We had an assembly today, honored the students who earned Academic Letter sweaters.  Since we don't have competitive sports at our school, the faculty decided to work this out so the students could "letter" in academics.  Out of a student body of 350, we honored our first 4 students.  Now, to make the assembly a little more fun, we surrounded the awarding with something from the Dance Company and our own version of the Match Game.  The basic rules (for those of you who don't remember) are that we are given a sentence with a blank in it, such as (this was one of ours) "Eric got kicked out of the department store for giving all the mannequins a _________." A panel of 6 celebrities fill in the blank and then the contestant comes up with their own answer and gets points for each celebrity answer they match.  (Answers were kept relatively clean, such as "kiss", "foot massage" and "wedgie".)

Well, I was on the celebrity panel, and the subject of one of the sentences. "Mr. Rossi is going to star in a new soap opera called The Old and the ______less."

• I came up with clueless,
• the History teacher came up with pointless,
• the English teacher came up with careless,
• the Science teacher came up with womenless,
• the Counselor came up with gutless,
• the ISS guy came up with toothless,
• and the student contestant came up with useless.

It's a good thing I didn't go into this job looking for an ego boost.

I took a little test on decorating style over at Naptime Nostalgia, and wasn't too suprised with the results. According to Sproost, my decorating style is

.

And I thought it was just Cluttered and Random.

Anyway, it was about 1979, I was working at Free Wheeler Pizza and had just bought my first brand new car.  The 1979 Mazda GLC Wagon you see below.  ($4,500 with tax & license).  Free Wheeler decided to shut down the store and have a company party at Lake Powell.  This was not an unusual thing, Free Wheeler would open 2 to 3 hours late so we could all play in the company football team up at the U.  So my best friend Ed, another worker (Kathy if I remember correctly), her dog and I packed all our stuff into my great little car and headed down.  You may or may not have heard of the Burr Trail, in '79 it was 100 miles of dirt road between Capitol Reef and Bullfrog, through an area called Waterpocket Fold.  The road  was on the map, even showed the town of Notom about 15 miles down.  I'd always  wanted to drive down Waterpocket Fold, so we decided to make a day of it and go down the dirt road rather than take the longer (distance, not time) highway route.  I had about a quarter tank of gas and planned on filling up in Notom.  We get about 20 miles down the road without any sign of Notom, stop at wash that crossed the road to determine if the car was going to make it across and take a break.  While we were stretching our legs a ranger comes from the other side, says "howdy" and we get to talking.  I was a little concerned about how deep the wash got, since I didn't have 4WD I didn't want to get stuck, but the ranger assured me the car would make it through fine.  The I ask "How much further to Notom?"  Notom, well, Notom's about 5 miles back.  "Five miles back?" I sez, "All I saw there was a clump of trees."  Yup, that's Notom.  Nice, it's just a farm, no gas station.  Well, it's 75 miles to Bullfrog and all I've got is 1/4 of a tank of gas.  I ought to turn back, go to Capitol Reef and fill up, right?  Yeah, right.  I'm 19, Ed's 19, Kathy's maybe 21.  No way we're going back.  Damn the torpedos, full speed ahead.  Now, 50 miles later we come over a little hill.  The road goes down, through the wash again and up another hill.  On the other side of the wash, on my uphill side, are three Jeep's parked at the side of the road.  The guys are out locking in the hubs, getting ready to forge this huge river when they see that overloaded Mazda come over the hill.  I could hear them chuckle.  I came to a stop, surveyed the situation, determined the wash was no deeper than the spot we went through earlier, hit the gas, come screeming down the hill, splash through the water, continue straight up the hill and over to the other side.  Laughing all the way, 'cause you should have seen their faces.  Jaws on the ground, eyes wide open in disbelief.  Yeah, I wasn't even thinking about the gas situation at that moment.  As for the gas, we did make it to Bullfrog.  Put 11.9 gallons in an 11.5 gallon tank.  Drivin' on fumes I was. 

In honor of my little brother's birthday, I chose this as the "old photo of the day". It's from the Motel West BBS days, back around 1987. He, his wife, another friend and I rented a house out in West Valley City, it became the Motel West hangout. To this day we refer to it as "HQ". Those were fun times, people coming and going at all times, like freakin' Grand Central station. Nobody bothered calling to see what was going on that night, they just showed up. One of my funniest memories from that time was when we had a water fight with the neighbor kids. The kids had the hose and some buckets or something like that outside, and the "adults" were throwing water at them from inside the house. We got soaked. They got soaked. The house got soaked. Fun times.

The last time I went to Yellowstone Park was back around 1980, in the picture is (left to right) my sister, my older brother, my oldest niece and my brother's wife.  We stayed in a campground despite bear sightings in the neighborhood, and instead of preparing a legal brief, we planned out exactly who was going to grab the child and which door of which car we all were going to get into in the event a bear showed up.  I remember we left the cars unlocked with the keys in them for a quick getaway.  My, how times have changed since then.

I'm still going through my old photo CD's, dating back to '97 (with pictures even further back), and I'm getting close to done. So, expect to see a few of them up. First up; the house. I found a great old cache of pictures of my house dating back to the mid 90's, showing pretty much the way it looked when I bought it. (If I ever find the original appraisal papers, you'll see it exactly that way). So, here's my house through the years:

The only change I had made before taking these first two was to cut down the bush in the middle of the lawn. You can see the stump in the picture, and it it still there now, just with a wagon wheel in front of it. You can, sort of, see the front porch is still just cement, you can't see how badly in need of repair it is. Because of the bush you can't tell, but there was no railing around it. These were taken sometime before 1997.