Personal

The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.

Reconnecting

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This is great.

Some time ago — back in April of ’04 — I came across an old Anchorage Press article talking about the “glory days” of the underground/punk/alternative music scene in Anchorage, from the late ’70’s up to the early ’90’s, which touched off my own post reminiscing about my days running around the local scene, from the ’90’s to the early 2000’s.

Touched off by a couple of random Google searches, over the past couple of weeks (starting in August, and really picking up steam in November), that post has become an impromptu meeting point and simple message board for quite a few of the Anchorage scenesters of the ’80’s. While I was just a few years younger and don’t know any of the people who’ve been posting, I have been having an absolute blast watching all the various comments come in as this group of old friends re-connect after twenty-odd years or so.

All I did was provide the right Google keywords and a comment form that these guys have been using to get back in touch…but it’s enough to get a grin on my face whenever I see another comment roll in.

Lots of Pictures

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I’ve spent much of the afternoon and evening continuing to work on scanning in old photos that I’ve had lying jumbled up in various boxes. Quite a few have been scanned in and uploaded to my Flickr account. They haven’t been done in any particular order — roughly chronological, but it’s been a bit hit-and-miss here and there as I come across mis-ordered sections — but to make things at least a little bit easier, I did end up creating a ‘Narcissism’ photoset that has all the pictures of me collected together and presented in chronological order.

Other bits that may be of interest to various people: Royce, who’s been in my life since fourth grade; City Lights, the first (though very short-lived) public DJ’ing gig I talked my way into; and The Lost Abbey (possibly NSFW, though not very), my first major (regular, longer than a couple months) DJ’ing gig.

More will come as I get time — I’ve only made it up to 1995, and I’ve got at least a few from ’96 and ’97, and that doesn’t even go into the three rolls from Gig’s that are sitting here too. For now, though, I need to do a little housework and get dinner in the oven before Prairie gets home and Hope and Peter show up to watch Lost.

Update: Prairie’s pointing out that when I said I needed to “get dinner in the oven”, I meant that literally — she’d actually made the dinner. I was just putting it in the oven so it would be ready in time for everyone to show up. It’s not like I’m actually cooking or anything here…. ;)

Before I was around

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Last time I went up to visit my folks in Anchorage, I snagged some old family photos. I’m (finally) starting to get some of them scanned in.

First up: four photos of my Aunt Kay. I never met Kay, as she died long before I was born. However, I’ve been told on a few occasions that she and I are very much alike. While I’m sure I’d seen pictures of her before, I didn’t remember any of them before I found these while digging through the stacks of pictures at mom and dad’s house.

From left to right: Kay sometime in 1960; Kay in a kilt sometime in 1961 (possibly at the University of Iowa, according to the handwritten note on the back of the photo); Kay and her date for Senior Prom sometime in 1961; Mom and Kay dressed up for Kay’s High School graduation in 1961.

Kay Ward Kay Ward Kay Ward, Senior Prom Berta and Kay Ward, Kay's High School Graduation

Lastly, Mom pinning Dad’s wings on after his promotion to 2nd Lieutenant in 1968.

Dad's 2nd Lieutenant Promotion

Where I’ve Been

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Where I've travelled in the world

USA, Canada, England, Germany (twice), Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia (which doesn’t exist anymore, so I had to choose Bosnia/Herzegovina), Italy, and Greece.

Where I've travelled in the US

Alaska, Arkansas, California, Washington DC, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississipi, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia.

(Some of these are “visited” in the sense of “drove through or rode through in a train”, others were when I was very young and can’t really remember. Still…in once sense or another, I’ve physically been within the borders of the state.)

Create your own visited states map or visited countries map.

Kind of sad that this is all I’ve been to, and yet that’s enough for many people to consider me “well traveled”. There’s still so much of this planet that I need to get to…I’ve barely gotten started!

Prairie’s birthday

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Birthday Bouquet, Prairie's Birthday, Seattle, WA

We had a very pleasant evening last night celebrating Prairie’s birthday. Since I worked ’til 9pm, she’d gone out to dinner with her sister H and H’s boyfriend P, and they all met me back at home after they were done. Prairie had baked herself a cake, so we all sat back and enjoyed birthday cake after she opened her presents.

H and P got her a little goodie bag filled with fun stuff, including Dirty Girl Bubble Bath and lip balm, and Atonemints. From me, she got Uno H2O (waterproof Uno cards for use by a pool) and Shel Silverstein’s last book, Runny Babbit.

More photos are right here. Yay birthdays!

Halloween Weekend

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Erk. Forgot that daylight savings time kicked in (out?) today, and got up an hour early. Meh. Could’ve had that extra hour in bed!

Hit the_vogue last night with Prairie, joined the table with gracesine, newwavegirlie, Aaron, and a couple other people that I didn’t catch the names of. So many wonderful costumes last night — all the schoolgirls in our group looked very cute, anzu looked great as a victorian schoolmarm (until she took off the coat and breasts popped everywhere…still looked very cute, just not quite as schoolmarm-ish)…while I got a laugh out of a guy who showed up dressed as a World Trade Center tower (very very wrong…but funny), Trish was wearing her Strawberry Shortcake outfit — and let me tell you, you have’t seen Strawberry Shortcake until you’ve seen her in red leather 20-eye Docs and a vinyl (satin?) corset that had her millimeters away from popping out of it.

Unfortunately, I’d neglected to bring my camera along for the night, so no pictures of the various costumes this year.

The only downside to the night was a higher than usual jerk quotient (mostly the group that invaded directly behind our table, who were loud, obnoxious, pushy, spilled drinks on newwavegirlie and gracesine, and at one point sent a cloud of horribly noxious cigar smoke across us…ick…before they were told to put it out). Prairie and I decided that we’d had all the fun we could stand around 11:20pm and came home to relax with an episode of X-Files before bed.