Flashback Friday #12: Mad Libs

Take a trip back in time with me every Friday. Continue your journey over at Christopher and Tia's.

Today's flashback takes us into the land of speculation regarding the past of our house (and it's previous owners ). Last weekend, while we were exploring our options for installing an outlet for our TV, we ventured into the crawl space. Where we found child sized crutches.



And empty beer cans.



Tiny Tim, the lush? Construction and dress up? A secret child on crutches ala the wife in Jane Eyre? Only one thing is sure. No matter how you fill in the blanks, it's weird.

Flashback Friday # 11: Pondering

Take a trip back in time with me every Friday. Continue your journey over at Christopher and Tia's.



At some point while we were dating, the baby pictures came out. The hubby had wandered off somewhere and his grandmother was showing me her photo albums. That is when I first saw this picture of my love which quickly became one of my favorites (in the same way that the infamous Bow Picture is).

It's not just the fact that the wee would-be electrical engineer managed to discover this cord at the bottom of a basket, pull it out, and then sit and ponder it, that gets me. It's the look of intense concentration. He is completely focused on figuring out this strange thing. And he still does that. He still gets that same look when he the wheels are turning. I love the way those little habits and things that make us uniquely us are often things that have been with us our whole lives.

Flashback Friday #10: A Bow on Her Head

Take a trip back in time with me every Friday. Continue your journey over at Christopher and Tia's.



This is one of my favorite baby pictures of myself. I made my mom dig it out every time we had to do one of those "Look how I've grown!" photo montages. So when we were looking at photos to use for the wedding, it naturally made the short list. Which is why it is one of the few baby pictures of myself that I have in digital form. And seriously? I was an adorable baby.

And though I'm not sure what's up with the frilly purple jumper, I think the bow really adds a touch of class. It certainly marks me as being with the right parents. We are, apparently, people who put bows on our heads.

Flashback Friday # 9

Take a trip back in time with me every Friday. Continue your journey over at Christopher and Tia's.



Once I picked up quilting, it took me about 2 nanoseconds to decide to make a quilt for my husband. We had gone shopping and he'd picked out fabrics in a variety of colors and then...it sat. I wasn't sure what pattern to use. At the time, I was working on my college campus in the engineering department. A couple of the women in the office also quilted and brought in quilting magazines for me to read. That's when I found "it", the pattern that was meant to be.

You see, my hubby grew up with out any pets (due to his parent's allergies) but when he was a very little boy he "adopted" a turtle that lived under a bush in their backyard. He was heartbroken when they had to move and the turtle couldn't come with them. That turtle was the inspiration for the pair of turtle pillows I made him and seeing this pattern, it was too much to resist.

Flashback Friday # 8

Take a trip back in time with me every Friday. Continue your journey over at Christopher and Tia's.



When the hubby and I announced our engagement it took approximately .05 seconds for my soon to be aunt-in-law to volunteer her services. I had never met her or really thought about the fact that she was a florist. About six months later, we flew out to Arizona where I met her, her daughter, and my hubby's grandmother. We spent the time looking at flowers and photos and deciding what we might want. She sent me home with a gorgeous bouquet as "practice".

For the wedding, she and her daughter drove out from Arizona, hit up the local flower market (a 3 am type adventure) and spent all night creating, arranging, and generally outdoing themselves on floral arrangements. And as much as I adored the centerpieces, the moss letters shaped into our initials, and my bouquet...what really amazed and astounded me was the gorgeous display they created on our sweetheart table. Layered under a panel of glass were letters we had bought as decor, fresh strawberries, glass stones, electric candles, and wire. And it was breathtaking.

One of my favorite wedding memories is sitting on the edge of the riser our table was on, the cleaning crew tearing down around us, talking with a few of our closest friends, eating the strawberries off the table.

And today, those same letters have a place of honor on the shelves of our rec room. A reminder of family, generosity, and friendship.

Flashback Friday # 7

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Today marks four years of marriage for my hubby and I, which means we have been together for (almost exactly) eight years. It doesn't seem so very long ago that we got our start but the things we've achieved together tell a different tale. We've finished our undergrad degrees, become Engineers in Training, moved to LA, got married, completed our masters (me in Product Development Engineering, him in Electrical Engineering), moved across the country, started work, adopted cats, bought a car, bought a house...and suddenly we're closer to 30 than 20. I don't quite know how it happened so fast, but I do know that we've had way more good times than bad. And as long as we have each other, there is nothing we can't do.

The photo above is the very first photo we ever took together. We had been dating only a week, and yes, it was film.

Flashback Friday # 6

Take a trip back in time with me every Friday. Continue your journey over at Christopher and Tia's.



2005 was the final year of my undergraduate education. As a capstone course for my degree, I was required to take on a senior design project and for the first six months of the year we lived and breathed that project. "We" being myself and three other of my fellow students. Some I was friends with before, others I became friends with somewhere during the long hours in the lab and the shop, the hours of discussion, the endless writing and rehearsing. For our project we chose to build an educational kit to teach the history and science of historical siege engines to junior high kids. We chose to make a kit that could build either a trebuchet or an onager. We did calcuations to determine what the expected distance would be, build up prototypes, did testing, wrote up assembly instructions, laid out our thoughts on marketing, and generally treated this as though we could walk out the door and pitch the idea to someone. We opted not to, but we were clearly onto something because my the next year Think Geek was selling something very similar. Of course, my heart will always be with ours.

Flashback Friday # 5

Take a trip back in time with me every Friday. Continue your journey over at Christopher and Tia's.



The summer I turned 14, I was on a mission...a mission to get a dog. My parents had had dogs before they had kids and they had passed away several years before. Plus, the December before, we had just moved to a new house. Clearly we needed a dog.

I don't remember where I first saw her, if we went to the pound or if we ran into one of those SPCA booths they like to set up at pet supply shops. But she stole my heart at first sight and I was over the moon when we brought her home.

I remember discussing with my Dad that I didn't know what we should name her. It was late, and we were locking up the house as we talked. In the quiet darkness, our discussion seemed to carry more weight. He suggested Waffle (because of her golden color) and Cinderella (because we had rescued her). After more days of thought I went with Waffle.

I was madly in love with her and she clearly knew she was my dog. We spent hours cuddled up, inside or out, playing fetch, or just being. But it was a scary place, because she was not a healthy puppy. The mange was the least of it.

That was the summer I had a scheduled week long trip away with my girl scout troop--my first such adventure. My parents convinced me to go, despite her health, and I spent a good portion of the trip worried about her. When I came back, she barked and barked when she saw me. She no longer remembered me.

We spent some time getting reacquainted, but she continued to get sicker and sicker. I was too young to really understand, despite my parent's gentle suggestions that she really might not get better. She simply had to, I loved her too much.

A month after bringing her home, we had to put her down. I sat with her, bawling, as the vet tech administered the shot.

I only have a handful of photos and a few weeks of memories but Waffle still holds a special place in my heart. She was my first dog, and remains the only dog that was ever "my" dog.

Flashback Friday # 4

Take a trip back in time with me every Friday. Continue your journey over at Christopher and Tia's.



Despite a deep love for music, I am not a concert junkie. They are too loud. Run too late. Have too many people, too much booze and smoke. Just not my style. I like to hear my music--not the fans--so audiophiles can say what they like about how CD production desecrates music, I still prefer my CD player and a sunny afternoon to your typical concert.

Every so often though, I get a wild hair. I will hear that someone I adore is coming to town and decide that we must go. And so it was in early 2005 when the not-yet-the-hubby and a good friend of ours loaded up to go see Bowling for Soup in Sacramento. It was a small club, a late show, and an odd crowd. Bowling for Soup's 1985 was wildly popular on the radio stations just then so there were mothers with their young (~10 or so) children in addition to the more expected college kid crowd. There were several opening acts, and with each one the schedule slipped more. Bowling for Soup was deliberately holding out on playing the song, since they knew it was getting late and people would leave. Several of the mothers eventually gave up and took their exhausted, disappointed kids home.

The live show was fun, but Bowling for Soup was raunchier than I expected given their music (and the fact that there were kids in the crowd). Instead, I was won over completely by American Hi Fi who was one of the opening acts. We picked up their new cd, when it came out a few months later, mostly (in my book) for the single The Geeks Get the Girls and their gentlemanly manners.

After the show, we stuck around to have them sign a poster they were handing out. While talking to them, the guys were quite taken with my husband's Strongbad hoodie, even calling over another guy to come look at it. It was a genuine moment of humanity from the famous. The kind of connection that makes you want to hang out and get to know them better.

Flashback Friday # 3

Take a trip back in time with me every Friday. Continue your journey over at Christopher and Tia's.



Digging through our artwork, sorting out what needs to be framed and what needs to go, I found this. I'm not entirely sure why we've hung onto it for so long but it's a poster that the hubby and I collaborated on in college. We enrolled in an entry level communications class together since I was required for our degrees (Apparently our university had been getting feedback that engineers couldn't communicate well. What? Really? What a shock.). The class was awful. It was so basic as to be completely boring and the instructor (knowing pretty much everyone was there only because they were required to be) had dumbed down projects ridiculously for a college class.

This project, for example. We each had to read a book, find examples of some of the communication concepts we had discussed in class, make a poster, and present it to our discussion group. I remember doing that for book reports in elementary school! Luckily, we also took an upper division communications class which, while covering much of the same material, was intelligent, thoughtful, and completely worthwhile.

Flashback Friday # 2

Take a trip back in time with me every Friday. Continue your journey over at Christopher and Tia's.



Back in the summer of 2007, I hearted a fabulous new to Etsy artist Tim Chumley. A short time later, he convo'd me asking for shop advice. I wrote him a novel and in return he offered me some prints from his shop. He said pick 2-3, so I sent him my top three choices. In return, he sent me four prints. I was absolutely floored by his generosity and kindness I even blogged about it at the time. The prints have sat, carefully tucked away, for the last two years. We had no good place to hang them in the rental house. But when the hubby and I were sorting through art a few weeks ago, we found the perfect place for them in the kitchen. Four frames and a few nails later and they are up and hung. I love having them up and out. Not only because they are beautiful, bright, and full of life. But because they are a constant reminder of the generosity of strangers. A reminder to be open and kind. To send out good into this world. And it makes for a heck of a story. : )

Flashback Friday # 1

Take a trip back in time with me every Friday. Continue your journey over at Christopher and Tia's.

Over on her blog Elegant Snobbery Marissa has joined in on Flashback Friday. And it looks like fun! I've been thinking about jumping in for awhile now but today I finally found the perfect excuse. I accidentally left my camera's memory card at work (oops!) and when I went to take pictures on the camera's built in memory, I discovered it was full! Of pictures taken when I first received the camera for Christmas nearly two years ago.

Here's the requisite family shot.


It's funny how the changes show up mostly in the hair--my baby brother (on the far left) has cut his hair, my mom's is much "blonder" than it used to be, and my dad has since shaved his head and beard (keeping only a mustache and goatee (which he now dyes). I've also made serious progress in revamping my wardrobe. At the time, that was a cute outfit--walking shoes instead of sneakers and a fairly new (only 2 years old) hoodie.

This photo cracks me up:


This is my brother, one of his oldest friends, and my hubby. I have no idea where we were driving to but it is so them. My brother going "what are you doing?", Mikey trying to thug it up, and my hubby, happy to go along with my picture taking antics.

And this one is pretty priceless too. My "why in the heck are you taking pictures of me first thing in the morning? And isn't that MY new camera?" look.



The funny thing is that if I took these pictures today, I probably wouldn't even have uploaded them. Of course, I also would have had quite a few more to choose from. (Apparently the memory standard on my camera only holds 14 pictures. 14. These people are crazy.) Still, it goes to show how much easier we often are on the us of several years ago than the us of today.