Tag: me

What did I do for my birthday? I made a really big cake! And then had a Friendsgiving to invite people to help me eat it. Here are some stages of this cake:

Individually wrapped and frozen layers with cardboard rounds in between to give me an idea of the final height:

With filling added. The top was fruit filling, and the bottom two layers were chocolate.

With buttercream layer after I dropped the top layer while stacking.

The final cake, fully decorated, with buttercream on the top layer repaired.

It was quite the adventure, making this cake, and honestly, I wasn’t pleased with the final results. But I think I like planning to make a large cake rather than the product of the planning. And people ate it happily, so that was good.

Thanks for the Decorette Shop in Tigard for supplying me with all the things I needed to make this cake, including those stars and candles.

As you can see, an official worker badge has joined my Multnomah County Library card.

I will be working in the Finance and Facilities division.

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.

I attended the holiday edition of the Low Bar Chorale in December. Tonight was my first time at their regular gig.

We sang “What’s Up?” by 4 Non Blonds, “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac, “You Were Meant for Me” by Jewel, and finished up with “Faith” by George Michael.

I learned that I can sing the harmony parts when I’ve got a strong singer next to me. And not so much when I don’t.

It was a fun night.

I discovered You’re Wrong About through one of my workmates, Shannon. She listened to an episode about crack babies and really liked it, so I gave it a try. I chose the Shannon Faulkner episode for my first listen, as the plight of the first female to enroll in the Citadel was something I followed closely.

I really liked the conviviality and research skills of the hosts, Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbs, as well as their Pacific Northwest roots. I found them around the time that Michael Hobbs went off to do other podcasts (“Mike Lives in a Downtown Hotel,” October 11, 2021, but I scrolled back and started at the beginning, so I had a lot of podcasts to catch up with. They started podcasting in 2018. The badge of episodes remaining was at 99—the maximum displayed—for a very long time.

You’re Wrong About likes to debunk “common knowledge” about big events. Mike and Sarah met because Sarah wrote a complementary and nuanced essay about Tonya Harding. One of their taglines is “Revisiting the stories of maligned women of the ’90s,” of which Shannon Falkner is just one.

They also had book club episodes during the pandemic. Not where the audience read books, but where the hosts talked us through what happened in different books.

You’re Wrong About led me to Maintenance Phase with Michael Hobbs and Aubrey Gordon. Their title refers to the part of the diet where you cease dieting and go into the “maintenance phase” where you supposedly begin eating normally again while not gaining any weight. Their tagline is, “Wellness and weight loss,
debunked and decoded.”

There weren’t as many episodes of Maintenance Phase, but I also became a Pateron supporter, so that added to the podcast backlog.

Finally, Michael Hobbs also led me to If Books Could Kill, where Hobbs and Peter Shamshiri analyze, “The airport bestsellers that captured our hearts and ruined our minds.” That added to the backlog.

But what a fun backlog! Over the nearly three years I’ve been catching up, I’ve learned so many things from these podcasts. And also had a lot of fun along the way. Now I can look forward to keeping up with them in real time.

The trunk originally had a bunch of clothing in it—mostly favorite dresses—but in the mid-aughts, I took them to the high school youth group at First Unitarian and let them take home anything they wanted. The t-shirt from my first concert, however, remained tucked away.

Here, from Bon Jovi’s New Jersey Tour, is the concert t-shirt that I complained cost more than the tickets (about $30 when the tickets were about $18-19). T-shirts are probably cheaper than tickets currently, but that’s because tickets have increased in value, not that the shirts have gotten cheaper. (I just checked and Olivia Rodrigo tour shirts are $45.00; tickets are something like $99 to $450 at their original price.)

Anyway, from my perspective today, the skull iconography is odd. It seems more in keeping with Guns and Roses etc. than Bon Jovi. But this might have been before they got full into western iconography.

This shirt was worn twice. I knew when I bought it, I wasn’t going to make it out of the house with the back visible. The word “ass” was a no-go for public display. The same went for the school dress code.

I bought it anyway. I wore it to school the day after the concert with a jean jacket I never took off even though it was early may and past jean jacket weather. There was one other time I wore it, but I do not remember what it was.

So this shirt is in GREAT shape.