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 her way to retirement, she decided to have a sub on the half day, which surprised no one. Second period was French III with a teacher who was easily the meanest old lady in la monde. It was during this year and this class that I started work on Break-Out! for the TI-85 (which eventually culminated two years later with the complete Game-Calc by Uri! containing Break-Out, Connect Four, Battleship, and Whack-a-Rat, but had the downside of taking up the entire memory of the calculator).

Nothing happened in third period Algebra II With Trig. The With Trig means that they threw in an extra semester of trigonometry, so you wouldn't have to have a useless gap in the second half of your year. Fourth period was Biology BSCS -- I no longer know what the BSCS stands for but I know it wasn't bromothymal blue. For this particular class, Ben Seggerson and I were administering a makeup test for the chapter we were forced to teach while the rest of the class just sat around and talked. In the final week of this class, the teacher informed everyone that there would be a notebook check of every ditto, test, and handout she'd ever given, and that it would constitute 40% of our grade. She apparently had a checklist which she was going to grade our notebooks against, although no one really believed her. Since I had thrown away everything to do with this class weeks earlier, I turned in a carefully manicured notebook filled to the brim with old math assignments, doodles, and hundreds of copies of the one ditto I had left. This faux notebook was a work of art, since many of the pages were carefully stapled and taped together -- when you flipped through the notebook haphazardly, you only saw the particular pages that looked official. Another student later reported that she threw out all the notebooks immediately after the school year ended, so I would have gotten an A regardless.

Nothing else of note occurred in the remaining classes, Art I and Band, though I did go to lunch at Jack's since he lived close to school. We managed to have a soda before the nineteen minute deadline loomed and we had to rush back to campus. Incidentally, Jack is the one who got me my current job, and he got promoted to business area manager of my project last week (also managing to throw in a nice little engagement to his girlfriend a few days ago). Were this faux-blog to have any greater world significance, this would be the point where I connect Jack to a deeper thread in the weave of life. Since this faux-blog actually has no significance whatsoever, I'll just close with my standard news stories.