through while living in Tallahassee is astounding -- as if I was trying to stave off an end-of-the-world scenario of peak-DVD. Kathy came over to my "when you build it out of cinderblocks, it's like you're sleeping in a classroom" apartment at Parkwood, where we made two Totino's Pizzas (with assort... - Wednesday, April 04, 2012:
Memory Day: Snapshots It's Sprinkler Time. - Monday, March 26, 2012:
Ten Years Ago Today On March 26, 2002 , the undergraduate-level Jazz History class I was taking to fulfill a graduate requirement was unexpectedly cancelled, leaving the entire afternoon free. Rather than waste the opportunity, we piled into Kathy's RAV-4 with Mike's new dog, Ginger, and hit the nearest beach, which was only 20 minutes away from Tallahassee. Marsh Sands Beach was more of a nature spot than a sunbathing spot, and had a small sandy island, dubbed Briland, that was only accessible at low tide. The beach that day was swarming with humping horseshoe crabs, and I built a turtle out of sand. That was also the day that Ginger learned that it was fun to run away from Mike. The LL Bean backpack shown in the upper ri... - Wednesday, March 14, 2012:
Memory Day: A Coach's Death It was eighteen years ago that my freshman crew coach died from blood clot complications, a month after a freak sledding accident at the Masonic Temple. I was fourteen years old, wore glasses with lenses the size of iPads, and was a junior at TC Williams. Although my grandma had passed away a year or two earlier, this was my first awareness of a death that impacted an entire community. As I tell about it from my journals at the time, it was pretty underwhelming. March 13, 1994 7:32pm Sunday Jack called a little while ago. Coach Yeich, the one that was in the sledding accident, had a blood clot sometime today and died. He was doing better too. It's weird. I feel bad about it but... - Wednesday, March 07, 2012:
Memory Day: Snapshots This picture was taken in 1983 at Point Lookout, Maryland. You can see the single-minded dedication with which I approached the menial task of filling up a bucket from the Chesapeake Bay and dumping it on the sand -- skills I later applied by winning in public school. A year later, mysterious space plane still in orbit George Washington-shaped Chicken McNugget nets $8100 - Wednesday, February 15, 2012:
Memory Day: Snapshots In the early years, we would go to an annual Christmas event sponsored by the adoption agency that bestowed the two-day shipping on my sister and I. Our parents would bring a couple gifts that they'd already planned to give on Christmas, and a Adoptosanta would give them to us as if they were his idea (Adoptosanta later faced an audit from the IRS). As you can see from the expression on my face, I was not buying his routine, and did not think highly of what seems to be a Cabbage Patch Kids in the Senate Rotunda set. I must not have realized that my own gift was separate and coming soon -- this was probably the year I received the Transformer that was supposed to turn into a gun but was so poorly built that it ... - Wednesday, February 08, 2012:
Memory Day: Snapshots This picture dates back to 1983. The bruise on my forehead was not from parental abuse -- more likely I was under attack by earth tones. I am wearing a hand-me-down sweatshirt from my sister, featuring the panda from Shirt Tales, and apparently I didn't get the memo that kneepads get ironed on where the knees are. Thinking back, most of my pants had iron-on pads about halfway down my calves rather than the areas that actually frayed. Congressman thought parody article on Planned Parenthood was real New scented jeans smell like raspberries - Wednesday, February 01, 2012:
Memory Day: Snapshots This picture was taken during a Court of Honor ceremony with Boy Scout Troop 131 in 1990. The folks on either side of me were all of the Life and Eagle rank scouts in the troop, and we were probably doing some sort of circle-based oath-reciting. Although I haven't had to recite any of the Scout stuff in years, I can still remember that a Scout is supposed to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. To this day, I shower regularly, about 1.5 times per day. US bars friends over Twitter joke School bans fuzzy boots used to hide cell phones - Wednesday, January 25, 2012:
Memory Day: Snapshots This picture was taken in the late 80s, probably on one of many Sunday afternoon trips in search of more Civil War battlefields we had not yet Foursquared. Back then, there was no Target, no Walmart, and no four-lane highway floating majestically fifty yards above dry farmland. Along with my stylish sweater that lasted through seventh grade, I'm wearing a giant Mickey Mouse analog watch. Mickey's hands moved around the dial to report the time until an unfortunate collision with the pavement during recess. After that, it was waterproof digital Casio's forever. 5 online petitions that prove democracy is broken An Evening with Dr. Demento&nbs... - Friday, January 13, 2012:
Stuff in My Drawers Day I regularly thin the population of my file cabinets to make room for new useless junk. On Wednesday, I came very close to trashing 2 1/2 inches of awards and certificates from elementary school through college, some of which I highlighted in this post . I ended up keeping them at the behest of Rebecca, since we figured that they would be a good way to develop complexes in our future children. Among the things which did not make the "save for later" cut: Back issues of the Boy Scout Troop 131 Newsletter, The Buffalo Chip . Black and white photos showing an absence of wildlife in Huntley Meadows Park, taken for the Nature merit badge. Triplicat... - Wednesday, January 04, 2012:
Stuff In My Drawers Day: Recorded Dreams When I entered the 7th grade, I decided to try recording my dreams. I kept pen and paper on the nightstand next to my bed, and trained myself to immediately record keywords from my dream as soon as I woke up in the middle of the night or the next morning. By the time I graduated from high school and wisely decided to end the habit before I received a stranger as a college roommate, I had filled in two columns on 21 pages in Courier New 10 point font. For the most part, the entries are cryptic and vague when viewed twenty years later, but the occasional keyword definitely triggers vivid memories from parts of these dreams. Here is a small sampling from my dream sheet: ... - Wednesday, December 07, 2011:
Memory Day: Snapshots I think my current habit of wearing nothing but solid colours can be traced back to having a photographer dad who developed his own pictures in the basement. You see, the solid colours are easier to gauge and provide an easy contrast against a washed out background. On the lower left, you can also see the Advent Calendar with all of the Hershey's Kisses eaten. I cannot recall ever buying Hershey's Kisses, because there was a perpetual supply frozen in the freezer, solely used for Advent Calendars. By 1996, we were probably still eating the Kisses from 1986. How That $3.8 Million Supercar Crash Happened Drunk driver crashes into DWI checkpo... - Wednesday, November 30, 2011:
Memory Day: Ten Years Ago... Ten years ago today was November 30, 2001 . On this day in history, I completed work on my final project for my 16th Century Modal Counterpoint class, taught by the inexorable Dr. Evan Jones. Modal Counterpoint is one of the many completely useless skills that I generally omit from my resum? -- this skillset also includes an encyclopedic knowledge of the General MIDI patch numbers, troubleshooting repaint problems in Java Swing, and dancing "The Burro". For my assignment, I used "Deck the Halls" as my melodic line, coupled with the Technical font for maximum impact: Deck the Halls with Lamb of God (1:13 MP3) I also turned in a paper and did a presen... - Wednesday, November 02, 2011:
Memory Day: Snapshots If I recall correctly, this photo was taken during the period where I was an itinerant child priest. Here, I can be seen giving the evil eye to someone who crossed my path indiscriminately. Jack the Cat turns up at JFK Halloween black licorice could kill you Fed false logic, campus eats up a hoax and revolts - Wednesday, October 19, 2011:
Memory Day: Snapshots When I was a child, I never received any Christmas presents. My sister got them all. Life was horribly unfair, as was the creator of that carpet. Wrold's most relaxing song composed Amazon sued for revealing actress' age Theft of Obama teleprompter probed in Virginia - Wednesday, October 05, 2011:
Stuff in My Drawers Day: Letters of Chastisement This is quite possibly the most scathing letter I have ever written. Spring 1999 was a tight time for music majors at Virginia Tech, because one of the standard piano accompanists had just had a baby and another was only taking half of the usual performers. To meet the mandatory performance requirement, I decided to jump ahead of the pack by performing early and employing the services of a new pianist who had just arrived in Blacksburg. After the first rehearsal, it was apparent that we were not well matched, as she was expecting a vocal accompaniment of the recitative variety, where she could pound out a whole note chord while some soprano tried to emulate the vocal arc of a drunk butterfly. Inst... - Wednesday, September 28, 2011:
Memory Day: Homes To commemorate my recent mortgage refinance, which will let me pay off the house 8 years sooner for fifty bucks a month less (9 meals at Popeyes), here is a retrospective of all the places that are qualified to erect "BU Slept Here" plaques once I have fulfilled my childhood dreams of becoming a robber baron and then making over my image through philanthropy. 1980 - 1996 My childhood home was nestled in the drooping bosom of Seminary Valley in Alexandria, on a dead end "street to nowhere" which was originally intended to be a major north-south artery, but has since settled on being "that wide street that uses up the asphalt budget because the former mayor lives on it". Since leaving home, I've l... - Wednesday, September 21, 2011:
Memory Day: Ten Years Ago The nice thing about having a website that refuses to die before it jumps the shark is that eventually your "Ten Years Ago" column will be able to refer to old posts to prove that you actually did go to music grad school or own a motorcycle or get banned from entering Libya because of a religiously insensitive hat. Ten years ago today, I was living in Parkwood Apartments two blocks from the FSU Music Department College School Commune and studying hard to become a professional composer (which is like an amateur one, but with less time for composing, and more grants to apply for). Each apartment was hewn from cinderblock like a combination toaster oven / motel room, al... - Wednesday, September 14, 2011:
Memory Day: Old Movies A movie from my birthday, twenty years ago. See if you can recognize any gifts which still might live in my basement. Audience at tea party debate cheers leaving uninsured to die FHP does U-turn over speed-trap flashing drivers Hold the pillow mint, send up the yoga mat - Wednesday, September 07, 2011:
Memory Day: Snapshots This picture was taken over Christmas Break in 1997 during my sophomore year. At the time, I was still wearing gigantic glasses and getting the 1/4"-all-around haircut. I couldn't do without my computer gadgetry over breaks, so everything you see in the picture made the trip back and forth between school -- the printer, music keyboard, premium Gateway computer, subwoofer, and collection of Raymond Feist paperbacks. The game on the screen is The Curse of Monkey Island , with its catchphrase, "That doesn't take wooden nickels!" Alaskan woman punches bear to save dog Saggy pants get Green Day singer kicked off plane ... - Wednesday, August 31, 2011:
Memory Day: Snapshots Here's another picture of me clowning around on my pride-and-joy He-man bike. I'm wearing the official sweatshirt (depicting a wise owl) of James K. Polk Elementary School which means this picture was taken in late 1985 or early 1986 while I was in the first grade. Gardener sruvives accident with shear luck 'Bad mothering' lawsuit dismissed Girls get caught for late-night goat walk - Wednesday, August 17, 2011:
Memory Day: Snapshots Here's yet another picture from 1983. Our neighbours, Bill and Bonnie Malone lived in this house on Pickett Street, and he's shown here allowing the local kids to help sweep up the cherry blossom petals. The girl in the middle is Meghan, our neighbour from the other side. Driver using two cell phones gets 12 month driving ban In-flight film "explains" mysteries of female pleasure Wild Close-Ups of Rare Mammals From Huge Camera-Trap Study - Wednesday, August 10, 2011:
Memory Day: Snapshots Based on the heart badge sewn over my heart, the lack of glasses, and the classy British Knights on my feet, this picture was taken in the spring of 1991. Since one of the goals of the Boy Scouts of America is to instill a patriotic distaste for fundraising in the youth, this snapshot shows me and Eric Ruesch selling orchids for Troop 131 at the Safeway in Bradlee shopping center. Besides orchids, we also sold holiday wreaths and tangelos, but were luckily spared from ever having to sell popcorn. Proceeds went towards our summer camp experience. I have a sense of placid urgency when it comes to my Memory Day feature -- now that I'm rapidly barreling towards 32, my recollection of the day-to... - Wednesday, August 03, 2011:
Stuff (No Longer) In My Drawers Day This is Part II of my efforts to photograph a bunch of old crap in my crawlspace so I can throw it all out without guilt. Part I was a couple weeks ago. In the olden days, you couldn't throw out your manuals, because there was probably a ridiculous set of symbols or questions hidden inside to prevent people from making copies of the games. As you can see, we had a marked preference for Sierra games in our house. I played this game for three months over dial-up when it first came out and was bored out of my mind. After all that time, I had made it to a level 18 BARD, and spent the entire time "kiting wisps", which meant allowing ... - Wednesday, July 20, 2011:
Stuff (No Longer) In My Drawers Day I finally got down to business on the oft-delayed task of cleaning out the crawlspace under the stairs, with the reasoning that we'll have kids in the next twenty years or so and we have a huge shortage of bedrooms, so the youngest will probably have to channel Harry Potter for living space. This time around, I actually designated things for the nearest garbage bin, including the millions, if not billions, of old computer games, manuals, and game box trinkets that I kept around purely for useless nostalgia -- although it's tough to throw them out, am I ever actually going to buy a computer with a 5 1/4" floppy drive to play them again? This is all that is left of my m... - Monday, July 11, 2011:
Random Vignette Day In 1988, there was a cheesy tourism ad about Epcot Center that regularly aired at all hours, but especially during the Wonderful World of Disney show on Sunday nights. The commercial ended with a zoom-out shot of Mickey Mouse waving from the very top of Epcot Center. My sister, who was 3 years wiser at the time, once asked hypothetically, "Wouldn't it be funny if he fell?" And I, as an impressionable 8 year old, had to agree -- watching a giant anthropomorphized mouse roll off of a giant golf ball did seem pretty funny. After the next Sunday dinner when the dishes had been washed and my parents were settling in to watch 60 Minutes, the ad came on again, and I decided to parrot my older siste... - Wednesday, June 29, 2011:
Memory Day: Snapshots It seems like there are a statistically significant number of pictures from my youth taken in front of this pine tree -- it probably has something to do with the need for a regular background texture and color in my dad's darkroom days when he developed all of his own pictures. I always felt that the moose hat was far cooler than the Smokey the Bear hat, even though the moose was anonymous and lacking celebrity. Plus, Smokey had a hard-shelled hat, while Anon the Moose was soft all over. The seven biggest dick moves in online gaming Woman accused of spraying deputies with breast milk Capcom annou... - Wednesday, June 22, 2011:
Memory Day: Snapshots This snapshot was taken in 1983 in our backyard, in front a pine tree which has never looked so lush ever since. The guy in the back was named Tony, and he lived in the cul-de-sac at the bottom of our street. Eventually, he was no longer welcome around our house, but I can't remember if it was because he stole things, or he broke things, or a combination of the two. Happy birthday to my wife! And Brianne, of course. Got his 'mined' in the gutter Horace Goodspeed marries 16-year-old Evidence proves, most lesbians are men - Wednesday, June 15, 2011:
Memory Day: Snapshots In 1983, Bull Run was still in the boonies, and the area had not yet become merely a stop in the seven-hour queue for Jiffy Lube LIVE!! We left my sister on the battlefield that day, and never saw her again. Mugabe toilet user awaits word of his fate Solo Swimmer to Trek Across Shark-Infested Red Triangle Children's author ejected from plane for bad language - Tuesday, June 14, 2011:
Time-Lapsed Blogography Day BU minus fifteen years June 13, 1996 was Graduation Day at T.C. Williams High School, in the halcyon days when its poor academic record was a local secret, without the government-mandated stamp of fail affixed to it. T.C. was never actually as bad as reported, although it's true that you were either destined for MIT or McDonald's from day one, and the word, "halcyon", didn't appear in the colloquial dialect unless you were an SAT taker in the top-half of the college-bound. For further proof of selectively high academic standards, consider the snapshot below of Straight A procession. By tradition, anyone with a perfect 4.0 average led the graduation procession, and this... - Thursday, June 09, 2011:
Memory Day: Snapshots This picture of my sister probably dates to the very early 80s. When we were kids, our family would purchase bread at the "used bread store" in Bailey's Crossroad. This was essentially a place where all the bread near its expiration date would come to die when no one had purchased it in the real store. I'm sure it was economically sound, but it also resulted in plenty of stale pieces (especially the ends) that were only good for feeding Fred the Squirrel in the backyard. You can still see chain-link fence in the background, which places it before the points in history where the neighbours on each of three sides annoyed my dad enough to elicit high wooden privacy fences. Rushvill... - Wednesday, May 11, 2011:
Memory Day: Snapshots You might conclude that 1983 was the maximum saturation point for pictures if you didn't know how many bushels were created in the subsequent fifteen years. When I was young, my hand were always filled with either a bucket, a shovel, or a stick. My shirt is not actually inside-out -- it's one of those intentionally stylish affairs that goes well with the plaid. Deaf men stabbed after sign language mistaken for gang signs Religious paper apologizes for erasing Clinton Gene Simmons faced cyberattack by Gig Harbor man - Friday, April 29, 2011:
Recital Day Part IV of IV Can you believe that it's already the end of April 2011, or that ten years have passed since I was an undergrad? It's very true that time flies like a banana, when thrown by a monkey. Once the recital had ended, there was nothing else to do but lounge around waiting for grad school to start (This was helped by the fact that I was only taking a bare minimum of 12 credits in that last semester, and I didn't even attend the sole non-music course once I'd established an A). It was also during this period that I started looking for the next big project and turned this website into a blog. The final piece on the recital, not including the obligatory encore march, was a three move... - Thursday, April 28, 2011:
Recital Day Part III of IV By far, the poster with the most longevity and popularity was the Asian Invasion poster, which still hangs in my office at work. The creation of this poster required me to expand my massive collection of Dave Matthews and Canadian Brass CDs with my first and last Beatles purchase ($8.99 in the bargain bin at the Christiansburg Walmart). After reshuffling the flowers to spell URI! and a trumpet, I splattered the background with friends and professors from high school and beyond. You can even see the plastic cow we put on Jason Chrisley's birthday cake on the left side below Mike Robb. This poster, and all of the rest from the complete series found a second life in Tallahass... - Wednesday, April 27, 2011:
Recital Day Part II of IV Promotional concerns for the URI! Recital took on as much importance as musical ones, since you can even make a musicologist's recital sound good if you advertise it with enough verve. The poster in yesterday's post was created with the help of Paige, who took fifty pictures of me in various poses which I then Photoshopped together. Since this was one of my first photo-editing outings, my original idea of showing a huge trumpet choir on stage was nixed when the shadows became too difficult to manipulate. The first promotional poster went up in August before the recital, and a new one came out each month, like a comic book for music nerds. I used the posters to learn all about... - Tuesday, April 26, 2011:
Recital Day Part I of IV This Friday marks the 10th Anniversary of my undergraduate recital, and seeing as how my daily updates are starved for content more often than any given page of eHow.com, I thought I would spend the next few days doing an indulgent Behind-the-Scenes, Where-Are-They-Now, Blu-ray-Edition-With-Deleted-Scenes retrospective on the whole affair. My recital was one of the few instances in life where I actually displayed qualities that could be mistaken for ambition , which is why I like to pull it out of the closet every few years and parade it around like a six-year-old son who just won a Halleys Comet trivia championship. By the numbers, The URI! Recit... - Tuesday, April 19, 2011:
Memory Day: Snapshots Extrapolating from this moment in the past: I am a backseat driver. I would prefer to live in countries where they drive on the left. I let the ladies drive me around town. Seatbelts are for wusses. What else can you learn? Meat discovered in meatless magazines Vegetable bandits strike as food prices soarT Americans reluctant to share sex, work details on web - Friday, April 08, 2011:
Memory Day: Snapshots Even by 1983, you can tell that I was thrilled with the possibility of taking "just one more" picture -- waves of enthusiasm are rolling off of me like ball bearings on the last level of Marble Madness. The Radio Flyer wagon was the transportation method of choice for trips where we'd be gung ho at the start, but probably run out of steam by the halfway point and ask to be carried. On more than one occasion, we'd take the Holmes Run bike path down to the Magruder's at Foxchase to buy groceries that didn't quite fit into the Saturday morning speed runs my dad performed. We would leave the wagon tied to a post outside like they might have done if Magruder's were in the Old West, but this practice ended when we c... - Wednesday, March 30, 2011:
Memory Day: Snapshots This picture was taken in 1988 at a fair full of balloon penises. Actually, given my penchant for Ultima at the time, I had probably requested a sword, but I don't know why my sister would have wanted a dagger. I'm wearing my ugly James K. Polk Elementary School sweatshirt, with mascot art that looks like a cross between a Siamese cat and an alien (definitely not a wise old owl). My sister is on the cutting edge of late 80s fashion, with a sweatshirt that could double as a fat person's smock, and Keds with the laces taken out. Whistle-blowing witch grounded by TSA Broken heart burns like hot coffee Tan... - Wednesday, March 02, 2011:
Memory Day: Snapshots My dad recently converted several tattered troves of negatives into scanned images, instantly adding hundreds of never-before-seen shots as potential Memory Day fodder. Here is the first, taking in December 1992. We're playing Super Tennis on the Super NES, a game that I won consistently after learning a single unbeatable serve and repeating it over and over (This will also let you win in NFL Blitz 2000 with a Hail Mary). On the table we're sitting upon is the one real plant in the entire house, an African violet, a big bowl of guppies, and one of those geode rocks with crystals formed inside of it. On the floor near the TV is the Super Mario Strategy Guide that came as a bonus with m... - Wednesday, January 26, 2011:
Memory Day: Garbage Pail Kids UNO Back in the late 80s (the ladies), one of several passing fads were the Garbage Pail Kids trading cards. These cards were a grotesque parody of the Cabbage Patch Kids, and came bundled in 5-packs with a stick of gum. The characters on the cards had punniful names, and to increase the need to buy additional cards, every picture was printed with one of two possible names. Collecting trading cards is annoying, except when your parents buy everything in bulk quantities. I was never able to complete the 100 card set for The Dark Crystal, since we only purchased them in 7-Elevens, but when it came to Garbage Pail Kids, we got twenty packs in a single afternoon and immediately ate all of the gum. Of course... - Tuesday, November 30, 2010:
Time-lapsed Blogography Day BU in the days before blogs Fifteen years ago , on November 30, 1995, I was a senior at T.C. Williams High School. I had a Calculus exam in Mr. Kokonis' class during 5th period which was interrupted by a fire drill, but otherwise the day was rather dull. After school, I was playing around in a very early edition of Finale (before they started versioning them with years and trying to convince me that music notation in 2007 was radically different from music notation in 2006 and worth $150) and wrote the first bars of what would eventually become the jazz band chart, Neckbone . This chart was performed at least four times, putting it ahead of most of the fare found in an Undergraduate Com... - Wednesday, November 24, 2010:
Memory Day: Report Cards as a Predictor of Future Success alternately titled "Squash" First Grade (Mrs. McClung) Tragically, my handwriting never did improve , so Mrs. McClung passed away with unresolved wishes, and probably haunts the perpetually-construction-afflicted elementary school where she taught. In addition, never again did I read at an exponential level. Third Grade (Mrs. Hutt) He was always a good citizen, except for the time you accused him of stealing a dollar from that other kid and called him a liar, but what else can be expected from a teacher that interchanges adjectives with nouns? Fortunately, today, my scholship is THROUGH THE ROOF! Four... - Wednesday, August 11, 2010:
Memory Day: Eighth Grade Extracurriculars As everyone who fell by the wayside in the ultra-competitive Christopher Newport University admissions process can attest, you MUST start your extracurricular activities in eighth grade if you want to have any chance of getting into college and avoiding a lifetime career degreasing the grills at Flamers. To carry on the eighth grade theme of this year's updates, here are the clubs and sports I was a part of in 1993. Since there are 9 people on a boat in crew, a positive soul might suggest that being on the "Novice B" boat puts you among the top 81 athletes in the entire program. A pessimist might note that there is no one worse than you while on this boat. That is also future President of the United States, Ja... - Wednesday, March 31, 2010:
Memory Day: A Decade Ago "Five million, two hundred fifty-eight thousand, eight hundred and eighty minutes" is long in both the temporal and literal senses -- it would not have made a catchy lyric for any plays about AIDS, but it does accurately represent how long it's been since my fourth year at Virginia Tech. I'm not even any taller today than I was back then, unless height can be measured in circumference. March 31, 2000 was the day after the VT Brass Ensemble concert, which featured too many trumpets, and four songs about cats. My parents were in town for the concert, which was followed by a parentless Delta Mu meeting at Andy's apartment in Foxridge, where a really shy girl named Paige was implanted into the circle... - Wednesday, March 10, 2010:
List Day: Eight Puerto Rico Experiences Wandering along Playa Lucia, and watching a dirty, old, pervert surreptitiously repositioning his car so he could watch the white chick in the swimsuit. Driving past signs for a Ferreteria and learning, with some dismay, that it is a hardware store, and not a place where you can have ferret for lunch. Driving back to our hotel near Yabucoa after dark on Highway 3, a G-string width road that wends around a mountain wherever there happened to be space to lay some pavement, and swerving around a grimy, staggering man stumbling up the road against the flow of traffic. Seeing kids riding a horse bareback along the beach. Seeing a million... - Wednesday, February 24, 2010:
Stuff in My Drawers Day It was around September of 1988 when I decided I could invent games just as cool as Infocom text-adventure games by drawing mazes on paper, and this was the first one I ever did. I now have a folder of over fifty, a mix of traditional mazes, Infocom box-style maps, and other images, and my fourth grade compatriots would crowd around the lunch table going through my mazes while I directed the action. None of us had ever heard or played Dungeons and Dragons (and to this day, I've still never played it), but I'm guessing it was roughly the same idea, without the numbers and nerd-stigma. This was one of the score sheets from my lunch games, and the fact that I spelled "shillelagh" correctly means it was pr... - Wednesday, February 03, 2010:
Vocabulary Day learning words the first grader way Here is Ken. I never actually knew anyone named Ken, but based on his crippled flamingo physique, I'm guessing that he would have been that friend who came to houses only to find all the lights off and the occupants scarcely daring to breathe in the foyer, hoping he'll go away. Ken and Beth can swing. If you don't know how to spell a word, it's completely acceptable to use pictograms -- even the ancient Egyptians did this from time to time. Also, it seems that Ken lost both of his forearms performing the exact same dangerous trick that Beth is attempting right now... - Wednesday, January 20, 2010:
Memory Day: Decades The interesting thing about a decade is not how much changes during that time -- it's how quickly the time went by. Since I've now been around for three, here is a look at the road trip of my life. Thirty years ago , I was 0 years old, an age that is only interesting when you are in the denominator of a fraction, so let's move ahead a decade. Twenty years ago , I was 10 years old and in Mrs. Turner's sixth grade class at James K. Polk Elementary School. We took our picture for the flimsy photocopied brochure that passed for a yearbook on the unapologetic death trap of a wooden castle playground from a non-litigious era. I had been a Boy Scout in Troop 131 f... - Wednesday, January 13, 2010:
Memory Day: Army Men Like most young lads who grew up in the 80s before toys were a garish mash of retarded Power Rangers and Pokemon, the core unit of outdoor play was the Army Man. Arriving from China in thick plastic bags hanging off the ends of the aisles at Best Company in Shirlington, these crudely stamped lumps were probably the Chicken McNuggets of the plastic industry, but they provided hours of fun even if they were poisonous to touch or eat. As a child of an economist growing up in the House of the Rising Sum, my army men never had any quality of craftmanship, but this was offset by the fact that I had millions of them -- every time there was a sale of 100 men for a dollar, that was the bag I received. On the plus sid... - Wednesday, December 23, 2009:
Memory Day: Hawaii Honeymoon Part V For the final segment of Cool Places I Visited While You Spent the Month of October Working , I'll be talking about hikes. I'm always been a fan of hiking (of the "go up a mountain with a water bottle and then go home and eat dinner" variety, and not the "BOIL YOUR WATER AND CHECK FOR SCORPIONS IN YOUR UNDERPANTS variety, or even the "Dulles Toll Road Fare" variety), and Kauai is eminently hikable with surprisingly diverse scenery for an island only 18 miles across. Kuilau Ridge : After our 2008 trip to Europe, on which I was forced to hobble around London like a hunchback , we played it safe with our first hike. We traveled inland from our condo to the Kuilau Ridge Trail, a consta... - Wednesday, December 09, 2009:
Memory Day: Hawaii Honeymoon Part IV Our time on Kauai was split into two discrete segments: for the first four days, we stayed at a fancy resort and worked strenuously to relax on and nearby the complex. For the last ten days, we rented a car and moved to a second-floor condo in Kapa'a overlooking the tidepools, allowing us to travel around the island and experience some of the more heady excitements and hikes. While on the resort, we had an hour-long outdoor couples massage in an airy tent on the beach, and listened to local musicians sing really bad Hawaiian music for a hula dancer while sipping free Mai Tais. When I was obviously not getting over my strep throat anytime soon, we took a local taxi-van to the nearest clinic, which was housed in a h... - Wednesday, November 18, 2009:
Memory Day: Hawaii Honeymoon Part III Having been tiny people since birth, most of the hikes on Kauai would have depleted our caloric composition to below zero, so it was in our health's best interest to consume as many different kinds of food as possible. Besides the fact that seafood is present in almost every restaurant, there is no specific Kauai cuisine. There's only an interesting hodge podge of ethnic plates from sushi to tacos to burgers. Here are four of the more memorable restaurants we ate at while on the island: Sheraton Resort : We ate all of our first week meals in the resort, at a restaurant called The Point, or another called Shells. The "Seafood Tinfoil" consisted of mussels, shrimp, ahi, and scallops cooked in a foil wrapp... - Wednesday, November 11, 2009:
Memory Day: November 11 Happy Veterans' Day / Kelley Corbett's Birthday. I'll be working from home today since our company contracts to the government, and the government takes their holidays very, very seriously. I'm sure there was at least one government program manager who took the day before or after this one off to give a little more time of reflection and/or golf to the enlisted men. I've never been a big fan of the concept of floater holidays that turn successive years of holidays into musical chairs where you must stop working regardless of how retardedly they break up the week. Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln had the right idea claiming Monday holidays instead of this floating nonsense (this is also why I prefer table l... - Wednesday, November 04, 2009:
Memory Day: Hawaii Honeymoon Part II When it comes to beaches, Kauai does everything right. Besides the rule that every beach is public property, regardless of which movie star's house abuts the area, There are also picnic pavilions, showers, and reasonably clean bathrooms available at major stopping points. Camping is allowed at several beaches, and because being an island leads to a very high proportion of coastlines, you can usually just roll your car into one of the million little highway shoulder spots and find your own personal stretch of unofficial beachspace. We went to seven beaches on our honeymoon (because we value methodical research and sitting), and each one was different enough from the others to warrant the visit -- picture the Outer ... - Wednesday, October 28, 2009:
Memory Day: Hawaii Honeymoon If you haven't been paying close attention so far, I got married three weeks ago and fled to Kauai, an island paradise which is the farthest western public island in Hawaii. My oceanic travels are exceedingly limited, comprised of my Fresh Off the Plane trip from South Korea , and a 2008 trip to big cities in Europe. We chose Kauai because the Caribbean was in hurricane season, and there seemed to be enough varied activities to last us for the two weeks we wanted to spend. The fact that I didn't have to fill out any forms at work for leaving the country to face the dangers of converting to Communism was just icing on the wedding cake (exquisitely constructed by Anna's mom). The first thing that strike... - Wednesday, September 09, 2009:
Memory Day: Stuffed Animals In the halcyon days of my youth (a period after the idyllic but before the tempestuous), I owned more stuffed animals than a taxidermist with defaulting clients. The collection of roughly thirty completely filled up a rectangular laundry basket, and the animals were all shapes and sizes, like the hippo on the left who is surprisingly happy for a mouth-breather and was probably a hand-me-down from my sister. My stuffed animal collection obeyed three basic rules: none of the animals were given names unless they already had one, they all actually had to be animals , and they could not have any hard shell parts (Cabbage Patch Kids failed on all three counts). And because we lived in a home where good childr... - Wednesday, September 02, 2009:
Memory Day: The Admiral's Overture In the winter of 1996, with only six months of composing under my belt, I was asked by a former band director to compose a piece for her middle school band. Although it wasn't my first world premiere (it was actually the fifth), it was the first one triggered by an outside request rather than my incessant attempts to bug band directors who couldn't say no to me. I would later learn that it's HARD to get people to play your music (with the exception of flute solos, because once you've played your first contemporary flute piece, you can fake all the rest of them without much effort, plus you save money by not having to hire a pianist). Hammond Middle School was a former high school, so their concert attire was an emba... - Wednesday, August 19, 2009:
Memory Day: Old Snapshots This is my old friend, Daniel Bethancourt, at our Sixth Grade graduation in June 1990. Sixth grade graduations are necessary milestones in today's society, since half of the class abruptly drops out immediately after to become car mechanics and air conditioning repair boys. Daniel moved to the West Coast immediately after sixth grade, and I've only seen him once since then -- he is now Father Daniel at an Orthodox Christian parish in Lousiana. This is just after seventh grade with my friend, Ian Nauroth, who I previously mentioned . We had just come back from biking through the mud, so our backs resembled a latrine mishap (for which he later got in... - Wednesday, August 05, 2009:
Memory Day: Christmas Every family has their Christmas traditions (even the Jewish ones who bemoan the fact that everything's closed on Christmas Day). The Uri! household traditions were fairly tame -- we did not construct ear wax candles in every window or go a'carolin' in four-part Hi-Lo's harmony, but we did go through the same motions every year for many, many years. A Uri! Christmas began with a tree, much like the French phrase, tr?s bien , when pronounced by a redneck. In the early years, we'd always shuffle off to the live tree lot for a giant, misshapen natural tree with all the roots still on it. After the holidays, it would get a ceremonial berth in the backyard where it would survive for about ninety-seven days b... - Wednesday, June 17, 2009:
Memory Fragment Media Day a triple threat of memories, old photos and fragments ♣ This picture was taken around 1991 at our powerful 486 computer with 5 1/4" drive, 3 1/2" drive, and tape drive. It had 256-color VGA and an Ad Lib card, but only 24 of the colors ever worked. I am playing Ultima 6, based on the hint book open in front of me. ♣ A wild party at Rosie and Jen's house in February 1998, where we played Twister and Uno. I still have that shirt, but I haven't worn it since the last time I was incarcerated at Denim Penitentary. ♣ At Mountain Lake in May of 2000. Paige is deciding that the rock f... - Thursday, June 11, 2009:
T-Shirt Day Remember when I wore a bunch of hats ? This is kind of like that. This is the same shirt I wore at Disney World in yesterday's post. Evidently Boy Scouts have horrible design and colour picking skills. I guess that's what Girl Scouts are for! AMIRITE? All that artistic talent centralized in a single place for the summer and this is the best shirt they could come up with. In other news, it's hard to cut your own hair evenly in the back. After our high school team lost the Science Bowl , Dr. Patel dug these shirts out of a box from better years and told us we were all champs... - Wednesday, June 10, 2009:
Memory Day: Disney World The last major family vacation we ever took was a week-long trip to Florida in August of 1994. Neither my sister or I were very excited about this trip -- she was only days away from leaving for her freshman year at UVa and would rather have been hanging out with her friends doing nothing, and I was going on the trip directly from a week-long stay at a Boy Scout Science and Energy camp without any time in the middle to simply be at home and recharge. The vacation didn't get off to a rousing start, despite the novelty of taking the auto-train. For the unenlightened, the auto-train isn't an electronic system to keep the train on or pretty close to the proper tracks -- it's a direct train from Lorton, Virginia to Flo... - Wednesday, June 03, 2009:
Memory Day: Junior Year Awards Ceremony As if sitting through an elementary school assembly in a multipurpose gym/auditorium smelling of feet while kids were awarded for perfect attendance wasn't bad enough, the assemblies only got worse as the years went on. By the time I'd gotten to T.C. Williams High School, the awards program was fifteen pages long (16 with an addendum) and had awards for every class and every subject, as well as scholarships, Book Awards, and other ridiculous categories. Having a technical school on the premises didn't help matters, as there were awards for "Auto Mechanics I" and "Air Conditioning Repair" interspersed with the smarty awards. By this point in my academic career, I was over awards, and rarely tried to get more than the occas... - Wednesday, May 27, 2009:
Memory Day: MV Auditions For the last two years of my five-year Marching Virginians tour, I was one of two section leaders (with Pat Brown and Joanna Swift), which meant that I had the privilege of sitting in a hot room with the trumpet professor, Dr. Bachelder, listening to seventy or eighty trumpet players zealously murdering their sheet music and vying for one of the sixty-three available trumpet spots in the marching band. We had all kinds enter the audition room, from eager freshmen who were first chair in their high schools because they could play "Let's Go Band!" , to shy music majors who played the Dave Matthews excerpt with vibrato, to oldtimer day warriors who hadn't picked up their trumpet since the Bowl game the pre... - Wednesday, May 13, 2009:
Journal Fragments random excerpts from my first year of grad school ♣ September 3, 2001 : Yesterday evening, I went to the department head's house for a music theory welcoming picnic but it's actually next week. Luckily no one was home so I didn't look completely dumb. ♣ October 14, 2001 : Mark was drunk and telling Kathy his opinions of people in our Pedagogy class and labeled me as the "quietly competent" one. I've heard that before... ♣ December 1, 2001 : In the afternoon, I went out to eat with Mark, Mike, and Beth, and then Mark, Mike, Jim, and some other composers went to Irish Pub with Dr. Wingate for happy hour. I split a whole pi... - Wednesday, April 22, 2009:
Memory Day: Learn2Drive My first driving experience (outside of steering on my dad's lap) came at the Go Kart Raceway after sixth grade, at the birthday/going-away party of the occasionally mentioned Daniel Bethancourt. The track workers were leery of letting someone so small drive a go kart, and after getting stuck on the tire-barriers twice, they drove me back to the beginning and told me to go wait in the video arcade. Three years later, I took the classroom portion of Driver's Ed during 10th Grade Summer Gym, since it was offered freely to all public school students in Alexandria. The quality of the offering matched it's price, since the entire session consisted of old reel-to-reel films about accidents (and not even any gory precu... - Wednesday, April 15, 2009:
Memory Day: Fifteen Years Ago Today On Friday, April 15, 1994, I was fourteen years old, and a stalwart tenth grader at T.C. Williams High School. With public schools slowly migrating away from the "junior high" system, tenth graders were at the bottom of the high school caste (and freshmen had a school all to themselves like some sort of prepubescent syphillis quarantine). Here are a few memorable moments from this day, taken from the journal I kept at the time. ♠ Homeroom was a hodge-podge amalgamation of students who weren't actually classmates -- anyone who took Art at some point during the day might end up in the Art room for morning announcements. As such, I was at a paint-splattered table with upperclassmen, Kathryn Danaher, Diana Pol... - Wednesday, April 01, 2009:
Memory Day: April Fool's Day ♣ On April 1, 1995, twelve of my close friends received an invitation to an end-of-the-year party. Well-versed in my rambling multi-page invitations and penchant for planning months in advance, invitees were surprised to discover that this party would take place at King's Dominion on a day when the park was closed to the general public. They were more surprised when the last page revealed it to be an April Fool's joke. My dedication to this joke was so strong that I actually put the invitations into the mail on varying days in advance to make sure that everyone (even clowns in Arlington and Fake Alexandria) got them on the 1st. ♣ In 1998, a girl I knew solely from the Internet confided that she was in ... - Wednesday, March 25, 2009:
Memory Day: Dr. Patel Dr. Manu Patel was the AP Physics teacher at TC Williams in my senior year. I've briefly mentioned Dr. Patel in previous posts here and here , but he's always been a supporting character. The time has come for him to get the full day's update that he deserves. I first met Dr. Patel in 1990 when my friend, Daniel Bethancourt, and I (as the two top students in our class) were extricated from the sixth grade for a day to experience a full day of science courses at the local high school. This might have been one of the most idiotic field trip ideas ever, since one of the classes we visited was taking a test, and another had a substitute. The only high points were a class where the students were test... - Wednesday, March 18, 2009:
Memory Day: Old Computer Games In the last two years of the 1980s, when Becca was either not yet born or incapable of walking under her own power, computer games were slightly stagnant. Infocom had been bought out by Activision, so text adventures were on their way out, and Sierra's "Quest" games were just starting to rise. For a kid who thrived on computer games (and who did not own a Nintendo until the 90s) this dearth of games resulted in some interesting, yet horrible, purchases. The number one rule when it comes to buying games is that you never buy a game based on a movie or a TV show, because it'll be nothing but a sodden lumpy mess of corn feces, crafted solely to steal money from parents. Unfortunately, it took awhile to learn this lesson.&nbs... - Tuesday, March 10, 2009:
Shoe Day Yesterday afternoon, I finally found a new pair of brown shoes on the clearance rack of DSW. For years I've been looking for a comfortable soft-leather pair under fifty bucks that aren't dotted with ridiculous seams or resembling the tasseled loafers every high school boy wears to church, and these were so comfortable that they felt just as broken in as my old shoes. Thus ends the journey of my old brown shoes, purchased for $19.95 at the Chantilly Payless in 2002, back in the days when I always wore tennis shoes and needed something a bit more classy to project a professorial air while teaching. In that time: The shoes travelled to Tallahassee, Florida and roamed the halls of Cawthon and Kuerstei... - Wednesday, February 18, 2009:
Memory Fragments Day ♦ Back in the days when Chompy wasn't an agoraphobic recluse like Sigourney Weaver in Copycat , we used to take her to various locales that passed as parks around Tallahassee, where she'd do her best to escape. Once, she broke free and did a 100 yard dash towards the nearest highway. Since smokey Mike had the lung capacity of a third clarinetist in marching band, I had to pursue, and tackled her mere feet from the road. ♦ In fourth grade TAG class, there was a chubby black kid with thick glasses who we could always get a rise out of by telling him a bee was chasing him. He would flail madly about with a squealing voice like a saxophone mouthpiece. Once, he gave an oral book report on D... - Wednesday, February 11, 2009:
Memory Day: Transfer Credit Going into college, I had 14 AP credits in English and Physics, and the feeling of getting exempt from additional classes to sit in my dorm room reading the entire back archives of Sluggy was intoxicating. Since I had embarked upon a course that would ultimately net 190 credits (I think 96 were needed to be a qualified liberal arts major), I decided to see just how many more transferred credits I could get without leaving the home base buildings of McBryde and Squires. There were an inordinate number of rules surrounding transfer credit, mainly to prevent people from substituting Androgynous Yoga 1001 for Biochemical Reactions 4625, but the most important to me was this one: This rule effectively ... - Wednesday, February 04, 2009:
Memory Day: High School Music Theory When I looked through my old journals for thoughts on the music theory class I took in my senior year, I noticed that I generally wrote one of four single sentences throughout the year: theory was boring, theory was dull, we had a sub in theory and did nothing, or theory was a video. The reason it was so boring was likely the wide range of personalities in the class -- like all public school classes without the TOR (Talented or Rich) label, more time was spent on the remedial cases than the kids who actually cared. Music Theory at the high school level is an introduction into the grammar of music -- if music was English, Music Fundamentals would teach the letters and words, Theory would teach how to make a complete senten... - Wednesday, January 28, 2009:
Five Years Day Fifteen Years Ago Today... I was snowed in at home as a tenth grader. Unfortunately, it was a Student Evaluation Day which meant that we already had the day off, which is like winning the lottery after you die. I spent the day playing computer games and shoveling snow. Ten Years Ago Today... I was living with Nathan, the dirtiest roommate I've ever had, in East AJ and taking Operating Systems, Polifrone's Contemporary Music Literature class, and "Probability and Statistics for Monkeys But Renamed As 'for Engineers' So They Feel Good About Themselves". The night before, I had gone to Rosie and Jen's apartment for Taco Night with Shac, who continuously mooched off of my car for a... - Wednesday, December 03, 2008:
Pet Day: Booty Booty (born Athena) was only fourteen weeks old when I adopted her from a rescue agency in Tallahassee in March 2003. Mike (of Mike and Chompy) was in attendance at Petsmart when I picked her out of the cage full of ugly kitties and did the obligatory lying to the stereotypical rescue worker who believed that all cats needed someone to be home 24 hours a day and have access to fresh salmon and litter boxes full of shredded money. I took her back to my two-room apartment in Parkwood and she promptly squeezed through a tiny slot under my cupboards where I could see her but not reach her. She finally came out six hours later when I tempted her with food, after which I sealed up every crack in the kitchen with two... - Tuesday, November 25, 2008:
Memory Day: A Day in the Eighth Grade The 1992-93 school year was my Eighth Grade year at Francis Hammond Junior High School. Because it was a junior high school and not a middle school, the top grade was 9, and eighth graders had no particular positive or negative status. This was part of the Alexandria City Public School System's experiment to inappropriately teach kids that "freshman" are at the top of the food chain. (The failed experiment was cancelled after I entered the tenth grade -- subsequent ninth graders were sent to a special ninth-grade-only school to teach them that they were both highly undesirable and incapable of playing well with others). Every yearbook staff tried to take a snapshot of the era by polling students about their fa... - Wednesday, November 19, 2008:
Memory Day: Table Top Games When I was younger, I was a bona fide athlete in top physical condition. Evidence of this can be found in the December 1992 issue of Sports Illustrated for Kids , which showcased the strenuous activity of Table Top Games -- not the nerdy, Dew-fueled games of dungeons and wizards, but real feats of physical strength with balls and goal lines and protective gear. For the sake of full disclosure, we were not called upon by the magazine for our skill at bouncing a tennis ball into a cup. The photo opportunity was set up by the mother of someone in my Boy Scout troop, which was sufficiently ethnically diverse. So on a rainy Saturday afternoon that would otherwise be spent biking for miles arou... - Wednesday, October 29, 2008:
Memory Day: Al's Magic Shop On snow days and the occasional summer holiday in my youth, I would accompany one of my parents to work, because government coworkers are much cheaper babysitters than the real thing. Every trip had its traditions, like getting to punch the Bus Transfer button in the Metro station, and pulling the bus cord when we finally arrived back home. Another tradition when I accompanied my dad was a trip to Al's Magic Shop, a longtime DC business that finally closed in 2004. This store was jam-packed with retracting knives, sleight-of-hand tricks, and an owner (Al) who was always willing to show off the latest tricks to wide-eyed seven-year-olds. His presentation was flawless, and though I could never pull off the tricks qu... - Wednesday, October 22, 2008:
Memory Day: Dinnertime When I was growing up, my parents had a staggered workday schedule. My dad would be on the 6:10 bus to the Pentagon Metro station and at his desk by 7 AM, which got him home in just enough time to catch the tail end of Duck Tales (though he never took advantage of this scheduling perk). My mom followed a more traditional rush hour timetable, where she drank coffee and watched the fake-smiled anchors on Good Morning, America!. As a result, she generally left the house around 7:30, and didn't get home until 7 PM or later. Since my dad was the primary caretaker in the evenings, the responsibility for feeding us was his and his alone. Weeknight dinners could be classified into various phylums and classes, ... - Wednesday, October 15, 2008:
Time-Lapsed Blogography Day carefully preserved in journals and the Wayback Machine Friday, October 15, 1993 : A typical day in my sophomore year saw my English class reading Julius Caesar out loud in its entirety ( ...we only have sixty more pages to go...) because our near-retirement teacher also ran a bed & breakfast in Berryville, and tried to think up as many substitute-friendly activities as possible to stretch the lessons out without any actual teaching. In art class, we had a substitute that looked like Rasputin with sunglasses, and the only reason I knew this historical figure was because Rasputin sneaks onto the rocket ship in the computer game, Martian Dreams , ... - Wednesday, October 01, 2008:
Memory Day: All-District Band All-District Band is like the Pro-Bowl for band members, but without any hopes of making millions of dollars or getting on a Wheaties box. Every year, hopeful band geeks from an arbitrarily drawn district (which were obviously gerrymandered to favor schools that actually cared about music education) would line up for a five minute audition that would make or break their all-star ambitions. The auditions were done blind by members of the nearest military band, who needed that extra $20 paycheck to make the monthly payment on their eight million dollar flute which they purchased before realizing that music, like crime, doesn't pay. One by one, the judges (properly hidden behind a chalkboard draped in a quilt sewn and ... - Wednesday, September 24, 2008:
Stuff in My Drawers Day Artwork of 1985 This first picture was drawn on a trip to Smoke Hole Canyon in West Virginia. From the nearest town of Petersburg, you apparently can only reach the canyon by canoe on the South Branch Potomac River, passing through a scenic field of daisies. After paddling a ways, you should take Exit 22 to reach the canyon, which is nestled between two prickly African boobies. If you choose not to take Exit 22, you will have to get out of your canoe and walk up the road into the Land of Zero Depth Perception. Otherwise, look for the SOKO HELL sign, which obviously advertises that you can play the hardest levels of Sokoban in the canyon. These two self portraits might ... - Wednesday, September 17, 2008:
Stuff in My Drawers Day Creative Writing, October 16, 1987 The Famous Professor: Mike Howl It was 1934, April 2, 2:34. He'd just come from collecting bugs from a canyon. In his laboratory (the garage), Professor Howl was experimenting with the dead ladybugs he'd dug up. He found that they held evidence of time, and electricity. With this he could make a time machine!!! He copied the plans very carefully. He got in and checked it (and of course it wasn't running). When the cat came and spilled some muriatic acid into the hole the machine sped to life..... It drove to 'Stone Age'. The cavemen thought the machine was an Evil Spirit so they threw it i... - Thursday, September 11, 2008:
Resumé Day You've never truly had to artifically inflate your curriculum vitae until you have to write one for the Personal Management Merit Badge in Seventh Grade. It's good to know that I learned all about "different levels of life" in Life Science (cellular vs. society, not Kshatriyas vs. Dalits). Without tooting my own horn, I can honestly say that I was an expert on rear entry safety, and the school administrators felt good knowing that I was on rear duty. I was also an expert at "neatening". As for the shocking secret that I was on the AV Club, I WAS the AV club. Whenever a teacher needed a film projector, I would be the one to get out of class and roll it down the hall. Notice th... - Monday, September 08, 2008:
Pet Day: Chameleons Probably the shortest pet fad to imprint upon my childhood was the pair of chameleons I owned around 1991 as a requirement for the Reptile Study merit badge . Because I owned them for just a few months and they lacked a cuddly nature, I don't even remember their names, although I'm guessing they were hilariously witty names like Cami and Leon that only an eleven-year-old could invent. The picture on the left is the only proof that these lizards actually existed, though they look deceptively small because the digital watch I wore was gigantic and told the time in every time zone of the world while having five settable alarms and an EZ Bake oven for goldfish crackers. The chameleons lived in a ... - Wednesday, September 03, 2008:
Lego Day The very first Lego set that I ever owned was the 1986 edition of the Shell Service Station. Shell's efforts to imprint children while they were young seems to have failed, since I only go to Shell stations when there's a line of cars at the cheaper station around the corner. Despite that, this set was pretty neat for a Town set, with all sorts of extra gadgets and subplots, like the mechanic in coveralls whose lifelong dream was to go on the road as a ventriloquist with his blue alligator puppet. Though I would eventually own enough Town Lego sets to construct a massive BUtropolis on the living room floor, the next set I owned was also the first Space set -- the Cosmic Fleet Voyager. This ridiculous monstrosi... - Wednesday, August 13, 2008:
Memory Day: Sweaty Lightweights Back in my high school Crew days, I was the coxswain for the Lightweight boat. As in most weight-restricted sports, the Lightweight bracket started out as a way for Lilliputians to compete against each other, but ended up as a just another abusable system where coaches tried to stack the fat without exceeding the upper limit. On the men's Lightweight boat, there were two weight restrictions: no single rower could be over 145 pounds, and the entire boat's average had to be less than 140. In our case, we regularly had two rowers near the 145-mark, with our bell curve average softened by Ian Schmidt's 132 pound frame. Coxswains are not allowed to be included in the average, because fat coxswains don't steer any diffe... - Wednesday, August 06, 2008:
Pet Day: Speedy and Pokey It was in the Spring of either fifth or sixth grade when the next animals entered the URI! household menagerie. This time, instead of a peeing kitty, it was a pair of fluffy guinea pigs. Although we didn't realize it at the time, guinea pigs are easily some of the most worthless pets in the history of pets. Now, many pets don't have much to offer to the human race -- snakes spend the entire day sitting stock still on a stick, stoically staring. However, guinea pigs are equally worthless and annoying to boot. Guinea pigs are larger than a mouse but smaller than a rat, poop and pee eighteen thousand times a day, refuse to be picked up or petted, and make an air raid BWEEEEP sound whenever they're hungry... - Wednesday, July 23, 2008:
BU Begins origins of a superhero Soon Bok Yoon, from the planet Wooie -- I may as well have been an extra in Star Wars. Only six days after my birth, they already knew that I would be handsome, intelligent, and able to poop without difficulties. As part of the Care and Feeding of Your New Alien packet, new parents are warned that all Oriental kids are plague monkeys. Another part of the packet is a twelve page attachment, Communicating With Your New Alien . To all the ladies out there, Un Je Den Ji Nal Bool Ru . It takes Americans months to obtain their passport, but little babies who are presumed ... - Monday, July 21, 2008:
Camping Inventory Day Vint Hill Farms, Spring Camboree 1989 Spring Camboree 1992 Spotsylvania County, every month for years Camp Sinoquipe, every month for years Camp Big Mac, every year for 4 years Rock Enon, every year for 4 years Camp Goshen, 1994 Virginia Beach 2001 The Cove, 2007 The Cove, 2008 Cow Backpacks Trap Methane Gas Unrepentant on Facebook? Expect jail time Hotel of Doom wakes from its coma - Monday, June 09, 2008:
Vocabulary Day learning words the first grader way Look at Jeff's new cowboy boots. More importantly, look at Jeff's inappropriately wide stance. The jet plane landed on the runway . Three dimensional spatial awareness comes in third grade. We had hotdogs for lunch. The lesson of the week was compound words, but I'm pretty sure that "hot dog" has a space in it. Tom will carry a flashlight on Halloween. Tom is also thrilled with pronouns. &nb... - Wednesday, June 04, 2008:
Poetry Day a line analysis of classic poetry Waiting for Christmas by BU (age 5) I cicles hang at Christmas. The author is metaphorically referring to the silver tinsel which adorns the tree. Real icicles are not cost-effective for indoor tree decoration, given their tendency to melt. They are L ovely to. Some scholars argue that this line is incomplete, and believe that the missing words are either "eat" or "poop on". Detractors of the theory suggest that the author was a horrible speller. Proponents of incompleteness notes that every misspelling the author has ever made has been intentional, for satirical purposes.... - Wednesday, May 28, 2008:
Memory Day: Senior Schedule Going to public school is like going to traffic school -- you show up, tune out, put in the time, and walk away with a certificate. My senior year of high school was easily one of the most enjoyable school years, because other than the three AP exams I took mid-year, it was an exercise in daily mingling. First Period : Music theory was a class of three musicians and three non-musicians, so the classes were geared towards the latter. We learned basic chord progressions without having to do any partwriting and got to listen to the 8-bar melodies of the non-musician who insisted that he was in a punk band. Second Period : Dr. Patel's idea of a joke was to put "shows no attempt to learn" o... - Monday, May 19, 2008:
Pet Day: Cindy The first pet which my family owned was a small grey cat with a white spot on its neck named Cindy. There are no remaining up-close photos of this cat although its likeness has been immortalized in one of those premade sculptures you can purchase and paint to give other people the impression that you're artistic. We owned Cindy when I was in first grade, at the same time when we owned two expensive leather couches (because foreshadowing is most effective when experienced directly). I honestly don't remember much about this cat except that it got trapped in our home office all day long while we were at school and peed in a big orange chair (which is still orange, and still smells like pee to this day). After this day, ... - Thursday, May 15, 2008:
Memory Day: School Newsletters Every month in elementary school, we would receive a copy of the school newsletter to take home to our parents. Contrary to popular impression, these newsletters were not safety pinned to our jackets -- we maintained the complete responsibility for delivery, which is probably why most elementary school parents were clueless. Every newsletter began with a pithy unreferenced quotation, teaching children that plagiarism is appropriate in all settings, and the body of the letter was typed in a fake cursive font. This was obviously a conspiracy to disenfranchise the first and second graders who had not yet learned how to SWOOP DOWN with their pencils. The opening section contained tips for parents to help their kids ... - Wednesday, March 19, 2008:
Memory Day: Carmen Sandiego Educational games in the 80s were a hit-or-miss affair. For every awesome game like Ancient Empires or Oregon Trail, there was a steamer like Logic Master or Gertrude's Boot. One game series that never got old, though, was Carmen Sandiego. This Broderbund series had you tracking pun-named criminals through various geographical and historical areas while looking answers up in a provided reference book, like the World Almanac. There were five major games in the series before the age when I became omnipotent and did not need to learn anything new for the rest of my life: Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego?, Where in Europe is Carmen Sandiego?, Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?, an... - Monday, March 10, 2008:
Five Years Day Fifteen Years Ago Today... I was a tiny bespectacled freshman at Francis C. Hammond Junior High. Tonight was the City Fine Arts Concert, so my Wednesday afternoon lesson with Jack Dahlinger (a retired high school band director who loved to play duets all lesson long) happened at 4:30 instead of 7:30. Lessons on concert and recital days were always great because you could use the concert as an excuse to not do anything strenuous -- "I have a two-measure solo tonight in Londonderry Air and I don't want to risk a lip-blowout so lets play some more duets instead of that etude". The concert itself was a big sham -- all the feeder elementary schools to Hammond converged on the old Hammond gym (before... - Wednesday, February 13, 2008:
Memory Day: Saturday Mornings The Saturday Morning Routine was an aspect of life instilled by my Dad, who saw every weekend as an opportunity to do extra work for the Home. We would wake up every Saturday between 6:30 and 7 and eat some cereal while perusing the Washington Post. At the time, I limited my reading to the comics and the NASDAQ stock exchange, where I could keep tabs on my shares in Babbage's and Sierra On-Line (both of which ultimately went out of business). Around 7:30 we would load up the Nissan Stanza (license plate XVX-881) and travel to the Shoppers Food Warehouse on Little River Turnpike. This store was built in a converted Safeway and had a high domed ceiling and classic 70s architecture. The polarity of the aisles was reverse... - Wednesday, January 23, 2008:
Memory Day: Comedy Records While driving home from the super-secret pencil factory in Bailey's Crossroad yesterday, I stumbled upon an Interview with Ray Stevens on XM Radio channel 2 -- I was trying to get to UPOP on 29 and didn't hit the 9 fast enough. The interviewer himself was annoying, as most interviewers and talk show hosts are wont to be, but it was a fun trip down memory lane to hear some of Ray's greatest hits and his commentary on them. To shamelessly milk this bit of nostalgia, I've decided to post recordings of my favourite comedy songs from my youth. While everyone else my age was listening to the New Kids on the Block or U2, I was enthralled with comic masters from the 1940s through the 1970s, and I'm fairly certain these songs ... - Wednesday, December 05, 2007:
Memory Day: Junior High Gym Class In junior high gym, we had to purchase and wear ugly blue uniforms with white enamel labels, where we were supposed to write our name in permanent marker. There were a surprisingly high number of gym uniform thefts which, to me, is about as logical as stealing bowling shoes or used dentist bibs. There was also a washer and dryer in a locked cage in the locker room where your gym teacher could wash a uniform if your family was too poor to wash it yourself. I used to get into near-fights with a tall black kid named Dan who always said, "Get out of my face before I steal you". I was scrappy back then, and a gym teacher always intervened before it came to fisticuffs or suspensions. Our junior high w... - Wednesday, November 14, 2007:
Evolution Day When I was growing up, my dad took so many pictures that their value is depreciating faster than the US dollar. The current rate is roughly ten pictures for 1 yen, and it's sure to sink further now that I've discovered another bin full that were never scanned or added to albums. Here are some long lost pictures from various Band Parents' Days since 1993. Like rings in a tree, you can tell how old I am by how long my hair is and how round my glasses are. Tenth Grade, 1993 : Our marching band had some ridiculous uniforms with capes hanging off just one shoulder (capes are why people in band are so popular, and the half-cape lets you pretend you can fly, but only to the left)... - Thursday, October 18, 2007:
Journal Day As mentioned in previous posts, I used to keep a private daily journal religiously throughout high school, writing in it every single day. The habit dropped off in college and I only wrote in spurts until around 2004 when I stopped altogether. It got to the point where keeping a private journal and a public blog at the same time was far too much work and one would inevitably suffer (as you can see from posts like these ). Reading through old journal entries last night made me wish that I still kept it up -- it's almost fascinating to see the naive and idealistic viewpoint the old entries were written in, as well as the random events of days that I would otherwise completely forget about. Here are a few samp... - Tuesday, October 09, 2007:
Birth Day Mike (of Mike and Chompy, and sometimes Jamie) was a fellow composing grad student at Florida State, arriving from an "I just graduated but don't want to enter the real world yet" background like me (unlike the vast "I was in the real world and hated in so now I'm fleeing and sacrificing my salary in the process" populace). In our first semester we had 16th Century Counterpoint and Pedagogy of Music Theory I together -- two-thirds of my total courseload since grad school, as everyone knows, is HARD AND RIDICULOUSLY TIME-CONSUMING OMG. I didn't really hang out with Mike until October of 2001, because I am an introvert and new people kind of suck. I remember liking some piano piece of his on the October 5th Composers' C... - Wednesday, October 03, 2007:
Memory Day: Gymnastics As I mentioned a couple months ago, being stuck in day care was an agonizing way to spend the afternoon, much like that of a cat dipped in peanut butter trying to groom itself. In fact, it was after-school day care and not college applications that sparked in us the early drive to do extracurricular activities. One of mine was gymnastics, which I started in fourth grade with my sister (who was in sixth). Luckily for us, the city's gymnastics program was offered at our school, so there was no need for buses or travel, and we got out of day care twice a week. Unluckily for us, gymnastics was taught by the same gym teachers who felt that the backbone of physical education involved playing with parachute... - Wednesday, September 26, 2007:
Memory Day: The Preserved Past 1990 was the watershed year when Aaron Ulm, Josh Lambert, Sharif Ahmed, and BU graduated from the SIXTH GRADE, a feat which is just slightly more impressive than beating Super Mario Brothers with a Game Genie inserted for permanent invincibility. Every speechmaker you might expect appeared at this ceremony: the musical arrangement by the vocal music teacher (who worked for at least four different schools), a first grader (who said "I wanna be like you!"), a senior (who said "In six years you'll be like me!"), the smart kids TAG teacher, the principal from the elementary school, and the principal from the junior high school we would soon be attending. In 1992, BU wins Best in Show at the h... - Wednesday, September 05, 2007:
Memory Day: Childhood According to Google Maps The Babysitter's Apartment : On the ground floor of Mayflower Square, a solidly Latino apartment complex before it was hip to be Latino and densely populated, lived our babysitter who cared for us until the year I finished kindergarten. The nearest elementary school had every other grade, so my sister had to take a bus across the city to Jefferson Houston for first and third grades. The apartment looked over a one hundred foot hill which was perfect for cramming onto a tiny Tonka dumptruck and riding to the bottom without falling off. This was also the place where I got a scar on my thumb from a bathroom razor, had to sleep in the closet with the cucharachas because I changed the channel from Th... - Wednesday, August 29, 2007:
Memory Day: Day Care For three years in elementary school, my sister and I attended day care every morning from 7 to 8:30 and every evening from 3:00 to 5:00. This wasn't today's version of day care that costs more than a semester of college and lasts all day with "child care professionals" -- instead, it was merely a holding pen for kids whose parents' work schedule didn't sync up with the school schedule, run for minimum wage by the least-qualified workers in the day care industry. You could probably pool the child-care knowledge of all three ladies in charge (who probably wrote "able to procreate" under job experience) and responsibly care for 3/8ths of a child. Day care took place in the cafeteria, a high-ceilinged rectangular room th... - Thursday, August 16, 2007:
Memory Day: Jump Rope Week With the exception of the time Arnold Schwarzenegger visited for a photo opportunity (during which all seven black kids got to sit in front so our school would look ethnic), our elementary school gym program was neither exciting or innovative. We had gym three times a week, and spent ten minutes running around a circle, jumping over cones to the sounds of really bad 80s records. Sometimes, if we had exhausted all other possibilities, we had off-the-wall diversions like Parachute Day or How to Square Dance. One such diversion, with little to no aerobic benefits, was Jump Rope Week. During this week, Ms. Joyner and Ms. Balthasar (the two single, yet strangely close joint gym teachers) would put on Whit... - Wednesday, August 15, 2007:
Time-Lapsed Blogography Day BU at 15 data points August 15, 1992 : I had a Saturday afternoon art class at the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, which I missed because I was off at Junior Leadership Camp wearing this colourful hat. August 15, 1993 : I don't have any information about this day, but I was probably at high school band camp, learning the show for Mirada and Fascinating Rhythm . I was just going into tenth grade, and my sister was a senior. August 15, 1994 : In the last of the big family vacations, the four of us took the auto-train from Virginia to Florida, and then spent a week at the various overpriced theme parks and beaches. A... - Thursday, August 09, 2007:
Stuff in My Drawers Day When I was in kindergarten, I had some brilliant ideas on how to improve the quality of life around my house, mainly by building a cooler house. The ground floor of The Pickett Oak had traditional sensibilities -- you came in from the terras and immediately freshened up in the powder room (whatever the hell that is). Food was prepared in the kichen and eaten in the dinner room (no word on where lunch is eaten), and clothes were washed in the youteltey room. It's the second floor of the house that really deserves the architectural accolades. Our private collection could be displayed in the art gallerey and we could play a rousing game of dodgeball in the pe room (though the team on the far... - Monday, August 06, 2007:
Memory Day: Old Roommates Next week, little Becca, the second-youngest regular visitor to the URI! Zone, will leave the area for her first semester at Virginia Tech, continuing the longstanding family tradition of doing everything the four older sisters do (with one inexplicable "who the heck goes to James Madison University? whatevs." anomaly in the early nineties, that will probably be rewritten in the Official Family Biography pamphlet when their homestead becomes a Historic Preservation Site). Because embarassing photos are fun, here is a picture of her in the sixth grade (the same year I started writing daily updates) as a member of the St. Timothy Tigers, a basketball team that puma'led a lion's share of their opponents. Becc... - Friday, July 20, 2007:
Governor's School Week: Part V of V The feeling of hearing Scintillation performed in a reverberating chapel for the Closing Ceremonies instilled in me the hunger to compose (a hunger which soldiered on through years of composition lessons that had varying degrees of annoyance, until it finally consumed itself sometime during grad school). When I returned home, I immediately wrote Glossalalia March , and these two pieces became the bookends for my Fifth Year Recital at Virginia Tech in 2001. I followed this up with a new composition every month throughout high school, and ended up as a composition major in college. So, despite the silly activities and embarassing curriculums, Governor's School a... - Thursday, July 19, 2007:
Governor's School Week: Part IV of V Before my senior year, I was a decent (if uninspired) trumpet player, easily making last chair or first alternate in All-District Bands. Although I was no Jason Price, I had a strong sense of rhythm and sightreading, and a secret weapon, my "beautiful tone". It didn't matter if I was playing a marching band tune or the solo in a Jim Swearingen song -- the only compliment I would ever get was "Wow, you have a beautiful tone!". I was the Tone Master -- if printers ran on tone instead of toner, I would have that call center job wrapped around my pinky finger. During my senior year, I started experimenting with oddball mouthpieces like the 14B3A and the C3P0 because I figured it would be more fun to play high notes in jaz... - Wednesday, July 18, 2007:
Governor's School Week: Part III of V Governor's School wasn't wholly about Celtic lore and jamming a yin in my yang though. Each evening throughout the four-week program was an offsite field trip to some suitably artistic locale in downtown Richmond, starting with a quaint fireworks show at some Civil War monument (the one with a cannon and some grass) on the Fourth of July. This was one of the few outdoor activities that was NOT cancelled because of summertime thunderstorms, since the adminstration's fears that we would all get struck by lightning was far greater than the fear that some of us might get pregnant. Though no one was electricuted by month's end, the power went out on campus at least seven times. Some of the other mind-altering activities we experienced incl... - Tuesday, July 17, 2007:
Governor's School Week: Part II of V In yesterday's comments section, Anna recalled that she was always puzzled why anyone ever wanted to go to Governor's School, and I'll be the first to confess that it wasn't at the top of my list of summer activities. I had to attend a drum major camp during the week immediately before it, and being a home-base-introvert, I didn't think I'd want to go to two separate camps without returning home for a while first. This ambivalence was not positively helped by the "Course II" options that arrived in the mail a few weeks before the month of July. This was the list of courses being offered every day after lunch, and I could tell that the forecast for all of them was partly ridiculous with a chance of retarded. Despite th... - Monday, July 16, 2007:
Governor's School Week: Part I of V It's been awhile since I had an honest-to-goodness themed week on the URI! Zone, like Video Game Music Week from 2002, or the lesser-known failure, Integer Divisors of the Number "1" Week. Because everyone loves a miniseries (unless they are un-American), I've decided to create a week-long Memory Day feature about my attendance at the Governor's School for the Visual and Performing Arts, twelve years ago this month. The Governor's School is a month-long program for public school students going into their senior year focused on a single discipline. In 1995, the School for the Visual and Performing Arts took place at the University of Richmond, sharing a campus with the Governor's School for the Humani... - Wednesday, July 11, 2007:
Memory Day: English Class English and Social Studies classes were my least favourite classes growing up. Like the eternal battle between Pluto and Neptune vying for the "rock farthest from the Sun" award, the two classes constantly tried to outdo each other on the curriculum-hatred scale. (The worst year was eleventh grade, when they decepticonned the two classes into a two-hour monstrosity called "American Civilization" that you had to take if you were going to a real college). Perhaps it's ironic that I now write daily posts in the English language -- or perhaps it's just lucky that I'm still using the language in spite of the wretchedness of English class. Either way, there really wasn't much to like. Reading Aloud : ... - Monday, July 09, 2007:
Stuff in my Drawers Day an occasional look at the worthless detritus of childhood from my file cabinet It's a simple enough exercise that everyone has to do at some point in school: write a word down the left side of your paper and then use those letters to make new words that describe the original word. It is fitting, then, that I started THANKSGIVING with "turkey", but from there, something may have gone horribly wrong. (1985) This was a fake advertisement from the 7th grade, one in a series of many (1991). It later won a national contest and was published in the Dec '92 issue of Boy's Life . SIKE. When your face turns blue from smoke inhalation, follow the hallucin... - Monday, July 02, 2007:
Lessons from the First Grade A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word, but has a different meaning. It is also a handheld device made by Apple. In the top picture, a muscle-bound giant is attempting to pay the price with the Empire State Building. Below, those damned kids flipped the hold-trigger and left the gas nozzle on the ground again. The 80s were a simpler time, where we didn't look for child molesters on every corner, and a boy could engage in pastimes like lion-hunting. Below, apparently the eggs in our fridge were fully incubated. That's a lot of pencils. The steed seems to... - Wednesday, June 27, 2007:
Memory Day: Food Because my dad got home from work three hours earlier than my mom, he was always in charge of weekday dinners. A typical meal for my sister and I consisted of boiled hot dogs, green beans, and a tall glass of milk, which we would eat at the dining room table while reading cartoon and kids' books. My favourite meal as a kid was two Celeste Pizza-for-One's, cooked on the microwave crisper disc that never actually made the crust crisp. When I was sick of these, the favourite meal became Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, with the powdered cheese that resembled the aftereffects of sanding down a giant statue of Big Bird. Cookie Crisp was the favoured breakfast cereal, followed by Corn Chex, Honey Nut ... - Wednesday, June 06, 2007:
Memory Day: To Grandmother's House If you were to tally up all the vacation days I spent outside of my hometown as a child, the bulk of them would take place in Burton, Michigan (a small town of 30,000 just outside of Flint). Michigan was the home of my grandparents on my mother's side, and the defacto place for my parents to dump the kids on extended holidays and revisit that long-lost concept, the "quiet house". The town of Burton was on the dulling edge of modernism, boasting a shopping mall roughly the length of a basketball court with a Little Professor bookstore and an indoor fountain. In Alexandria, we would pile into our peach Nissan Stanza (license plate XVX-881) at 7 AM for the ten hour trip north (despite continued attempts by my Dad t... - Wednesday, May 30, 2007:
Memory Day: The Foreign Language Requirement In my high school, there were two paths to a diploma: the Standard path (which generally included a course with the abbreviation "ec" but not in the context of "ecology" or "eclampsia") and the Advanced path. Because of grade inflation, the Advanced track was actually the common track that most students followed, with Standard being the new Subpar. (The same is happening in the food industry, where a Large pizza is now roughly the size of a prematurely-born opossum). To qualify as an Advanced student, you had to meet the language requirement which, in the grand American tradition of failing to understand basic math, required three years of a foreign language, or two years each of two separate languages. Having been a ... - Wednesday, May 23, 2007:
Memory Day: Pickett Woods The street I grew up on was intended to be a major thoroughfare between Seminary Road and Duke Street in Alexandria. Before this plan could come to fruition, the rich folks in their wooded manors at the north end of the street managed to block it, not wanting additional traffic near their diamond tennis courts. The result of this was that I lived on a dead end street wide enough for five lanes of traffic, which was perfect for pretending to know how to skateboard. Pickett Street stops and starts five or six times as it wends through Alexandria, which meant that the chances of our UPS deliveries arriving on time was roughly one in five (on the rare occasions that the driver didn't end up on Pickett Road in Fairfax). In... - Wednesday, May 16, 2007:
Memory Day: Assistantships At the end of last Wednesday's post , I had just completed a relaxing year of being a graduate research assistant with absolutely no responsibilities. Though pleasant, it did not give me any real-world teaching experience for my eventual career as an academic in the music world (although I will now be an expert at picking up my Unemployment check, should I ever lose my job). For my second year, I was picked up as a super-assistant in music theory for one of my favourite professors, Dr. Peter Spencer. "Stephen Foster really irritates me [...] He writes these smarmy, nasty, little tunes [...] But it is a good example of a two-phrase period, blast him!" - Peter Spencer, in a diatribe on the a... - Wednesday, May 09, 2007:
Memory Day: Assistantships In most cases, graduate school is far cheaper than your run-of-the-mill college experience because of that nifty little occupation known as the assistantship. A graduate assistant is defined as the person who will do everything the professor doesn't want to do for one percent of the till and a rebate on tuition fees. Because academics are far too busy to actually want to teach anything, there are a million billion available assistantships all over the globe, and anyone who says they can't find an opening at even one university probably put as much effort into their search as Jim Swearingen puts into writing his band arrangements. I was employed by the great state of Florida (which is just like California, but with red... - Tuesday, May 01, 2007:
May Day Today is the first day of the month of May. Today is also the first day of the rest of your life, but since your life doesn't really matter much, we'll talk about May instead. May is easily one of the Top Twelve months of the year, and definitely makes the Top Three in my book. It's the time when the weather finally decides to stop dicking around and the days are consistently warm -- when you can leave the windows open by night and watch all the sun dresses go past by day. The heater turns off but the A/C doesn't turn on, and my electric bill drops by a good $40 per month, which is just enough to buy three Tatu CDs to explode in your microwave for the good of humanity. During college and grad school, May was alwa... - Wednesday, April 25, 2007:
Memory Day: Indoor Track This is me in a 1994 indoor track picture, sitting next to Jay Morrison and two seats down from Ian Schmidt's hair (not pictured). When you don't turn 16 until your senior year in high school, you tend to bike everywhere, and years of criss-crossing the city by bike had blessed me with calves the size of migrating bison. As a sophomore, I decided to put these muscles to use for the good of humanity by joining the indoor track team. Actually, my reasons weren't quite so philanthropic -- the spring crew team made a big deal out of staying fit through the winter, and I had a choice between running around a heated gym or wearing a Speedo. Plus, there were lots of hot chicks on the indoor track team. When I join... - Thursday, April 19, 2007:
What's In My Drawers Day an occasional jaunt into my past via the crap in my drawers I am not a particularly hatful person. It's not that I hate hats (for there's enough hate without hat hate), it's just that hats aren't really a part of my daily ensemble. This hasn't always been the case -- throughout my formative years, I almost always wore a ball cap on my head. I can't really pinpoint the reason why, because it usually wasn't even a cool cap -- just whatever cheap cap I'd bought or received for going to this particular camp or that particular brothel. It definitely wasn't to hide hideous hat hair because anyone who knew me back then knew that my hair was generally just a little bit taller than I was at any given tim... - Wednesday, April 11, 2007:
Memory Day: Dinosaurs! RAAR! Every young child has a singular fascination at some point in their lives -- a topic that they simply cannot get enough of, that they consume voraciously like a fat sheikh devouring a stuffed camel. My fixation was dinosaurs (RAAR!). There was a period in my life where I would come home from school and spend the entire afternoon pretending to be an archaeologist in a three-square-yard dirt pile next to the house where the sun didn't shine strongly enough to grow grass. I had dinosaur popup books and picture books lining my shelf. I could expertly sort dinosaurs into Cretaceous and Jurassic and Curvaceous, and could recite the foraging habits of the Diplodocus from memory. I drew the picture on the rig... - Thursday, April 05, 2007:
Psychoanalysis Day Sixteen years ago when I was in the seventh grade, the entire class body had to take a series of multiple choice psychology tests to determine which of us should prepare for great ambitions and college life, and which should immediately start reserving spots in the city jail. Here are the results of mine -- how closely do they match up with what you know about me? Happy Birthday Geoffrey King! It's still a DUI if it's a horse... ...but not if it's a Zamboni Smoking is good for you - Wednesday, March 28, 2007:
Memory Day: Parties What with the pool table, home theatre, and private champagne room, my house has always been a prime location for playing the part of the host. However, this "I'd rather stay home and invite everyone else over" behaviour isn't new -- I was hosting extravagant parties as far back as junior high school. It started simple, with the obligatory birthday party, but soon expanded into a June "End of the Year Party!", a December "Other End of the Year Party!", and a random holiday-themed party thrown in for good measure. By the time I left for college, there had been at least twenty-five parties hosted in the home of my worn parents (my dad would occasionally retaliate with tricks like taking everyone's shoes, tying the... - Monday, March 26, 2007:
Time-Lapsed Blogography Day It's always seemed to me that the education system should gradually increase in difficulty and effort as you progress (see also, any arcade game from the 80s). In American society, the scale seems skewed, with high school entailing high stress and a mad rush to prepare for college, and college being a collosal waste of time (this imbalanced buildup and letdown is also reflected in the Matrix trilogy). I can't remember either phase of life being particularly hard, but I do remember that my schedule in high school was far more packed than it ever was in a year since. For example, put on your baggy time-jumping pants and jump back with me twelve years to March 26, 1995. I was a junior in high school with big ... - Wednesday, March 07, 2007:
Memory Day: Beach Sunrises Six years ago when I was pretending to learn about composing in Florida, I would open each weekend by visiting a local nature preserve or state park. One of my earliest trips was to Marsh Sands Beach, a small east-facing beach on the Gulf of Mexico that was just fifteen minutes outside of Tallahassee (a straight shot down one of the main roads). Although this beach would ultimately be remembered for the low-tide island I claimed (Briland ), watching horseshoe crabs hump, or training Chompy not to be crazy, in the beginning it was just the perfect place to catch the sunrise. I normally wouldn't give a rat's ass about sunrises, and I'd be one of the last people to scale Mount Gobacktobed just to watch a... - Thursday, March 01, 2007:
What's in My Drawers Day or "why it's a good thing I never became a cartoonist" Junior High School in the early 90s. With a single cartooning class under my belt from the Torpedo Factory Art Gallery, I was obviously inches away from an exclusive New Yorker deal, but somehow my life took a turn towards Music. Though those cartooning days are long gone, these sketches still survive. Remember, everything is funnier when you're in Junior High. Almost every single cartoon I drew is on the back of a school handout or homework assignment. Pen and Ink was my preferred medium. "I wonder what he meant by 'One small step for Aagh'?" Signs We Rarely See ... - Thursday, January 18, 2007:
Time-Lapsed Blogography Day BU at 15 data points January 18, 1992 : I spent the day, and the rest of the weekend at Camp Big Mac in Markham, Virginia with the Boy Scout Troop. Camp Big Mac was a step down from our usual camping spot because it was a desolate snowy mountain in the frigid wastes of Shenandoah Valley, but it was also a step up because it had a dining cabin with a wood stove. January 18, 1993 : Today was the final Board of Review for my Eagle Scout reward. "Why are you only 13?" was the most asked question, edging out "Why are you so Asian?" and "Why are you so short?" January 18, 1994 : I stayed home from school today, and the entire week as well, for what passes as... - Tuesday, January 16, 2007:
Memory Day: The School Nurse The school nurse at my elementary school was the archetype upon which every future stereotypical school nurse was ever founded. Picture a stark white lady in her early seventies named Beverly (or maybe it was Virginia), wearing white orthopedic shoes and a purple sweater with hair in a ridiculously tight bun the colour of polar bears in a blizzard. Her job was to treat the neverending parade of kids complaining of stomach aches who occasionally threw up in the halls or the ones who nearly killed themselves on the last remaining Lawsuit Playground in the United States. She also had a cardboard box full of abandoned shorts that you could sift through if it was gym day and you'd forgotten to wear a pair under your pants.... - Monday, January 08, 2007:
Pearls of Wisdom from Yearbooks of Yore 7th Grade, 1991 Sadly, I was! 8th Grade, 1992 The sweets guy is the one that brings candy to class. This note would be completely unremarkable, were it not for these happenings a decade later . 8th Grade, 1992 "You impudent little freak" was a catchphrase for a very very short period of time in 1992 -- was it from SNL or something? "Bammafied bamma" lasted much longer. 9th Grade, 1993 The obligatory inside joke that no one else will ever get. I read this for probably the first time since it was written and the old levity of the joke immediately washed over me like an incoming tide of hors... - Thursday, January 04, 2007:
Memory Day: The Secret Society of Safety Patrols The elementary school Safety Patrol program is a hands-on extracurricular activity designed to teach our budding citizens-students about the inefficiency of bureaucracy and the futility of law enforcement and positive change. Each member of the Safety Patrol is given an appallingly orange belt, no doubt stamped out of a much larger, yet still appallingly orange skin of vinyl, probably left over from the previous year's reupholstering of the school buses. The clasps are too loose for the skinny kids who break the curve on the body fat test (and too tight for the chubby buggers of Today's America) while the shoulder harness is pocked with pin marks from students incapable of affixing their badge at the proper height. Armed with th... - Tuesday, October 31, 2006:
Halloweens of Yore In 1992 (ninth grade), I went trick-or-treating as a Candy Recycler (a.k.a. teenager who is too cool to think up a real costume but still wants candy). The recycling sign hanging off the trash can was a carry over from my Environmental Science merit badge and is still highly useful at parties. "Do you recycle beer bottles? OH." I've gone trick-or-treating as both a wizard and a warrior (but never a rogue). Coincidentally, the walking stick I used for my wizard costume and the wooden warrior sword made by my grandparents' neighbour were both later destroyed by situp-farting Tony who tried attacking a cinderblock wall with them. I was not happy about that. In 1999, I went to a party at... - Wednesday, October 18, 2006:
Letters of Recommendation In an ephemeral span of nine days in February 2003, I wrote eight letters of recommendation that would ultimately change the course of Man's evolution. You see, Florida State had built an all-inclusive dormitory specifically for music majors, where students could live in high tech suites with computer labs, practice rooms, and classrooms all in the same building. The concept was very similar to that of a mental hospital, but with slightly more sanitary conditions. As an aside, it should also be noted that Virginia Tech tried the same type of idea, and ended up with an abandoned building that used to be a campus hospital, with one classroom and forty-seven used hypodermic needles littering the floors like pointy presents for picc... - Wednesday, October 11, 2006:
All About Me I am Brian. I like to go to the swimming pool. I like to watch TV -- especially Batman. I like to go to my firend, Megan's, house. I like to go on vacation to the fun places. The fun places are just south of the border on I-95 and also in my pants. My grandpa has a garden. He lives in Michigan. I play with the cat there and probably got fecal cat disease from all the times it scratched me because it was an outdoor cat and never had its nails cut. I like the scarecrow (which apparently is a mutation-cross between a bald eagle, a manatee, and a operatic soprano in an evening dress) and the corn. I like to ride my bike every night. It has training wheels. I like to make tracks with it. I lik... - Monday, September 25, 2006:
Portraits of the Artist as a Young Man Looking at old class pictures can be nostalgic, but it also shows how quickly you forget the people you spent 180 days out of the year with in a compulsory educational setting. At one point, I probably could have given you complete biographical sketches of everyone in these pictures down to what they usually wore to class and what their favourite legume was. Now I'm lucky if I can remember their first name at all! This was the A.M. kindergarten class at William Ramsey, the only grade I ever attended there. In a system that only made sense in Alexandria, William Ramsey held grades K, 2, 4, and 5, while its sister school Jefferson Houston (conveniently located on the OTHER end of the city) had grades 1, 3, and 6. Yunus ... - Wednesday, September 20, 2006:
Where Are They Now? When I was a young and impressionable primary schooler at Polk School, I had a friend named Tony who lived a few streets over. Tony is the star of a news update I posted last year about the boy who farted while doing sit-ups . He had a little sister a couple years younger who performed in every single school talent show by doing a dance routine to popular songs by Tiffany, like I Think We're Alone Now with her friend, Emily Beatty. Tony was a little odd, and he had a particular hang-up on that pivotal friend activity: the sleepover. The one time he slept over at my house, it was in fifth grade and he was unable to sleep in a strange house. This was perfectly understandable even though I wa... - Tuesday, September 12, 2006:
Memory Day: The Safe Spot I had a very cool bed as a child. Where some kids slept in racecars or My Little Pony stables, my twin bed had a captain's wheel as the headboard. When my mom would sing songs to my sister and I before we went to bed, the wheel would often be a prop in the reenactment of the song about the galleon and the guy thrown overboard for his love. This bed was fairly high off the ground, because underneath it was an old-fashioned trundle bed which was only put into service at Christmas time when relatives filled up my sister's room. Sometime towards the end of elementary school, the trundle bed was thrown out to make room for storage -- billions of crates filled with Legos in their original boxes and game boxes for Info... - Thursday, August 24, 2006:
Congratulations! American schools have always loved to shower their unique snowflake children with awards, deserved or not. Nowadays, it seems that everyone on a team gets trophies for outstanding effort even if they didn't deserve them, because to do otherwise would shatter the fragile psyche of underachieving kids everywhere. This seems like a new phenomenon, but it's actually been around for many years. Here are some samples from my youth and how they should be translated. Good Citizenship : Congratulations on not being the guy with the money when some girl accuses the class of stealing a dollar from her desk and the teacher orders all the guys to empty out their pockets! Congratulations on being the onl... - Wednesday, July 12, 2006:
Memoirs of a BUsha: Ten Years of the URI! Zone 2004 - 2005 When you leave hallowed halls of progressive education, you completely relinquish your frame of reference since you can no longer say things like, "That was when I was a senior" or "I got arrested the summer after I went to France". I actually had to skim over my old posts from 2004 and 2005 to remember everything that happened, which wasn't much. I know the order of major events, but no longer have a good impression of where on my timeline they were tacked. I feel like I lived at the Elms in Centreville for two years, but it was actually less than one year. I feel like I bought my house in February 2005, but it was actually 2004. I moved fifteen miles up the road from Centrevi... - Tuesday, July 11, 2006:
Memoirs of a BUsha: Ten Years of the URI! Zone 2002 - 2003 The first year of grad school was all about figuring things out -- meeting the people that would form the nucleus of the atomic hanging out group, discovering all the hidden fees that Bank of America threw onto every transaction, realizing that grad school was just like undergrad but with more free time, and chatting it up with the cute girl in the office for two weeks until she absent-mindedly scratched her nose one day revealing a wedding band (something you're just not used to looking for first when you're only 21). After that initial phase, grad school became a blur of comfortable hang outs, painting pictures, playing pool, listening to Mike's rants about how ho... - Monday, July 10, 2006:
Memoirs of a BUsha: Ten Years of the URI! Zone 2000 - 2001 For my fifth and final year as a college overachiever, I finally moved off campus to escape the antics of serial fire-alarm pullers and people that threw up in, on, and around dormitory bathroom stalls. I moved into a three-bedroom Foxridge apartment with Rosie and Anna, sacrificing high speed Internet for the master bedroom with a private bathroom and Friday-night pajama'd pillow fights. Having 14.4k dial-up after four years of T1 came as a shock, especially since the connection was shared across three separate computers, and I barely had the patience to wait for CNN.com to load, much less update and maintain a whole website. For posterity's sake, I had my website labell... - Friday, July 07, 2006:
Memoirs of a BUsha: Ten Years of the URI! Zone 1998 - 1999 1998: The year of Monica Lewinsky, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time , Google, and Windows 98. Also my junior year of college, Kim's freshman year of college, and Anna's senior year in high school. The year I first had a car on campus (a problem-plagued 1994 Dodge Spirit) and the year I started pulling out of all my online circles and actually going outside. Now that the novelty of having a website had worn off, the URI! Domain became a big landfill of creativity, a dumping ground for all my music and artwork. Every new composition, short story, MIDI theme, and funny article I happened to read ended up somewhere on the site to be read or ignored by the Internet populace. Th... - Thursday, July 06, 2006:
Memoirs of a BUsha: Ten Years of the URI! Zone 1996 - 1997 I wrote my first homepage on the night of August 30, 1996 at the end of the first week of classes. Being a scholarly freshman concerned about my academics, I was not out partying that night, although my roommate was. I remember this because he stumbled into the dorm room with a girl that was most definitely not his girlfriend (since she was still a senior at his high school) around 2 AM when I was figuring out how online visitors could go to buri.campus.vt.edu to get to my weird page. Surprised to find me quite awake and working on my computer, they quickly did a 180 and departed to have a smoke. I was not totally socially inept or heartless, as I made sure I was asleep when they ma... - Thursday, June 22, 2006:
Vacation Memories I spent many summers in elementary school at my grandparents' house in Flint, Michigan. Their next door neighbours had a trampoline, a giant swimming pool, a woodworking shop, and two to four spoiled grandkids. Sometimes when we didn't want to play with them, we'd hide in the den and have our grandmother tell them we weren't home. Every evening after I started playing trumpet, I would play Taps from the front porch which all the old retirees in the area loved. I can't remember how that tradition got started but I found it very embarassing, especially when the cute girl around the corner would bike by. I spent a month after sixth grade with the other branch of the Uri clan in Henderson, Nevada. After a heavy rain... - Thursday, June 01, 2006:
Untitled Post Welcome to the month of June! Unless you are living in the completely wrong hemisphere of the world, June is the bringer of summer, stirring up images of Pop-ice, fireworks, and dirty beaches with crabs. I realize that summer comes early in other places, such as Tallahassee, but it doesn't really count when the average temperature rises from 87 to 94. When you're living in the humid armpit of the Southern giant, the only surefire way to tell that it's summertime is when Chompy hides in the bathtub to get away from the fireworks. Here are some pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that form my summers: The ice cream truck has been making the rounds in the neighbourhood again, although I rarely ever see anyone buy anything. The i... - Thursday, May 25, 2006:
Memory Day: High School High Points High school was a blatant waste of time and money, using up hours in the day better spent playing video games, going to the library and reading, or going out back to smoke crack with Zulfan Bakri. However, you could always count on a few peaks to brighten the year and prevent mass suicides. Field Hockey Home Games As a sign of solidarity, the field hockey team always wore their skirts on days when they were playing at home. Mix in a gaggle of goggling hormonal teenage boys, and you'll find that those boys will learn absolutely nothing during those school days, and remember very little other than a lot of leg by the time they leave for the day. We always tried to convince the swim team to have a simila... - Tuesday, May 09, 2006:
Repressed Memories Day: The Math Emporium We shall build a utopian society where students will voluntarily come to take advantage of free Macintosh computers loaded with math software. Students will regularly revel in the bursting joy of mathematics. This could have been the mission statement for the Virginia Tech Math Emporium, that ridiculous pork barrel project nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains that continues to harass students to this very day. Maybe it looked good on paper, or maybe they just had a bit of spare change they needed to spend before the next budget, but either way it just didn't work. I would like to meet the building planner who thought that this concept was a good idea and strongly suggest to him the medical benefits of testi... - Tuesday, May 02, 2006:
Goo Goo Gaa Gaa I should have known going into it that I'd never make it as a great composer, because I could never compete with the pure talent which is evident in this song: (2.12MB MP3). Whoever wrote this song deserves to be in Chapter One of every History of Western Music book on the face of the planet. Goo Goo Gaa Gaa is a representative track from an 80s audio cassette called Are We There Yet?: Songs for the Car published by Rand McNally. I no longer have the book full of car games, but I rediscovered the tape just last week and relived the memories of being strapped into hot leather seats in a Chevrolet being driven to just one more battleground every weekend. Here are some other sam... - Wednesday, April 12, 2006:
The Evolution of a Composer: A Pictorial (Part II of II) I finally decided to go to school for composing and ended up at Virginia Tech in 1996 where my first composition professor hated everything I brought in and constantly asked me to do exercises where I should "put a few wrong notes in the score". Over time, lessons became less about learning new craft (because I was a stubborn son of a bitch) and more about a cat-and-mouse game where I would try to convert his dissonance exercises into tonality. One trick I used to do was to put four consecutive quarter notes somewhere in the score, and see how long it took him to zero in on them and change them for "rhythmic interest's sake". I think he batted near .992 or so on catching them all. If my compositions were a game of Pokemon, he wa... - Tuesday, April 11, 2006:
The Evolution of a Composer: A Pictorial (Part I of II) In fifth grade (1989) I wrote and submitted my first composition ever, The Proud Beagle for solo cornet. I wrote it for cornet because I played cornet, and I played cornet because my hands were too tiny for a trumpet. This piece won second place in the school's yearly Reflections contest, and my clever sequence of sixths in the B section earmarked me as a tyke to keep your eyes on. (I washed my ear soon after). I didn't write again until tenth grade where the high school pep band had a repertoire which consisted of a grand total of four (4) songs and a power chord someone had made with the leftover whole notes in the music budget. For added shame, one of the songs was called "Bread Man". To rem... - Tuesday, March 28, 2006:
Untitled Post I had to work onsite at Bailey's Crossroads yesterday so I took the opportunity to stop by my old high school and visit with my former Crew coach (who's also an eleventh grade English teacher). It was the first visit I'd made to the school since 2002 when I offloaded several hundred pounds of "Drum Major Teaching Materials" on the desk of the latest revolving-door band director, who may have been named Josquin, but perhaps it was Palestrina. T.C. Williams High School from the west looks exactly the same as it did when I went there, right down to the list of State Championships won (which makes the not-so-subtle point that the school hasn't won one in over fourteen years), but the west side is being devoured by a fung... - Tuesday, March 21, 2006:
Untitled Post You are bidding on the authentic lunchbox discussed in the February 15th edition of the famous URI! Zone blog . This is the ONLY "lunchbox owned by BU in the late 80s" available for public consumption, and was recently rediscovered in the basement of his childhood home. The front of the box features Gizmo next to his carrying case, and Billy Peltzer in the background. The back of the box shows Gizmo speeding through the hardware store in the climactic final scene and also has an authentic lime scratch n' sniff sticker in the lower right corner. Amber the cat not included. The Thermos is a verita... - Tuesday, March 14, 2006:
Things I Remember I remember watching cartoons on USA, where the opening animation was a bullet train (maybe the Cartoon Train) choo-choo'ing through the countryside and going through tunnels. I remember the Nickelodeon station identification commercial where a set of false teeth gobbled up everything on the screen, and there was a different sound effect on each upbeat. The last two upbeats were filled with "Nick" and "olodeon!", followed by a springy sound and laughter. I remember watching Dennis the Menace on Nickelodeon and wholly disapproving of the fact that there were two different actors playing Mr. Wilson. Joseph Kearns was the only good one. I remember playing at my next door neighbour's when ... - Tuesday, February 14, 2006:
Untitled Post Happy Singles-Awareness Day! There's a big bowl of Valentine's Day candy on my desk at work if you want any. Pay no attention to the fact that it's been there since Halloween -- Jolly Ranchers are the ancient Greek candy of love, and Hershey's Kisses are inherently smooch-themed anyhow. You also won't find any gross powdery-tasting conversation hearts in my bucket -- the only way they'd ever be good is if they were made out of Sweettarts. When I was in elementary school, we were required to create little valentine receptacles out of construction paper and hang them along the underside of the chalkboard. Then, the entire class would get up en masse and distribute cards to the rest of the class. The main rule was that ... - Tuesday, January 24, 2006:
List Day: Five Random Stories from College 1) In my freshman year, I spent 100% of my time in class or in my room. I was one of those guys that always had the door shut. I roomed with a sax player named Andy who had dreams of being in Chip McNeill's jazz band and would spend hours practicing to Kenny G CDs on his soprano saxophone. Despite this, he was much cooler and more outgoing than I, and made it his life's purpose to turn me into a social animal. This mostly failed, but we were good friends. I lived in 5050 West AJ, and to this day, I use a variant of 5050 for passwords on unimportant things like work voice mail. No one except Anna leaves messages for me at work, so you should leave an after-hours message for me today: 703-885-1375. 2)&... - Wednesday, January 18, 2006:
Untitled Post When I was a little tyke in elementary school, my sister and I spent a couple summers at Summer Day Camp since both of my parents worked and we were untrustworthy prepubescents who would probably burn the house down unattended. One time, in an ever-so-eighties kind of way, they ran out of things for us to do, so we all went on a field trip to the roller rink. I had never roller-skated before and lacked the innate sense of rolling balance that everyone else seemed to have (no doubt because in my homeland, the streets are made of sun-baked cow dung and the wheels on roller skates are oblong). However, I amused myself by standing upright and pulling myself along the wall around the outside of the rink. In roller rinks, you see, you... - Monday, January 02, 2006:
Untitled Post Happy New Year! Welcome back to the 2006 edition of the URI! Zone. In August of this year, this site will have been around for ten long years (although it will have only acted as a blog-like enema of the tortured soul for five of those years). What this means, for people who are not so hot with numbers, is that my site is older than Napster, older than Slashdot, and older than MacOS 8. It's just one year younger than Amazon, eBay, and the Java programming language, and HoTMaiL is its elder sibling by a mere month. Honestly though, this site is far cooler than HoTMaiL ever was. I am all the hot male you could ever want and I have the added bonus of not resulting in spam. I enjoy writing my daily column for all you than... - Thursday, November 17, 2005:
Extended List Day: 36 Memories from Primary Education, Part III of III Ninth Grade 25) I was in ninth grade one year before it seceded to form its own union (making schools become K-5, 6-8, 9, 10-12) so being a freshman meant being at the top of the school, not the bottom. Somehow I was in the popular crowd and actually had my own cadre of kids that would follow my lead. We would often make fun of kids, especially the fat girl in band, for no other reason than the fact that we were kids, and kids are inherently cruel. One day after making fun of her, her friend asked me, "Why do you have to be so mean?" It was then that I had a Lifetime/Oh! epiphany that I was a mean little prick, and I wouldn't want to be friends with me. From then on, I've always been acutely aware of... - Wednesday, November 16, 2005:
Extended List Day: 36 Memories from Primary Education, Part II of III Fifth Grade 13) I had Mr. Ferris in fifth grade, and once had to write a 250-word punishment for talking when I wasn't supposed to. That was the only one I ever got, even though he handed them out like candy. I had Language Arts and Science with Mrs. Nicholson. In science class, we had footprint-shaped plastic terrariums where we grew seeds and farmed aphids. My terrarium always ended up moldy and dead. Mrs. Nicholson's class was a split class of fith graders and sixth graders from the Talented and Gifted program, which meant she pretty much ignored one half of the class while teaching the other. I developed a crush on a pretty sixth grader who liked playing computer games. How hot is that? 14) I star... - Tuesday, November 15, 2005:
Extended List Day: 36 Memories from Primary Education Kindergarten 1) I remember very little from Kindergarten. I had Mrs. Lovo and Mrs. Wheatley in the morning session at William Ramsey Elementary School, which was just a couple blocks from where my all-day babysitter lived. I thought the school was cool because it had an attached nature center with a beehive in it, and you could watch the bees fly in and out. 2) As you can see from the above transcript, I was always destined for great things. From the age of 4, I could recognize my own name, recognize a thermometer as an instrument of temperature, march rhthymically, and show appropriate emotional responses. I don't remember if there were actually tests for this stuff, or if it ... - Thursday, November 03, 2005:
2/14/1997 9:56 PM To all CS Majors on CSLAB, On Friday the 7th, I mailed out a malicious email to CS Majors. Not only was the message malicious, it was also fraudulent. I repeat the message in question was not sent out by Markus Groener, but by me. For producing and sending out the message I can only ask for forgiveness from Mr. Groener. It was wrong for me to produce and send out the message. In the process of doing so, I not only violated the Honor Code for fraud; but I also violated the CNS and CS appropriate use policy. Another issue I would like to address is mostly for new students and freshman. As most of us are new to this college environment we find that we sometimes have no real avenues to display our c... - Wednesday, October 19, 2005:
Every Entry Gets a Title This Week Last weekend, I got the first e-mail about my ten-year high-school reunion from our slacker-assed Class President, Mike Sharp. If I recall correctly, we actually had co-Presidents, the black girl (Tori) and the white guy (see above), so as to make sure that no one felt underrepresented. This was because we came from a high school that was ever so equal opportunity (a euphemism for "70% Black, 20% Hispanic, 9% White, with special guest star, BU, as the Token Asian #1"). So, Mike got to be the white President and dance with hot chicks (as seen in Figure A) and everyone in the world was complacent 1 . I have mixed feelings about attending a reunion and mingling with people I haven't seen in ten years, who are d... - Thursday, September 22, 2005:
Untitled Post On Friday afternoon, I'm taking a weekend trip down to Tallahassee to visit the few remaining FSU people still clinging to the Spanish-moss-coated city like barnacles on a dry-docked hull. Florida-Mike and Florida-Kathy each chipped in a quarter of the cost of plane tickets for my birthday which was quite nice of them. I think it's ridiculous, though, that the flight from here to Florida is twice as expensive as a flight from here to San Diego, our country's Mexican outpost on the far seas. I'll be back on Sunday, so you probably won't miss any news updates in my absence. I lived in Tallahassee and went to FSU for grad school from August 2001 (when these daily updates started) until April 2003, except for the s... - Tuesday, August 23, 2005:
Untitled Post I have a little over three weeks until I turn twenty-six -- I got a big laugh at my last music presentation after telling the audience that I wasn't born until three years after A Fifth of Beethoven was mixed by the Walter Murphy Orchestra. For the lifespan of these daily updates, birthdays have not been a big deal; they were just a day where I took off from work and made filler updates like this one , and I think Number 26 will be no different. Since it'll be on a Thursday this year, I may take two days off from my limitless vacation pool and squander them by doing nothing of historical value. I can't even think of any gifts I'm particularly interested in, so if you're having troubles thinki... - Monday, August 22, 2005:
Untitled Post I sore on a stack of Bibles that I wouldn't t'ache today's update to talk about my weekend of moving and it pains me to go back on that, but I figured that at least I could mention how stiff I am so you'd know that I wasn't just pulling your muscle. I'll spare you the whole soredid tale, but if anyone has some pain-relieving bruise I could quaff, I could leave this world of hurt. I'll give you a moment to cauterize that horrible introductory paragraph from your brain before continuing. On Saturday, four of us split an apartment of two into two Apartments of One 1 , near my old stomping grounds in Alexandria. One of them moved up to an efficiency on Seminary Road and the other moved into the Haml... - Monday, August 15, 2005:
Untitled Post I would say that my weekend was pretty hectic, but my outlook on such things might be skewed. Having long ago relinquished the title of Social Butterfly of Loudoun County , I consider any weekend busy if I go outside the house more than four times in a single day (bonus points for getting in my car and driving somewhere. Beep beep, monsieur!) On Friday evening, I cleaned the house and recorded some music examples for my presentation, and then Jack came over for some miscellaneous socializing. Saturday's opener was my typical shopping gambit, where I hit the gas station and the grocery store, pissing off the clerks by getting more cash back than they have in their drawers at such an early hour. I then went ... - Tuesday, June 14, 2005:
Untitled Post This week is still ancient history week. Eleven years ago today was June 14, 1994. Like a peculiar suburban Tennessee Williams play, it was a hot and humid half-day at the end of my sophomore year, and it was the last day of "going to every class" before exams. The Alexandria City Public School System, like any good school system, felt that students would not benefit unless they went to every class but had an inability to divide the day into increments of five minutes at a time. As a result, we went to every class for approximately 19 minutes before the bell rang. First period was English with Mrs. Riviere, who owned a bed and breakfast in Berryville and commuted about eighty miles to school everyday. Well on h... - Monday, June 13, 2005:
Untitled Post As a sequel to my "Do you remember what you were doing years ago" post, I was planning on picking a random day from high school and writing about it for each of this week's updates. As luck would have it, June 13, 1996 was the day I graduated from high school, aptly illustrated in the photo to the left (which includes the college-age sister too embarrassed to get any closer to the family, but does not include my dad who mistakenly stood on the wrong side of the camera too often to get into many pictures). At T.C. Williams High School, a 4.0 is the numeric equivalent of a straight-A student, but taking Advanced Placement courses gave you a bonus 0.5 which could ostensibly push you higher than the maximum. Because of t... - Saturday, April 13, 2002:
Untitled Post Authors of Yesteryear, Part VI of VI Of all the books I read as a kid, Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game was probably the one that got the most face time. Part murder mystery and part treasure hunt, this slightly surreal book told the tale of a deceased millionaire and the seemingly random people selected to be his heirs. The entire book turned out to be as twisty and convoluted as a movie like The Usual Suspects . If you've never read it, go check it out of the public library. It'll only take a few hours to read and would be well worth it. Brian Jacques began the Redwall series several years ago. Like Watership Down , it featured mice and other woo... - Friday, April 12, 2002:
Untitled Post Authors of Yesteryear, Part V of VI John D. Fitzgerald wrote a seven book series about the Great Brain in the 1970s. It was about a boy in a small Utah town at the end of the nineteenth century who was smarter than the average joe. Told from the point of his little brother, the Great Brain spends most of his time swindling his friends and family. An eighth book was published from manuscript after the author's death but I haven't read it. The books were light, enjoyable reading and provided an interesting "historical fiction" look at the old West. The only problem in the series was the first chapter of each book, which was usually a literal repetition of all the family background information necessary to ... - Thursday, April 11, 2002:
Untitled Post Authors of Yesteryear, Part IV of VI Without a doubt, Gordon Korman was my favourite young adult author. Since 1978, he has written a large quantity of humourous books, the most well-known being the Bruno and Boots series at MacDonald Hall. Korman's writing was clear and accessible, and his characters got caught up in genuinely funny situations and dialogue. In fact, I Want to Go Home (1981) still holds the distinction for the only book that's ever made me laugh out loud multiple times. The book tells the story of Rudy Miller, a dry cynic who is forced to go to a summer camp. He spends the first half of the book trying to run away from camp (which is on an island), and when he fin... - Wednesday, April 10, 2002:
Untitled Post Authors of Yesteryear, Part III of VI Lloyd Alexander was best known as the author of the Prydain Chronicles, five books and a collection of short stories set in a fantasy world (which was based on Welsh legends). Although it's all swords and sorcery, the books are fairly well-known, since the first two were turned into a Disney movie and the fifth was a Newberry Award winner. The books tell of the adventures of Taran, Assistant Pig-Keeper and his friends as they grow and mature. Among other characters you might recall: Gurgi, the shaggy creature who spoke in ending couplets, constantly after 'munchings and crunchings', Eilonwy, the analogy-loving princess with the glowing bauble, and Fflewddur Fflam, the itine... - Tuesday, April 09, 2002:
Untitled Post Authors of Yesteryear, Part II of VI In the seventies and eighties, John Bellairs wrote fifteen books with a mix of supernatural, science-fiction, religious, and treasure-hunting elements. He effectively did the Harry Potter schtick years before it became mass-marketed. Bellair's books were divided into three series by main characters, his protagonists being Lewis Barnavelt, Anthony Monday, and Johnny Dixon. Although his emotions were poorly written, they were good enough for young readers, and the sharp dialogue and genuine suspense more than made up for it. Bellair's first book, The House with a Clock in its Walls was a receipient of the Newberry Award, and the chapter about bei... - Monday, April 08, 2002:
Untitled Post Authors of Yesteryear, Part I of VI This isn't quite expansive enough to be a special feature; it's more like a featurette. This week I'll be posting some brief memories of young adult authors I read as a kid. C.S. Lewis will be the first author covered, since everyone is probably familiar with his most famous series, The Narnia Chronicles. This series was made up of five chronological books detailing the magic adventures of plain English children in the fantasy land of Narnia: Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe , Prince Caspian , Voyage of the Dawn Treader , The Silver Chair , and The Last Battle . Between the final two books, Lewis also wrote a preq...
