Month: August 2024

I suspect these were from the one time I went to camp. It was Pine Creek Ranch, which apparently isn’t a Girl Scout camp any longer. Camp Pittinger is still a thing. But there was one other one that also isn’t there any longer…Wait! It was Ta-Man-a-Wis and is now called TAM (Not surprising).

[more googling] Ah! They sold Pine Creek Ranch and proceeds went to a new building that opened in 2018. Pine Creek Ranch was last used in 2008.

Anyhow, labels. From Bell of Maine!

I cannot believe that this was in a frame!

As a child, I loved this design. It had ladies in fancy dress. It had a Girl Scout song. It used silver and gold thread for the words “silver” and “gold” respectively. So I got this kit and set to cross stitching.

The first thing I did was to ignore the way the fabric was folded. I centered the design the way I thought it should be. Mistake. The fold was there to show me where the center of the design should be. Result: my mom had to cut stuff off of the bottom and stitch it to the top.

I also love that I used one strand for one lady and two strands for the other lady. Two strands was the correct number, but I did not backtrack and fix the single strand lady.

Finally, the rust stain from the hoop. Even back then, I wasn’t a finisher, so this got started and then set aside long enough that rust formed.

Emerging skills. Memorialized.

I was surprised that the back wasn’t more chaotic. While not the tidiest, it’s also not terrible.

Tucked away with my seventh grade art portfolio were some fun newspaper finds.

The Charles and Diana wedding was a big event in my six-year-old-world, so it’s no wonder that I held onto this clipping from the Oregonian. I enjoy that a local filed a report, and that he interviewed several people from Oregon watching the procession. However did he find them?

He look, I was born! Also interesting, a boy with the last name of Edes was also born. I went to school with Jon Edes. Was I one day older than him?

Here is what was happening on the day of my birth (or actually, the day before my birth) according to the Idaho Stateman. The mob on the front are people trying to get free flowers in Boston. Apparently it was over in 10 minutes and no injuries were reported.

Note also in the upper right corner the word “save” written in pencil in my grandmother’s handwriting.

Patty Hearst was still missing. It would be almost a year before she was found/arrested: September 18, 1975.

My parents were otherwise occupied with their first day being parents, so they missed out on a big sale at Sears! Ultra-Shear Panty Hose, 47 cents! What a deal!

I checked to see if my church had advertised, and indeed Southminster Presbyterian Church had. I can’t tell if World Wide Communion was a one-off in McKinley School (my future elementary school) or if they were holding services there. I thought the first building was already built in 1974.

Some good deals on household helpers at the Bon Marche.

Here is an article about the teacher of the year, a second-grade teacher who began her career in 1949. No mention of a husband or children of her own. She picked Boise over Bellingham due to Boise’s excellent climate. Not a fan of the rain and damp, apparently.

We at the Twin Dragon after our 20-year high school reunion. It is now closed.

Although Sara and Shawn’s blog (now hidden) has a picture of April, Sara, and me looking at old yearbooks while eating at the Twin Dragon.

This was a surprising find. Films of sexual nature in Caldwell! My goodness! Also, funny: “Visit the magazine rack.”

Other movies playing the week I was born. Aside from Gone With the Wind, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Jeremiah Johnson, I have not seen these films. There were a ton of drive-ins. You can still go to the Terrace Drive-In. The other drive-in theaters are gone. The Karcher Twin shut down in 2000, and the Plaza Twin closed in the mid-90s. The Vista Theater closed when I was young. I don’t see an ad for the Egyptian Theater or the Overland Park Cinemas, which are still open.

I roller skated a lot at Skateland. It struggled when Skate World opened, and it closed in 1986, just as I was finishing elementary school. The building then was used to sell carpet and I can remember running around on the carpet rolls, even though I think I was a little too old to do that.

There were two copies of the birth announcement, and this one was bigger, so I got to see the menus for various schools. Plus, a bomb threat!

The article below was my favorite find.

Who doesn’t love a good story about a chaotic band trip? Even better, exactly 16 years after this story was published, I was also on a band trip to California celebrating my 16th birthday by being serenaded by a room full of guys singing “16 Candles.”

I had the same band director, JP, and he regularly referenced performing at the football game in Candlestick Park. We didn’t hear about the chaos of the trip, though.

Also: 300 people on the trip! Such a big band and drill team!

The fun elective in seventh grade was Applied Arts Sequence. Every quarter we switched mediums. Over the course of the year we covered visual arts, cooking/sewing, drama, and industrial arts (shop class).

This is my portfolio from the visual arts class. The cat stamp, made from old inner tubing, was my favorite thing in it. The cat stamp has been lost to time, though.

I really liked looking at this exercise. We had to make some sort of collage using various textures, and then draw it. While I think my results are middling, I enjoyed looking at it.

The rest of the portfolio was full of similarly somewhat okay drawings of things. I have spared you the full tour.