1979 - 2000

2000-2001: Hamburg
August 2000
September 2000
October 2000
November 2000
December 2000
January 2001
February 2001
March 2001
April 2001
May 2001
June 2001
July 2001
August 2001

Current

Me, Me, and More Me

(Note: No matter what the "last modifed" date says, I haven't changed the content of this page since August 2000, when I originally wrote the page.)

All right, here we go for the pictures. Sorry if these take too long to load or are crappy quality or whatever. I didn't do it on purpose! I'm especially sorry if the formatting is horrible, or the pictures overlap, because I've taken great pains to make them perfect, but I'm not good at this yet. My technique was mostly to add enough text between the pictures that it would somehow flow around the pictures, separate them, and make the whole thing look okay, so sorry if I'm unnecessarily verbose. I had ulterior motives.

Left: Me when I was four, with a huge grin on my face. It's the best picture of me until I was about 14. Ten years of ugly school photos! *shudder*

Right: Autumn of 1994, ninth grade, the first good formal-ish picture in a long time, and the last without glasses. I had glasses by then but still looked normal without them; the next year, I tried taking a picture with them off, and it just looked wrong.

Below: My exchange-student pals and I in a little village called Baume-les-Messieurs in the Jura (France). Andi (from Indonesia) is on top, then from left to right, Karl's host father Bernard, Zach (USA - yes, the one who has the a cappella group), Daniel (Colombia), Karl (Canada), me, and Anne (the president of our region of the exchange program, AFS). It was Karl's birthday, and we had a fun day. We hiked up to a peak with a marvelous view over the valley and had a wonderful celebratory lunch, complete with champagne.
(Leanne has pointed out to me that I'm wearing shorts while other people are wearing jackets, so I must have been cold. It was April, and this is a mountainous area, so the air was still slightly crisp. However, the sun was out that day, so I was hot in the sun and cold in the shade.)

Right: My senior picture, from October 1997. I had been growing out my hair until the fall I went to France; my first host sister and her friends pressured me into cutting my hair, and I had been thinking about it anyway, so I did. They chose a style that I would never have picked for myself, but it did look good. (Yes, I know, I shouldn't have let peer pressure get the best of me. I wanted to fit in, and I wanted my family and other people to like me, so I did it.I learned my lesson too, not so much about the haircut but about life; if I had been less chameleon-like, my host family would have been able to know me better and to adapt a bit, too, but I hid myself under what I thought they wanted.) Unfortunately I don't have any pictures at all of it, because I simply didn't think to take any. I let it grow out until I came back to the USA, and then I got it cut evenly, at about shoulder level, so that's what it is in this picture.

Left: Friends dressed up for the prom. I'm not telling you which one is me, though you can probably tell. This was the occasion for yet another drastic hair-cutting experience. I had put off getting an appointment to have my hair done for prom, and I couldn't get one, so I decided to get it cut instead, to just below ear level (this cut can also be seen in the next picture, of me and Emily). It turned out well, though the stylist who cut my hair said that she had a two-hour no-show just before me, so in fact, she would have had plenty of time to fix my hair. *sigh* Well, this style went better with my dress than a fancy hairdo, anyway.

Right: Me with Emily, decked out in her clothes for my first punk concert. I was visiting her for a week in July 1998, and I lived her life. She was vegetarian, so I ate vegetarian too; we slept and did everything in each other's company. She wanted to go to this concert, so I went with her, and her parents took this picture of us in her back yard. The music (and assorted odors) at the concert were not much to my liking, but I'm glad I went, because now I can say that I've been to a punk concert before, and I don't need to go to another one. :-)

Left: This is the best, most recent picture I have of myself. It's from August of 1999, and I'm in my parents' back yard. I especially like it because I actually look relaxed, composed, and natural, unlike most other pictures, in which I tend to look fairly idiotic and unattractive. As you can see, I got my hair cut again, to avoid that annoying in-between stage (long enough to be annoying but too short to tie up out of the way).

Right: My immediate family. Clockwise, from top: my brother Ralph, my mother, me, and my father. This photo-portrait was taken a couple of months after my senior picture. Even though a lot of shots were taken, it was really hard to find one in which we all look halfway decent at the same time. This will probably be the last family photo that we four will ever have, since we are all going our various and separate ways.

Left: My grandfather (now deceased) puffed up with pride at my brother's accomplishments with Academic Decathlon in high school. Granddaddy was always proud of his children and grandchildren, and that's how I like to remember him. I never got the feeling from him that he disapproved of anything I did, and I know he was supremely proud of my going to France. So this is my favorite picture of him, rejoicing in the products of his gene pool.

Right: My darling cat, Goldie, as a new kitten way back in 1992. She's not quite as small and ingenuously cute as she used to be, but she's still beautiful, even when she tries to lean on my right arm while I'm typing this web page. She's a sweet cat who will let you do anything to her and even take pills without much hassle. She loves laundry baskets and clean laundry, so most of my clothes are wrinkled and covered with cat-hair. Interestingly, my mother said that when I was a baby, I also had a thing for clean laundry, especially diapers. Like owner, like cat, I suppose. *g*

Left and right: My hobby - Elizabethan garb. It's more comfortable than it looks, and it does amazing things for cleavage. :-)

My mother and I made this outfit during my senior year of high school, starting from the undergarments (left) and working up to the outer finery (right). By the end of school in May, the garb was mostly finished (all but the open sleeves), so I wore it to school on one of the last days of class. It was marvelous fun to see everyone fall silent and turn to watch me process down the hall, like a queen in her court. No other reaction I've gotten has ever been quite as satisfying, but I did find that at a renaissance fair it performed the same service for me as it would have for a woman wearing it in the 16th century; it made me look like I had money, so merchants paid attention to me and tried to sell me expensive accessories (it worked <g> - I bought a bodice dagger, a freshwater pearl and garnet necklace, and a fan, whereas I had only been planning on the dagger). Fancy clothes come in handy sometimes, especially at Halloween when I'm guaranteed to get the "best costume" prize (at least at the kind of parties I attend), but mostly it's just fun to play dress-up, like when I was little but even better since now I have better clothes! (cf. a certain Pratchett quote).

Left: My first dorm room at MHC - or rather, my side of it. It was a tiny room shared between two people; sophomore year I had a huge room, and my roommate moved out at the beginning of spring semester, so I had a huge room then. I guess it evens out in the end. :-)

Anyway, you can see my posters, CDs, down comforter, desk... I'm of the opinion that there's a lot to be learned from a person's room. If so, that information is severely out of date. I wish I knew what it said, though. I might learn something.

Right: Me with my "baby," Trilogy, in October 1999. For some reason I have a special affection for this grumpy old horse. He's in his mid-twenties, old for a horse, but in amazing condition. He knows all the tricks, how to scare a shy novice rider and how to undo the lock on his stall. He's a terror on the ground, but under saddle he's perfect. I don't let him intimidate me, so he behaves, which is perhaps one reason why I like him. Another is that he responds so ecstatically when I give him a massage or take him out to eat grass. I especially like him because I believe he likes me, and I'm a glutton for affection. :-)

Leanne asked for some pictures of me on horseback, but I actually don't have any. You'll have to suffer without until I do something worth photographing.

Now go read about what I did next!

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