Old Cards and Letters

I was going through a box of old mail today, and I came across several funnies. Here we have abirthday card made by my little brother Tim, using "Kidpix" on the computer, back in 1996. He called me "Da" for "sister" as a toddler (somehow that makes sense, right?) and sometimes called me "Big Da" for "Big Sister." The crab is pretty random, unless he put it there because I like to eat snow crab legs??? The "Sweet 17" is priceless. It brought a smile to my face to find this card that my baby brother had made for me!!

The little card underneath is from my parents and says, "Happy Birthday and happy shooting!" Reading it 14 years later, I was completely baffled and wondered if they'd given me a gun I'd forgotten about as a birthday gift. It finally hit me that it was in reference to my camera I'd gotten that year!

This one was goofy - it is a valentine card from a high school friend. He always teased me that a guy I was dating at the time wore make-up (which he didn't. I may have dated a gay guy before, but that was a different guy! ;). Apparently he teased me about being a girl, too, what with the comment on the envelope... I don't remember.

And here is a note from my elementary/middle school art teacher. She loved the Bulldogs, and I loved the Gators. So we always engaged in some good-natured competition when fall came around and the Gators/Bulldogs football game was approaching! And yes, that says that she bet another student a dollar... ahh, how schools used to be, where you could place bets with a teacher as a seventh grader... now I bet they'd get sued or something. Nothing's any fun anymore! :-P

And another note from Tim sent to me while I was away at summer camp. Yes, he says that our mom killed 508 Barneys. We had a computer game called Purple Dinosaur Massacre - anyone remember that one? We just called it "Kill Barney." My mom was always the video game master of the family... she beat all the levels in the Mario games long before anyone else - and without using the Game Genie!!

And this is totally random, but Tim and Mike would recognize it from the days where I made them play "Horses" with me. Okay, so they played willingly. Anyway, some of the old letters were stored in this box, which had a former life as a drive-through "resteraunt" in the model horse town. I even have the model horse that fits in it so well... he has been on a shelf here in my house. Ahh, the horse town... what a fun game that was, and it never ended. The entire pool table in the basement was the town, covered in buildings and horses. A Taco Bell box was the Taco Bell drive-through. A shoe storage box was the "horse condo." A styrofoam mountain from a model train set was a planetarium called "Journey to the Stars." A Barbie swimming pool was the community pool for the horses. A My Little Pony stable was the schoolhouse. It went on and on and on...

Just some random discoveries I made from the past!

Songs That Remind Me of Florida

Back in the 1980s, my family made trips to Florida almost annually, sometimes twice a year. I loved road trips. I loved watching out the windows to see familiar "landmarks" that we passed along I-75. I also heard popular songs of the time during those years, and those songs became ingrained in my mind as "songs the remind me of Florida." In the very early 90s, I wrote down lists of landmarks and songs, and I would take these with me on our drives down I-75 to Florida. That way, I could see what was coming up next and check off the things we'd passed. I even timed the distance between landmarks once and then used this as a reference on future trips, and at one point I made a list of all the exits and then wrote down all the gas stations, restaurants, and hotels as we drove past. This only came in handy in the future when we were deciding where to stop to eat lunch!

As for the songs, I began recording them off the radio in the very late 80s/early 90s. In these days before the Internet, I could not just look the songs up on Youtube or Google them to find out who sang them or even what their titles were... so, I had a blank tape ready in my tape player, and every time a song would come on that was one of my "Florida songs," I'd hit the record button. As the years passed and my Florida songs weren't guaranteed to happen to play on the radio as we drove to Florida, I could put a tape in my Walkman (remember those??) and reminisce that way.

These songs are special to me. They represent my childhood, and a time in which life was much simpler. They remind me of the love I had for travel and for Florida. They make me think of the landmarks along the way, the beach, my grandparents and cousins... sweet memories.

A few of them have particularly special meanings. For instance, I had a memory of being in the back of the Ford station wagon on the way to Florida. My mom was already there, and my dad and brother Stephen were in the car with me. I was five years old. I had been laying down in the back (the horrors! no seatbelts!) on some blankets, or maybe a little porta-crib mattress... anyway, I remember sitting up and asking my dad, "So, why are we going to Florida?" It was weird to me, because my mom had gone on her own to Florida, and so I didn't think we'd be going too.. we always went as a family. My dad told me that we were going because my grandmother (my mom's mom) had died. I remember laying back down in the back with sadness, and then hearing two songs on the radio: If This is It by Huey Lewis and the News, and I Just Called to Say I Love You by Stevie Wonder. Well, years passed, and I always thought of my grandmother whenever I heard either of those songs. My memory was dim, and I wasn't so sure I had really heard those two songs at that specific time.. maybe I'd just associated them with it somehow. But, with the dawn of the Internet, I was able to look up those songs, and lo and behold, they were both popular around October 1984, meaning that I can safely assume that my memory is accurate! The Stevie Wonder song was number one on the charts during the week of October 13, and the Huey Lewis album was number 4 on the charts that week, hitting number 1 toward the end of the month.

Another one is I Can Dream about You by Dan Hartman. This song makes me think of my brother, Stephen. We were at some kind of social event at the neighborhood swimming pool, and we won a game... and the prizes were record singles. Yes, records. 45s. And so I chose Dan Hartman's I Can Dream about You... why? Because it had a rainbow on the label. I picked it because it was pretty. And then Stephen and I listened to it often and enjoyed it thoroughly. Interestingly, this song was also popular in 1984. I am not sure if we got the record the summer of '84 or the following summer, though.

Then we have Cherish by Kool and the Gang (released 1984... hmm, a trend here, although these songs were also played for several years after their release, of course). This song reminds me of my Grandma and of the beach, specifically Angler's Cove condo on Redington Beach. On this one, I can't tell you the reasoning, other than the fact that the song has a seagull sound effect in it. Perhaps that is the only reason, now that I think of it. I looooved Angler's Cove. And now it has a website!! I wonder if I would have developed this level of sentimentality about it all if there had been this instantly accessible info on all these things back then...

Careless Whisper by Wham! ~ 1984
True by Spandau Ballet ~ 1983
Every Time You Go Away by Paul Young ~ 1985
I Wanna Know What Love Is by Foreigner ~ 1984
December '63 by The Four Seasons ~ 1976
Shattered Dreams by Johnny Hates Jazz ~ 1987
These Dreams by Heart ~ 1985
The Longest Time by Billy Joel ~ 1983
Turn Your Love Around by George Benson ~ 1981
If This is It by Huey Lewis and the News ~ 1984
Broken Wings by Mr. Mister ~ 1985
Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper ~ 1984
Cherish by Kool and the Gang ~ 1984
Break My Stride by Matthew Wilder ~ 1983
Every Breath You Take by The Police ~ 1983
You Belong to the City ~ 1985
Smooth Operator by Sade ~ 1985
What a Fool Believes by The Doobie Brothers ~ 1978
That's All by Genesis ~ 1983
Everybody Wants to Rule the World ~ 1985
Endless Summer Nights by Richard Marx ~ 1987
Throwin' It All Away by Genesis ~ 1986
Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley ~ 1987
What a Feeling by Irene Cara ~1983
Sara by Starship ~ 1985
Something About You by Level 42 ~ 1985
Waiting for a Girl Like You by Foreigner ~ 1981
That's What Friends are For by Stevie Wonder and Dionne Warwick ~ 1985
The Greatest Love of All by Whitney Houston ~ 1985
The Lady in Red by Chris DeBurg ~ 1986
Drive by The Cars ~ 1984
Missing You by John Waite ~ 1984
Silent Running by Mike and the Mechanics ~ 1985
I Just Called to Say I Love You by Stevie Wonder ~ 1984
The Next Time by Peter Cetera and Amy Grant ~ 1986
Higher Love by Steve Winwood ~ 1986
Take Me Home by Phil Collins ~ 1985
I Don't want to Live without You by Foreigner ~ 1987
Stuck with You by Huey Lewis and the News ~ 1986
Kiss on my List by Hall and Oates ~ 1980
Africa by Toto ~ 1982
Sailing by Christopher Cross ~ 1979
Eye in the Sky by Alan Parsons Project ~ 1982
Sweet Freedom by Michael McDonald ~ 1986
Carribean Queen by Billy Ocean ~ 1984
It Might Be You by Stephen Bishop ~ 1982
If Ever I'm in your Arms Again by Peabo Bryson ~ 1984
You Are by Lionel Ritchie ~ 1982
Valerie by Steve Winwood ~ 1987
All I Need by Jack Wagner ~ 1984
Summer Breeze by Seals and Crofts ~ 1972
Together Forever by Rick Astley ~ 1987
The Finer Things by Steve Winwood ~ 1986
Out of Touch by Hall and Oates ~ 1984
I Keep Forgetting by Michael McDonald ~ 1982
Arthur's Theme (The Best That You Can Do) by Christopher Cross ~ 1981
Suddenly by Billy Ocean ~ 1985
Times to Remember by Billy Joel ~ 1986
Oh Sherrie by Steve Perry ~ 1984
I Can Dream about You by Dan Hartman ~ 1984
Because I Love You by Stevie B ~ 1990

Other songs that sort of make the list... I think that over the years, my mind got mixed up as to which of these I really associated with trips to Florida, so these are on my iffy list. They remind me of Florida, but I am not sure if they do so validly. That probably makes no sense to anyone but me.
How Much I Feel by Ambrosia ~ 1978
Biggest Part of Me by Ambrosia ~ 1980
Rosanna by Toto ~ 1982
Live to Tell by Madonna ~ 1986
Right Down the Line by Gerry Rafferty ~ 1978
Nightshift by The Commodores ~ 1985
The Living Years by Mike and the Mechanics ~ 1988
Say You, say Me by Lionel Ritchie ~ 1985
If I Could Fly by Benny Mardones ~ 1980
Babe by Styx ~ 1979

So, if you actually read through all those, thanks!

In looking up all the years, I found out interesting tidbits of information, such as Jack Wagner was a soap opera star more than he was known as a musician, and less pleasant pieces of information such as how Chris De Burg had an affair with his children’s 19 year old nanny when he was 45 (ewwwww!!!!!) and his wife was hospitalized with a broken neck (what a jerk!!). I also discovered how many musicians of the 70s and 80s were just plain ugly! Good thing they could sing well, I guess.

So, those are my Florida songs. I have loved them since childhood, and each time I hear one, memories are evoked. I now have all these songs on CDs… I got them back when Napster was legal. Maybe next I will write about my landmarks on the way to Florida… such as “the airplane on a stick” and “the big peanut in a crown.” I may have to do that once I have access myself and stopped along the way to take photos of all of the landmarks… something my parents never would have let me do on a family trip!

Good Food Fast...

Why yes, that is a construction hard hat I am wearing in a restaurant... why do you ask? ;)

Ah, the Waffle House. Thousands of locations across the country, and they all began with one in the Atlanta area, where I grew up. The Waffle House had a sort of cult following for teenagers in Atlanta. It was a place to go to hang out after school or at midnight on a weekend (before they had that curfew for teens thing in Atlanta - a good thing overall, I suppose... but I was a good kid and would have hated it then).
It wasn't about the food... it was the atmosphere. Even for non-smoking folks like my friends and me, the smoking section usually didn't ruin the atmosphere. We'd go to the WH for a place to talk, cheap coffee, vanilla cokes, and to people-watch. And I went to set a record.
See, I had a crazy goal to visit as many WH's as I could. At first, I thought I'd take a napkin from each one I went to, write the address on the back, and have the waitress sign it as proof. But that seemed too difficult, so I went to the idea of a logbook. I put an entry in a small notebook for every WH I visited - even if I just ordered water, even if I just went in to use the restroom. I also recorded interesting notes such as who was there with me, what we ordered, time and date, and any return visits. The logbook had entries from GA, FL, SC, AL, VA, and TN. As you can tell, this little obsession went right along with the love of random road trips.
A few brief stories about the goings-on at the WH...

• At the Sandy Springs location (behind the Target), my friend Karen and I decided to stop after school. We had my brother, Stephen, with us. He was not into the whole WH culture and went in reluctantly. He was lloking at the jukebox when a WH song started playing (Karen and I had queued it up to play). As you may know if you've frequented the WH, many of the waitresses HATE the WH songs. They are recorded by the wife of one of the Big Cheeses of WH and have titles such as "Waffle House Family II," "Waffle Do Wop," and "Waffle House Thank You." (I'm not making this stuff up. Honestly.) So the waitress thought Stephen had selected the annoying song and began yelling at him (we told her his name): "Steve! Did you play that WH song?!?!?" He was pretty surprised, needless to say...
• At the WH on Clairmont/PT Ind. Blvd., another girl from my high school and I would go occasionally after school. We'd have a dollar between the two of us, which we'd spend on an 80 cent cup of coffee that we would share (lots of refills), leaving 20 cents for a tip. The waitresses hated us.
• At the Rome WH across from the mall, my friend Randall stole a menu for me. I proudly hung it on display in my dorm room, and then when I was teaching, I used it as a tool for teaching money skills in math.
• At the location on Roswell Road about one mile inside the perimeter, at 11:30 pm, the day before my birthday, we got to experience a treat in the people-watching department. Randall and I saw a table full of drunk, gay, fat, white trash... and they were singing. It was funny, in a scary way.

The WH: a perfect destination for late night meals after trips to Six Flags or the mini golf course. Thanks to Randall, Karen, Bridgette, Aura Lee, Alison (etc. etc. etc.) for putting up with this obsession.

The Fate of my Taurus

I used to drive a Ford Taurus (yes, lame - I know). It was a 1990 model and belonged to my dad before it was officially mine. Pictured here is the back of the car, which I had slathered with bumper stickers at a time when I had an aversion to blank surfaces and felt the need to cover them with displays of one kind or another (at one point I also collected the McDonald's Monopoly game pieces and stuck them all to the steering wheel).

I began driving the Taurus in high school during my Junior year. My dad was on business in Italy much of the time, so his car was sitting around collecting dust and I had nobody to drive me to school, as my mom had to drive my younger brothers to their school in the mornings. So I drove the Taurus. We paid $40 for the school parking permit (you can kind of see it in the picture, under the Scooby Doo sticker in the bottom right corner of the window), which is crazy considering I paid $5 for my college parking permit... but then again, my brother recently paid like $200 for a one semester parking permit. Anyway... I drove the Taurus to school and to work, and then when it was time to go to college, I had to leave it behind because my dad was back from Italy.

That lasted about two months. I had the roommate from hell who had a car, and I didn't want to rely on a pot-smoking beer drinker to get me to Wal-Mart safely.  So my parents decided I could have the car, and my dad got himself another car... a 1991 Tarus (*sigh*... he didn't learn his lesson and still drives yet another Taurus, a 1996 model. The windshield wiper motor has consistently broken in all three Tauri {my plural form of Taurus}) . So I had a car... reunited with my old pal, the Taurus.

Aura Lee, my good roommate that I had for three of my four college years, had a Chevy car. It was purple (although she insisted that we say it was 'dark cherry'). She also had a bottle of nail polish in the exact same color (good if she needed a touch-up, I suppose). The nail polish company decided to sound trashy and call that particular color "Tramp." So we called Aura Lee's car Tramp. And my car became O'lean (you know that stuff that's in the lowfat chips that can cause intestinal distress, also known as Olestra?). Say the names of the two cars together and you'll understand why we picked O'lean.

I had many good times with that Taurus - it made it over 100,000 miles somehow. I think I was driving it on the Perimeter in Atlanta at the time, so I couldn't pull over to take a picture unless I wanted the car to get smashed and never go any further past 100,000. I also drove my dad's 1991 Taurus over 100,000 sometime before mine made it that far. For some reason, I was driving his Taurus on the loop in Athens on the exit for Epps Bridge Road when it happened; maybe I was driving my dad's Taurus because my Taurus was getting new tires or something??  My boyfriend and our friend who were with me in the car were thoroughly unimpressed over my extreme excitement of being the one to drive it over the 100,000 mile mark.  And the third Taurus has beaten the odds as well and made it to well over 100,000... it's the only one that I didn't drive as it turned over to 00,000. You see, Ford never really expected these cars to make it this many miles, so they only put a maximum of 99,999 on the odometer. So it looked like our first two Tauri had very few miles on them in the late 1990s.

So, here's how my car finally bit the dust... I had just gotten married less than a month before, and I was driving to work, which was 30 minutes from my home. The car stalled at the first of three lights that I had to go through. I managed to get it to start again. It stalled at the second light, and once again, I got it to start, even though I saw that the temperature gauge was reading pretty hot. I just wasn't interested in being stranded at 7:15 in the morning. At the final light, one mile from the school where I worked, it gave up. I was fortunate that a police officer noticed me and helped to push the car over to the shoulder of the road. We called a local shop there, and they towed it and replaced the termometer and some other pointless repairs. As I drove it home the next day, it started overheating again, but didn't stall. Very soon after, it just died. We figured it was a blown head gasket, which you don't bother repairing on a car that's only worth maybe $1000.

But wait - the Taurus had potential life in it yet! My husband works with a charity organization that needed a car for their foster kids to drive. They'd wrecked their Taurus wagon, and the body damage wasn't worth fixing. But they had a great engine! So we had the car towed to them in Alabama and they had the engine put in it. My Taurus had a second chance!

My Taurus even returned to me one magical night. My husband had to go to this foster home in Alabama to deliver some stuff, and the U-Haul broke down and he was stranded. Seeing as U-Haul has crappy customer service, he didn't want to wait around for 12 hours for them to come up with a solution. So the Taurus was loaned to him! I was so excited to see my old buddy, but I didn't drive it. I looked it over carefully though, to make sure they were taking care of it. My husband had to return it a couple days later.

Sadly, I later learned that one of the kids had driven it off the road and between two trees. I got to see the photos of it. But that was the final straw for the old Taurus. It was gone for good this time.

My Roomie

Aura Lee was my roommate for three of our four years in college. Sharing living space with somebody can be a challenge, but Aura Lee and I did quite well together. I began my freshman year with the Roommate from Hell - she was a smoker and had lied about it on her application (because she didn't want her parents to know, she said), she was a complete slob, she put empty beer bottles in our trash can (dry campus - hello!), and she had about six different guys in her bed and never changed the sheets all semester long (I know, TMI). Oh, and she enjoyed taking phone calls at 3 am and refused to leave the room even though it was a cordless phone... how inconsiderate was I to ask her to get out of her warm bed and sit in the hall to talk on the phone!
Anyway, I was lucky enough to escape her and find another roommate for the next half of the year. I was sad to move away from Aura Lee (she lived right across the hall), but I was glad to get rid of The Evil One. I ended up finding somebody who actually wanted to move in with her, so we traded for the rest of the year. I got a nice, clean, quiet roommate who left on weekends (giving me the room to myself) in return. It was a good deal. So I thought I might stick with this roommate for the next year, too, because Aura Lee and her current roommate had talked about rooming together the following year. But suddenly one day, Aura Lee's roommate had another girl over in their room, and right in front of Aura Lee, they started talking about how they wanted to arrange the furniture in their dorm room the next year. So Aura Lee thought, "Okay, I guess we're not rooming together next year after all." I guess my evil roommate had rubbed off on her through the walls or something. Or maybe the doorbell that the girls next door had installed in their room drove her to insanity. Who knows. She just had some issues. Did I mention we were also friends with a pathological liar that year? Yep, we attracted strange people our first year of college. Luckily, we stuck together in the following years.
So Aura Lee and I roomed together in two different rooms on the first floor of the building over the next three years. The first room (where we lived for two years) was right across from the kitchen and the RA office - big mistake. RAs are supposed to make sure that nobody breaks the dorm rules (from big things like the beer bottles in my former room to somebody leaving a curling iron plugged in since it might spontaneously turn itself on and catch the building on fire - this was the only rule I was ever caught breaking, which is a very good thing for me), so you'd think the RAs wouldn't be problematic to live near. We also lived next door to the head RA of our whole building. But most of our RAs liked to disregard the rules about being considerate of other people living around them. I think they were all deaf in one ear, because the TV in their office was always turned up so that you could hear it clearly while taking a shower in the next dorm over. They also talked loudly, so as to make themselves heard over the TV. And they liked to be friends with every RA on campus and invite them all over at once. I don't know who was on duty in the other dorms ever, because they were always all in our dorm. Especially annoying was Bike Boy, who was extra-loud and for some reason brought his bicycle into the dorm with him. I think it was actually an extension of his arm or something, because I never saw him without it. Sometimes other people would use the kitchen in the dorm, and they were loud, but when the RAs used the kitchen, they were even louder than in their office somehow. I guess because the room echoed. To top it all off, we lived next door to a girl named Thunder (at least that's what was written on her message board attached to her door). Maybe she had this name because of how loud she was. Her loudness must have caused her premature hearing loss (or maybe it was the RAs that caused it, as she lived directly across from their office), because her answering machine was turned up loud enough for us to hear it clearly through the wall. And her friends always called her in the middle of the night. And she never woke up to answer the phone due to her apparent deafness. But we'd wake up and listen to some of the longest messages ever left in the history of answering machines. At first we thought maybe she wasn't home those nights, but then we noticed that we'd see her coming out of her room the next morning, still looking mostly asleep.
Boy, I'm getting sidetracked. Anyways, we moved out of that room and into a nice, peaceful one for our senior year. It was at the very end of a hallway, so the only loudness we experienced was the occassional group of people coming in through the outside door. We lived next to a quiet RA this time. We actually woke her up once, not by being loud, but intentionally. See, there was this loud banging noise coming from the basement one evening, and we went down to investigate. We found water leaking out from under a door that led to the unfinished section of the basement (the place where we'd go and sit on mounds of dirt when there were tornado warnings during our freshman year)... and this wasn't just a little puddle. It was like a small duck pond at this point. So we figured a pipe had burst, and we went to report it to the RA, who said, "Oh, I wondered what that loud banging was..." Not that it was her job to check out suspicious things such as that, but anyway...
Aura Lee and I had lots of fun sharing our living space over these years, despite the problems of dorm life described above. Here are some good memories:

• Fridays were our favorite days. There were several reasons, the most obvious being that it began the weekend. Also, we loved to go out to eat and would look forward to it all week. We'd decide on a place and then go there either Friday or Saturday night. Among our favorites were Los Portales, Cracker Barrel, and Restaurant. In fact, this photo of us was taken outside Cracker Barrel in one of the double rocking chairs. Oh, and another great thing about this day of theweek: "We don't bathe on Fridays, we don't bathe on Fridays!" (Insert annoying music in your head here)
• Our many chants and sayings included the following: "Kafra's in diorite!" (repeat over and over, chanting, woth a brief pause after the word "in"); "I'm... normal!"; hissing at things/people who irritated us; and of course, the "we don't bathe" song.
• One of my favorite memories of Aura Lee's phone conversations with her mother: She was in her dorm room and her mother called, and while talking, a "private" topic came up. Aura Lee's mom began to whisper. "Aura Lee? are you alone right now?" she whispered. "Yes," answered Aura Lee (I must've been in class or something). "Why are we whispering?" Her mother whispered, "Well, I wanted to ask you if you needed any more... TAMPONS. Because I just bought a big box if you do." Aura Lee at this point said, "Mom, nobody else is there with you, are they? So why are you whispering?" Apparently it was too private to speak out loud even with nobody around to hear. I'm sure she'd be appalled if she knew this was on the Internet!!!
• Our many kitchen experiences: other people in the dorm must've thought we were little Martha Stewarts or something because we cooked a nice dinner in the dorm kitchen at least every one or two weeks. Some of our favorites were quiche with Aura Lee's mom's yummy homemade crust, taco cassarole, and of course, snacks that were not heathly such as sausage balls and cookies. We also had an annual tradition of baking a cake for Phil using the special Phil's Birthday Cake Pans (this is why they were purchased and it was basically their only function throughout college. Oh, except once I baked pumpkin bread in one of them and it got moldy because I made it with real, fresh pumpkin and didn't eat it fast enough.), and one year we burned it somehow (see more on this in the "JOSTA!" post).
• We'd watch Days of Our Lives some evenings, which I'd tape record. We made fun of how stupid Austin was and how lame the whole plot was in general. Aura Lee really liked Kate, for some reason. But taping it was the way to go: we could fast-forward through the commercials and boring parts.
• We would always read the campus newspaper as soon as it came out to see what was for dinner all week in the dining hall. Our ultimate favorites were quiche (sometimes spelled "keesh" by the dumb food service staff), taco salad, ... and that's about it. Chicken tenders were decent, and creamed chicken over puff pastry... but luckily, they had a waffle maker and sandwich line to satisfyus on all the days of nasty entrees. Quiche was by far the highlight of our dining hall experience. They'd always look at us funny when we'd ask for three pieces.
• Our favorite store in the local mall was B. Moss. Whenever they'd have a 40% off sale, we'd get a call on our phone about it. That was always lots of fun. Unfortunately, B. Moss closed in that mall recently :(
• One interesting thing we saw one day in the dorm bathroom was a mesage written on the mirror with a dry-erase marker. Another student had written it. It said: "Please do not urinate or blow your nose in the showers - it is NASTY!" We thought this was weird, because honestly, how would anyone even know if somebody peed in the shower? Does the cleaning staff have video cameras, or secret spies who watch people taking showers? I mean, I understand how you'd know that somebody was blowing their nose in the shower because you'd hear them, but you wouldn't hear peeing over the sound of the water running. Aura Lee made the comment that it's probably more sanitary to blow your nose in the shower, because you're getting soap and shampoo all over your hands, thus cleaning them, whereas most people don't normally wash their hands after blowing their noses. Anyway, we wore shower shoes (flip flops) for a reason.
  

Well, I could continue on and on, but then we'd have a book here instead of just a post. So all that to say that Aura Lee and I have lots of strange college memories!

Random Road Trips

I have always loved roadtrips. I was never one of those "are we there yet?" kids. Entertaining myself was quite easy once I could read and write. Playing the alphabet game, finding lisence plates from other states, and just playing with my brothers was all the entertainment I needed.

On trips to Florida, I would locate "landmarks" along the way and write down what exits they were located near. Then I'd search for them on return trips to Florida. This led to my recording of all the establishments at each exit: restaurants, gas stations, and hotels. Then, on a return trip, I could easily look at my notes and try to convince my parents where we should stop for lunch. For example, if I wanted to eat at Arby's, I could say, "Are we going to stop for lunch soon? There's an Arby's coming up at exit 33, and there's also a Texaco, Shell, and BP where we can fill up the gas tank." I guess I just liked to be able to plan ahead like this.

As I got older and was able to drive, I enjoyed taking road trips myself. It was really my senior year in high school when my parents let me take true trips with friends (not overnight or anything, though - my parents were still responsible and didn't let me just go off roaming the stste randomly for days at a time anywhere I wanted!). I often drove to my best friend's house, which was 45 minutes away (yes, metro Atlanta is a big place), which was like taking a road trip. The two of us had gone on some road trips with her mother as well: Washington DC; Spartanburg, SC; Cave City, KY.

But back to my own road trips with no adults: we went to places that were about an hour or so from Atlanta. Twice, friends and I drove to Pendergrass, GA to go to the big antique mall. That was an all-day event. We'd go and have a picnic lunch along the way at a rest area, and then we'd walk around the antique mall, and then we'd eat dinner or just a latesnack at the Waffle House there, or at Katherine's Kitchen (a WH wannabee). I also went to Alabama once with my fiend, Alison, on December 31 to buy fireworks for New Year's Eve. And we stopped at a Waffle House along the way (see the post "Good Food Fast" for more on this obsession that is becoming evident in this post). Unfortunately, I was feeling pretty sick on the way back home, and that evening I had a fever of 103 degrees... and so did one of my brothers. But we made ourselves stay up until midnight even though we felt like crap, because we were entering the year 2000 and wanted to make sure that none of the Y2K stuff would cause the world to come to an end. Anyway, that was a random tangent, and I apologize...

In college, the random trips continued. We again drove to Alabama to buy fireworks, although this time it was only a 30 minute trip. Some other places I went during my freshman year were Royston, Macon, Dublin, and Savannah (the last two were both for St. Patrick's Day parades, the two largest ones in the state). Royston is the home of baseball great Ty Cobb. Other than that, it is a pretty pointless place to go, unless you want to buy groceries at Dill's Food City or take a photo of your boyfriend standing on the shopping cart return in the parking lot, ha ha.  That would have been one of those road trips where the trip was the whole experience, rather than the destination.  When in Macon, the annual Cherry Blossom festival was going on. We saw something pretty disturbing as part of the festival: old people on parade. There were old people dressed up for spring in their wheelchairs. One lady was dressed as the Easter bunny, for example, and one old man had pink flowers all over his wheelchair, and the funniest one: there was one wheelchair with a big, pink box with the words "Holy Bible" painted on it... and the old lady was sitting inside the box. she had a little airhole cut in the back, but she couldn't see where she was going and was probably very confused. I got a photo of some of them, but unfortunately not the lady inside the Bible.  Anyway, they called it "The Parade of Wheels" or something that sounded dignified, but I really think it was old people abuse. These are not your pets, people, to dress up and parade around town! Just because they are senile and will let you do this to them does not make it right. Sorry, another tangent...

Other college road trips include the one I took with my friend, Lisa, across North Georgia. Our goal was to go to Toccoa Falls and then Terrora Campground in Rabun County, with stops in Dahlonega and Cleveland along the way. We ended up in some scary, free campground at the bottom of a hydroelectric dam, and then decided to just go camp in somebody's backyard instead. It was okay; Lisa knew the people and her brother (who was with us) remembered how to get to their house. Nobody was home, but we pitched the tent anyways. And then they came home. And they probably thought we were freaks. But they let us sleep in their yard. This was probably the only road trip that was overnight.

I even dragged my husband on a random road trip before we were married. We were visiting his parents in TN, and we decided to drive to cave City, KY, where we'd both been before. But we took the scenic route, Hwy 31W, and saw a few Rock City Barns along the way, which I think are cool. We drove around Cave City, looking at the lame tourist attractions, and I think we stopped to ride the alpine slides. And then we got hot fudge sundaes at dairy Queen - I LOVE those! When we arrived back to his parents' town, we of course went to Waffle House for dinner.

I guess that this love of road trips was good from a financial point of view. I could've been wasting money on more expensive forms of entertainment. But this was when gas was cheaper - around a dollar a gallon. There was even one gas station on Hwy. 314 that cost about 75 cents a few times when I stopped there in early 1998! It was a good thing that gas was so cheap when I had this love of random road trips. If gas is ever that cheap again, I may have to drive Route 66 - the ultimate road trip!

The Pool Room

I wrote this description of the pool room in early 2000 for a college class. Unused for the most part due to all the kids being mostly grown up, the storage has overtaken it (at last count, 13 laundry baskets full of stuff, my brother's seats from his Camero, a painting I did in college, various mattresses, and lots of clothing). Here it is - the story of the pool room.

My family has a large room in our basement that we affectionately refer to as “the pool room.” This is because we have a pool table in there, which was in the house when my parents bought it some 23 years ago. My brothers and I have had many adventures in this room throughout our lives. Some of them have gotten us into severe trouble with our parents, and others are just kind of bizarre.

I suppose I should start off by describing the room. It is an extremely peculiar room or, at least it was, before my mother decided that its hideousness had to be remodeled into normalcy. First off, I want you to keep in mind that this room is in the basement, meaning there are other floors above it. I say this because the ceiling is, or was, paneled with Styrofoam. Upon describing this, I have had many responses of, “But doesn’t it leak in there when it rains?” To these remarks I simply restate the words “basement” and “paneled.” I then go on to explain that the walls of the pool room are paneled with bamboo, and no, the wind doesn’t blow through the cracks because there are cinder blocks between the bamboo and the outside, thus I again use the word “paneled.” I suppose this is confusing to people because bamboo and Styrofoam are not exactly what you would call home décor. So, I imagine that already you have a strange picture in your mind of what my basement looked like. It gets worse.

There is a bar in the pool room as well. Behind it, the wall used to be covered in mirrors. There were also ends of two barrels sticking out of the mirrored area, and attached to each was a weird, wooden, African-looking mask thing. It was some pretty horrid decorating, but since it had all been there when my parents first moved in, I grew up with it and thought it was pretty normal.

I spent a lot of time in the pool room, since it was like a playroom to my brothers and me. But around the time I was six years old, the tacky paneling and the presence of the pool sticks created too much temptation for my younger brother Stephen and me. It’s not that we were bad kids; we just didn’t think before acting. So each of us began jumping, armed with a pool stick pointed straight into the air. The sound of the pool sticks poking into the Styrofoam ceiling was very satisfying, and the bits of foam that began drifting down out of the holes seemed like snow to us. So we continued jumping and poking, until the ceiling was rather full of holes the size of pool stick tips. Stephen and I were having a blast, until our parents discovered what we had done.

The ceiling remained this way until we refinished the basement ten or more years later. In the meantime, it provided a conversation piece and an opportunity to get into more trouble. Paige, our neighborhood friend, was a great trouble-getter-into-er. She thought it was cool to make some of the holes above the pool table a little larger so that pool balls could fit inside. We had a few big holes that we could roll the pool balls between, like a giant pinball machine in the ceiling. The holes were pretty close together, all being above the pool table so that we could stand on it to reach the ceiling.

Did I mention that we lost one of our pool balls for a long time? For years, the whereabouts of the fifteen ball was the biggest mystery of the pool room. I was convinced that it had rolled behind the ugly green piano (also left in the house when my parents first moved in), a place we couldn’t look because of the impossibility of moving the massive piece of furniture. By the way, this is the piano in which Paige managed to get stuck while playing Hide and Seek. But I’m not here to tell Paige stories, so you can ask me about that later.

Remember how I said that we refinished the pool room? My dad bought some dry wall from Home Depot and brought it home to re-panel the walls and ceiling. I wasn’t too happy about the destruction of my childhood playroom, but my mother was determined to have the basement look un-seventies. So my father pulled all of the bamboo paneling off the walls, and then he started on the Styrofoam. As he removed one of the panels above the pool table, he heard a strange rolling sound followed by a loud clunk as the pool ball that had narrowly missed his head hit the floor behind him. Now, by this time we had stopped hanging out with Paige, but she had still almost managed to give my dad a concussion ten years later.

Those are a few of the funnier memories of the pool room. There are many more things that happened there: It was the site of Stephen’s model train set, where we played a game called “Chris and Emily” with Froster the polar bear. It was where Paige’s sister Holly got stuck in our laundry chute. Also located in the pool room was the old refrigerator that began to make poodle-like barking noises right before it died. And I won’t ever forget the half-missing ceiling panel from where my cat fell through the Styrofoam and landed in the Barbie swimming pool (which was being used by the My Little Ponies). And my brothers and I never tired of building dark haunted houses that went throughout the entire room. The pool room is the place where many of my childhood memories were made.