Surviving Your Class Reunion

First I should put in the disclaimer, if high school was a miserable experience and you would rather gouge out your eyes than see any of those assholes ever again?  Just skip on by this post.

For the rest of the population, let's talk.

Most people agree that the five and ten year gatherings are a waste.  Everyone stays in the same circles they did in high school, no significant mingling, no happy memories.  Wait until the twentieth.  Enough time will have passed  that people break out of their teenaged roles and have actually grown up.  Memories fade, names escape you, and you are available to make new friends.

Me?  I was a wallflower in a class of 500.  I knew only my very small group of friends.  Of course I knew the names of the popular kids, but I was never one of them.  At my twentieth I was surprised, no wait, ASTONISHED people knew who I was.  They remembered me.  Me?  What the hell?

Then came Facebook.  Oh buddy how this has changed the world.  People I NEVER knew in high school were becoming my online friends.  They were commenting on my woes, cheering my successes, and liking my pictures.  It was, and is, pretty cool.

This weekend was our thirtieth class reunion.  How am I even old enough for that?  Thirty years?   Since high school?  Me?

A year ago the date was set and eventually the plans came together, most of it done through the miracle of Facebook.  Word did get out to those not online.  Excitement was building, this was going to be awesome.

On Friday, twenty of us gathered at the high school for a tour.  There were no surprises for me walking through the building, I had worked there not too many years ago.  What did surprise me was this vivacious woman bounding up to our crowd, hugging EVERYONE, and introducing herself.  I found out later she had been a cheerleader.  At the mixer at a local restaurant we crowded into a party room and squealed as new faces arrived.  I was introduced to the cheerleader's circle of friends and suddenly I was having deep conversations about toilet paper.  I still felt a little stifled trying to mingle with the other clusters of people and kept returning to a safe zone.

Saturday was the official event held at a winery.  It was a gorgeous venue on a gorgeous day.  I charged up my iPhone and decided I should try to get a picture with each person.  I don't know where this inspiration came from but I rolled with it.  Once I started walking up to people saying I wanted to get a selfie with them they cheered my idea and started snapping a few of their own.  I actually did manage to walk up to every person there although my pictures didn't prove that.  I'm sure my drunk thumbs missed the button a few times.  It didn't matter.  It got me off my ass and away from my table, not that I had anything against hanging with my two best friends, but I see them all of the time.  It truly was fun and that stupid act of trying to get pictures with each person was a fabulous ice breaker.  My favorite line was from Jack who said "Hi I'm Jack, I think we graduated together."  Why, yes we did!

Afterwards we had a room reserved at a nearby bar.  The band was loud, the room was crowded... are we getting old?  Close to 100 people managed to squeeze into the tee-tiny patio, escaping the loud band inside.  More laughs, more mingling.

I have spent the last two days adding more friends to my Facebook list.  Okay, they're only acquaintances, but who cares?  We have a shared bond for having sat in the same football field on a Tuesday night early in June 1984.  There is a shared bond and maybe, just maybe a few new real friends have been discovered.

Reunions come in many shapes.  I don't have many memories to reminisce, I didn't attend grade school with any of these people, no childhood antics, so reunions have to be something else.  For me, on this round, I made new friends.

Halloween 2011

Sunday the kids gathered to carve pumpkins and eat chili.

The gnarled pumpkin is the one squirrels decided to sample while sitting on my front porch.  And then mold started to set in.

Grandma QQ with Nugget

Riding the Great Pumpkin

Intensely concentrating

 

Completed (mostly) jack-o-lanterns

Keith finished his zombie pumpkin (far left) after he got home

Reader Questions - Feb 7, 2011

Do you enjoy reading these?  If so, keep the questions rolling in!

From frequent commenter, Skippy, "Where does you sense of humor come from and why do you like to torture your readers [with pictures of spiders]"

Clearly Skippy is skeeved by spiders.  I do sympathize as there are a fair number of creepy crawlies that I do not like, but for the most part pictures of them don't throw me into hysterics.  Now butchered eyeballs?  Or any pictures of instruments coming close to eyeballs?  Just typing about it gives me the shivers.  But I wasn't INTENTIONALLY trying to torture any spider-phobic readers, they just pose well for pictures.  And the post in question was about a cave cricket - a grody mutant spider thing with long spindly grass hopper legs (THOSE SKEEVE ME OUT) and I needed to share this information.  It's important to know these things exist.  A service to my readers (you're welcome).  I will try VERY hard in the future to warn you of any impending spider picture.

As for my sense of humor, that is totally to be blamed on this guy

My dad was nothing but a giant kid.  Now when my mom says that she means it in a negative way and it was the basis of their divorce.  For me and my brothers, however, it meant nothing but smiles and jokes.  He made us blue mashed potatoes, encouraged tickle fights and frequently sat down on the floor with us as we played.  All three of us have a warped sense of humor and easily slip into giant kid mode.

He would have been proud of my penchant for practical jokes and he would have roared with laughter over the retribution I have received for doling them out.

Life can be shit and he waded through plenty of it.  If we wait for everything to be sunshine and flowers we will be very disappointed people.  Make the most of what you've got where you're at and find the humor in it.  If there is no humor to be found, make it.

Celebrating Online Friends

For the past nine years I've been hanging out on a particular messageboard of unruly women.  Much to my family's horror I've actually left town to meet up with these internet strangers.  AND HAD A FREAKING BLAST!  My favorite story is the day I drove to Chicago for lunch.  To drink margaritas with absolute strangers.  All by myself.

But here's the thing, they aren't strangers.  We email back and forth, talk on the phone and know mutual friends.  We've mourned the deaths of family members and celebrated births.  We rally around each other all the time, it's inevitable that we would meet in person at some point.  So after enough of us had met at various times and places we decided to have a Lolling At The Lake weekend. 

OH.MY.GOD!  The food was fabulous, the drinks were scrumptious, the men played along with our flirting and the music rocked.  IT WAS PERFECT! 

We dressed up with feather boas and tiaras and took over the lounge of the Arrowhead Lodge (sadly no longer open).  I'm sure they're still plucking feathers out of the woodwork with all of the boas molting with our wild-woman gyrating.

My 3D friends do not understand any of this.  They also don't get the whole blogging thing either, but whatever, I'm having fun.

My Theory About Work Days

I have a very unpredictable job as I really cannot tell you from one day to the next what I will be working on.  Such is the life of the office technology goddess.  It's rather appropriate and fits quite well with my ADD.  Most people shudder at the thought of the constant stream of interruptions but I welcome most of them, there are a few I could do without.

I've developed a theory concerning work days:

Monday - NO CLUE what I'm walking into.  Frequently I'm met at the door with some frantic emergency.  My weekly report that is due by 9am usually isn't turned in until after lunch.  My supervisors have stopped fighting it, many times because they are the source of the emergencies.

Tuesday - Mopping up Monday.   Fortunately, I'm well aware of my workload before I ever walk into the office because it's whatever I didn't finish the previous day.  Unless, of course, it's the monthly staff meeting.  I cross off all hope of accomplishing anything at all on meeting days.  That's just hopeless.  Once I realized the futility of trying to finish any project on meeting days I suddenly felt a load lift off my shoulders.

Wednesday - Catch Up.  Finally I can attack lingering projects from the previous week, spend a few minutes dangling over a cubicle to hear the latest gossip, linger over lunch.  We've been busted a few times discussing inappropriate material, usually sexual in nature, in the lunch room.  So we call it "Inappropriate Wednesday."  Invariably the day we start one of those conversations (menstruation, penis sizes, fun positions, strip clubs, stripper names...) that is the point Ned Flanders walks into the kitchen.  We try to tone it down in his presence, but we always end up saying something that makes him turn a thousand shades of red.

Thursday - Normal.  As much as "normal" could ever be used around here, there is a calmness to Thursdays.  I could never predict my projects from one week to the next, but I'm usually running reports and tending to computers with non-emergency issues.  There's a quiet rhythm that hovers over the entire office.

Friday - Crazy.  It's not crazy busy, just crazy, like lunatic insane crazy.  These are the days the CEO will burst into song, the chocolate fairy will leave gifts in the kitchen, we will stand outside catching snowflakes on our tongues, or I will cram every office plant into one cubicle.  These are fun days, ones where we laugh so hard our bellies hurt.  Not every Friday is like this, but enough of them are and they sure do make up for Monday!

So today is Tuesday and true to course, I'm mopping up yesterday, knee-deep in a project I couldn't have predicted yesterday morning.

What's work like in your world?

Teens At The Beach

As promised yesterday, I dug up some old beach pictures to inspire some warmth.

My mom and a group of her friends were hanging out at the beach (a luxury of living in Los Angeles, no?) 

It looks like a lot of fun and DEFINITELY WARM!