like a rainy saturday

Given that work is dead, I thought I would proawl the interweb for entertainment. I'm getting tired of reading about the jockeying for Democratic presidential nominee already. So on a whim I decided to look at the past five years of LJ for January 20th.

January 20th, 2001 - Well. That was also a Saturday. Around 8am I was laying in the bath tub contemplating suicide. Around noon Patrick called from NEw Jersey and asked me to marry him. That afternoon I went to a party at Karen's apartment. Sam and Greg made a pot roast with so much Shiner and jalapeno that we almost died. Melynda spilled food on herself when I mentioned I was engaged. It was sunny, I remember.

January 20th, 2002 - I went to Mass, visited my mother, played with the animals. My sister was visiting her drug dealer boyfriend in jail.

January 20th, 2003 - Apparently I bought Girl Scout cookies, ate hardboiled eggs and smoked. I think this was right before I got hired by FAFDS for a couple years of night shift work.

January 20th, 2004 - I cleaned the house and made tea while Alan was sleeping. I hadn't been married very long at the time. I was depressed by the general news of the world, and took comfort in a story about a Texas man catching a 121lb catfish. I can remember what the light looked like when I had the front door open at the apartment.

January 20th, 2005 - My training at DFPS had started, and we listened to example calls. I picked up my state ID badge. It was very grey that year. In a couple weeks my life would start to go to hell, but I didn't really expect it. There are a lot of things that I did not write down during this time period.

January 20th, 2006 - I was cranky, and made some random reference to the Bene Gesserit about needing to control my emotional reactions. It was a hard week.

January 20th, 2007 - It's cold, wet and sort of wintery out there. (How strange that almost every other year it was sunny.) I'm sort of puzzled by the passage of time. This is the longest I have ever kept a steady journal/diary. Most of the ones I had before ended up lost, forgotten or destroyed. I suppose I could delete my LJ, but that's not as dramatic as say, setting a spiral notebook on fire in your driveway. (thankfully)

I've been posting a lot lately. Perhaps even excessively. I wonder if this will ever have any value some day. If someone will read it while researching some topic tangentally connected to my life. If I will have children who will find the entire thing saved on some archaic electronic storage device and wonder what it was like to live in such a deprived world as the early 21st century. It occurs to me that among the things I need to have put together with my will I will need to write down my LJ password. Only after I'm gone will anyone ever read all those private entries. What a strange thought.

google, both blessing and curse

I truly can't remember what it was like to live in a world without the internet, Google, Wikipedia and the eight billion other convenient ways to find the most trivial pieces of information. It allowed me to immediately find the name of the weird late 80's sitcom involving Snow White transported into the modern world. (Incidentally, it was The Charmings and it only ran from '87 to '88.) I can also learn the location of the Chelyabinsk Shagol airport (55°15′36″N, 061°18′0″E if you're interested however Google lacks any satellite pictures of said place.) I also learned that the principal of my elementary school in Austin is still the principal. Too weird. Though all the other teachers I remember are gone.

I lie. I actually can remember having to look things up in encyclopedias, and being jealous of a kid down the street who had a pretty recent set.

The one thing I haven't been able to figure out though is the title of this weird educational video I saw in third or fourth grade about teaching us the Dewey decimal system. It was vaguely futuristic, and I think there might have been aliens or robots involved. The kids had to solve some kind of puzzle and needed information. They had to learn the decimal system to find stuff in the library where they were hiding out. I can't remember what this was called, and most people look at me like I'm crazy when I describe it.