Saturday, December 13, 2014

Day 13: History

So today I was clearing out out living room of all the moving stuff that got stuck there and hadn't made it upstairs yet. Some of it was boxes that came up from my parent's house inexplicably, because apparently they had just seen a bunch of stuff with my handwriting and thought I must want it. Instead of carrying the whole box upstairs for it to sit there untouched for months, I decided to actually go through it and see what was in there.

Most of it was stuff that I didn't need to keep. Old notes from high school classes, homework that was useful for that week and the test, and that's it. Even some old stuff from elementary school Latin and Greek class and 6th grade science. Fun to go through one last time, but definitely not necessary in my currently storage-impaired living space.

There were, however, some things that I found pretty funny, and definitely worth saving. A lot of old essays from my first real English class that I took in 8th grade, which I decided to keep to prove to any future writing students that I too once sucked at writing essays. Like, seriously stunk. One of the early ones was just one whole long paragraph, with long drawn out trains of thought, no discernible thesis sentence, etc. I was reading through it and cringing at the writing, and at the comments from my teacher, all of which were totally things I've written on student's papers.

Some of the things I found were pretty funny. I found an essay attached to a diagnostic sheet (sorta like a rubric, but more checklist-like), and on it one of the listed questions was, "Do you only have one topic per paragraph?" My 13 year old cheeky answer was "Hopefully?"

There was also the paper that I wrote for the assignment to write my own obituary. Which is seriously a really morbid assignment to give a Jr. High class, can I just say? Apparently I was very ambitious, because I decided that by the time I was 25 I would totally have a husband, three kids, and a successful Christian music recording career. Also, I was murdered in my hotel room. Because reasons. I have no idea why. Other than an odd obsession with the story of Selena, but that was a couple of years earlier. It was a pretty interesting to read what I thought I'd be doing in 12 years. Looking back now at 25, I can see how crazy that was. But then? I thought anything was possible.

I also found a good bit of artwork, and those cards that you could print out yourself. You know, when the internet was new and it was so novel that you could design your own greeting cards! It is so funny going through old stuff like that and seeing what I thought was a good essay topic. Some of them made me laugh. Some made my cringe. I could see my voice starting to pop out in some things, and in some I was still wandering through a void of form and no real content.

During the day, I was going through old history. Then at night, after the living room was mostly cleared out and we could actually move around, we made some new history. First Christmas in the new place, so today we got and set up our first Christmas tree! I am super excited, because I didn't get to have a real tree the last two years. It was for a good reason, because the cat would eat it. But it was still sad. And I'm very happy that we get a real one this year. There's no substitute for the smell of a real tree, and I missed it. I got a bunch of sap on my hands while I was carrying it in. I walked around the house smelling my hands for awhile after that. It was great.

It was fun going through all the Christmas ornaments that I had, half of which were my aunt's that I grabbed last year when she didn't think that she'd have a real house to put a tree in any time soon. Funny ol' world, innit? I did find some of my own though, including my TARDIS lights and my glass-blown hand-painted TARDIS. Plus the awesome Bilbo Baggins ornament that one of my friends gave me last year. I'm only a little bit of a geek.

So yeah. It was a fun day. I'm at Denny's right now with the After Dark group that formed during NaNo. It's great fun. Tea and pie FTW! And I'm getting wildly distracted, obviously. But hey, some sort of social life! After a week of having to ditch stuff because I was so tired after work, I only made this one because it wasn't preceded by 4 hours of running after children.

But now, it is late and I should go to sleep. So goodnight! Sleep tight! Don't let the Vashta Nerada bite! Hey, who turned out the lights?

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