American in Spain

My third grade teacher, Mrs. Black, made us keep a journal throughout the entire school year. It was yet another part of my education that I absolutely despised the teacher for making me do, but that I am immensely grateful for her making me do it. As anyone who has attempted NaBloPoMo will tell you, some days you just don’t have anything to say, but darned if forcing yourself to do it doesn’t make some interesting things come out.

As an eight-year-old, school activities and cub scouts dominated my routine, and girls were clearly opponents considered to be “on the other team”. I particularly like the references to people and big events that I still remember. Many of the people mentioned are still my friends 23 years later.
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My parents are visiting, and they brought a set of photos that I haven’t seen for a very long time. They are photos that I took just before and during my high school graduation from the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics on June 1, 1996. Needless to say, it was quite a blast from the past. There’s nothing like a photo of the dorm room you lived in fourteen years ago to bring back a flood of memories. My time at NCSSM was definitely the peak of my academic career. Everything (i.e. a four-year bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from NC State) after that was a slow glide downhill.
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This year I made another “Thanksgiving Pizza”, which I choose to define as a pizza with turkey as a topping eaten on the fourth Thursday of November. My in-laws are visiting this entire week, so we had a nice dinner with family. Even Nora had some turkey today mixed in with her vegetable puree, which she dutifully ate twice the normal quantity of (I told her overeating on Thanksgiving was a requisite for her to keep her American citizenship). Other Nora news includes a third tooth, a top incisor that is making an appearance setting off a chain of events that somehow effects her bowels, setting a new record of eight movements today, one requiring an emergency bathing procedure. I would like to wish all my users a wonderful Thanksgiving, and thanks to you all for reading. Here, have some pizza.
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I had never really drunk much alcohol before going to Denmark as a naive 20-year-old. There in Scandinavia, I fell in love with the two main lagers available, Tuborg and Carlsberg. Upon returning to my homeland, now of legal drinking age, I sought them out, only to find no sign whatsoever of either brand. Once, shortly thereafter, I was on a business trip in Chicago when I entered a bar that had a neon Carlsberg sign. I rushed up to the bartender and asked if they really had Carlsberg, but he told me that hadn’t had it for a couple years and that the sign was left over from some publicity from ten years earlier. Apparently Carlsberg had stopped exporting to the US just before I’d learned of its existence.
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Nora, we’ve recorded the size of your hands and foot again in a clay keepsake. Recently my parents sent us a new shipment of clay keepsake kits. You requested that one of them be sent to your friend, Matteo, in Brussels, and we kept the other two. Since we used one when you were three months old, we thought it would be nice to do one at six, nine, and twelve months as well. Luckily the package arrived during your six month birthday party. That weekend, we sat down to knead some clay…
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I bet that, while most people remember details of the day they met their future spouse, most don’t remember the actual date. The only reason that I remember the date is that I was keeping a journal of my time in Denmark at the time. Each week I emailed my journal for the week in MS Word format to my father, who published it on the internet. It really was a web journal, or a web log, or a blog…in 1999! I still have the entire document for my trip. I’ve been considering replaying it, day by day in a modern blog, a task I really should have done this year, being exactly ten years later, but perhaps I will do it next year starting in June. Below is my entry for September 11, 1999.
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