Soup Is Not A Finger Food

Hunter Safety, Sponsored by Miller Lite

WHERE I GREW UP, in Pennsylvania, game hunting was a popular activity. I come from a family of hunters. Both of my parents hunted (yes, Mom, too) - just deer, though, and mostly to retaliate against the the critters that would eat the crops we were trying to grow.

Schools were closed on the first day of Buck (hunting season - which we pronounced "hunt'n") AND the first day of Doe. This was because many students, and teachers, wanted to get out there and bag their game.  Kids would come into school wearing their hunt'n jacket, complete with the license pinned on the back.  There was at least one teacher who spent more class time than parents probably realized sharing stories of his own hunting exploits.

I remember hanging out at home on the first day of hunt'n season, waiting for the phone to start ringing. Often, my grandma would call with news from the relatives. "Johnny got a five-pointer," she'd report, or "George saw one with a huge rack, but he couldn't get a good shot." For some of my relatives, game hunting literally meant food on the dinner table.

In the weeks leading up to the start of the season, we would go "spotting" (yes, pronounced "spott'n"). We'd pile into the pickup truck, plug a super-strong spotlight into the cigarette lighter, then wait till dark and drive along the country roads, sweeping the spotlight along the fields and up towards the fence rows. I guess this was an attempt to figure out where the deer were loitering - a bit of pre-season intelligence gathering.

(Hey, don't laugh. It was the country - there wasn't much to do.)

Because hunt'n was such an integral part of the culture, our school required all students to sit through the hunter's safety curriculum, published by the state game commission. Even if you never intended to go shoot wildlife, never aspired to tramp through the woods toting a deer rifle. And look here - I just found my booklet! Guess I saved it all these years, just in case I ever needed to refer to it. Here's the cover:

 
Do you like my doodles? Some boys' notebook doodles featured sketches of the ten-point buck they hoped to shoot. But I was into drawing roses then.

Here's a glimpse of the inside (click to enlarge):

Why, it says right there that kids as young as age 12 (!) can get licensed to hunt! That's why I'm pretty sure we ran through this curriculum in 7th grade.

Look how well I did on the quiz - I correctly labeled all the parts of a rifle and a crossbow!

 
You get the idea.

All these years later, hunt'n is still very much a part of the culture in the part of the Commonwealth from whence I hail. The first day of the season is right after Thanksgiving, so as you might imagine, in the weeks just prior, hunters are busy as squirrels, cleaning their rifles and stocking up on ammo and checking their tree stands and making sure their camo and blaze orange gear still fits, and...

 
Headin' to the local bar to get their drank on. Yes, this little bar, situated on a country corner near where Soup Husband Curt grew up, which is not far from where I grew up, wants to be sure that hunters come on in and have a few beers before they head out to scale their tree stands and shoot at antlered critters. Which is interesting, because it says right there on page 15 of the hunter's education program that hunters should avoid alcohol before or during shooting.  Which should be common sense.

But wait - before you conclude that deer and beer don't mix, I want to point out two things. First? They rhyme! And second? I checked Wikipedia and deer are in the family of Cervidae, for which the adjective is cervine, all from the Latin cervus, and do you see where I'm heading? I think that sounds an awful lot like cerveza, which of course is Spanish for... BEER.

I'm just sayin'.

Preserving memories

DO YOU HAVE PHOTOS you've been carrying around for years and years because they're just... special?  I have boxes full of unorganized pictures, but for some reason, there are a few that keep floating to the top of the stack.  They're all ones of me when I was but a wee tot. I ran 'em through Picnik and here's what came out the other end:

 
That's me, with the hair all wingin' out, and I don't know whose feet those are - probably my mom's. Check out the bells on my baby shoes! The rubberband wrists! The sweet chubby cheeks! But I think the real fun in this photo is the reel-to-reel tape recorder. (Kids, ask your parents, as I don't even know where to begin.) I remember we had that contraption in the closet of our spare bedroom for years. I think there was a recording of my baby voice in there, too, but I'm sure it's long gone by now. Maybe this is a photo of my mom trying to capture my dear baby voice for posterity? Maybe she can confirm in the comments!

(In a not unrelated thought: Someone remind me to get our wedding video and all those hours of tape from when the boys were little transferred to digital storage soon.)

 
That's me, standing outside the front door of our farmhouse. We moved there when I was two years old (insert here my mom saying, "She was so cute - she used to say she was 'two years an old'!"), so judging by this photo, this would have been soon after we moved there.  While we're asking my mom stuff, someone ask her if she remembers tying a scarf on my head? And why - was it windy?

 
That's me with one of my favorite cousins, Bill. He was like three years older than me - maybe four - and we must have been on a big ole family vacation at the seashore.  And I am wearing my "babing toot" (and yes, you need to imagine my mom telling you how cute I was when I mispronounced bathing suit).

So, I guess the recurring theme here is that someone's gotta preserve all of these memories. Over forty years ago, my mom was snapping photos and trying to record my voice so she'd be able to remember what I was like when I was a baby. I'm glad I have these photos as reminders.

Typing 101

WE INTERRUPT THIS FRANTIC MORNING LOOK BACK AT THE 1980s to bring you this urgent bulletin: The QWERTY Keyboard is considered, by some, to be a (oh, it pains me to say it) relic.

So says Virginia Heffernan in the August 15, 2010 New York Times Magazine, anyway. I was browsing the magazine during my morning cup of coffee and this column reached out and smacked me upside the head.

I wasn't going to post any more about the '80s, but then I saw this article and the memories came rushing back. Anyone who took typing class in high school in that era (raise your hands - thanks - you may put them down now. You, too, CBW) remembers learning to type on the QWERTY keyboard, so-named because of the seemingly strange arrangement of the letters in the top row. I remember a typing drill where we had to say aloud, "A, S, D, F, J, K, L, Sem (for "semicolon"), Return" as we typed the letters on the middle row.

And by "type" I mean type.  "Keyboard" was still just a noun in those days, and "word processing" was something that only the kids enrolled in the business-track curriculum learned. (And by "business", they meant anyone who wasn't planning to go straight into a four-year college. Those who were were in the so-called "academic" track.)

While the business students started their typing classes in 10th grade, those of us in the academic curriculum had to take typing (I think just one semester) junior year. It was fourth period, and we entered the classroom and parked ourselves in front of IBM Selectric typewriters. (Kids, see photo above. I'd try to explain it but honestly, I haven't the patience. Go ask your parents, or Google it.) Now, the Selectrics were a more advanced beast than their typebarred predecessors, because they had a nifty typeball-thingy. (I think that's what it was called.)  Our classroom was equipped with these, and each student had his or her own type eraser - remember, the kind with the coarse eraser on one end and the stiff brush on the other? (Of course you do. It's ok, you can admit it. You're among friends here.)

Well, I loved typing, and showed immediate skill. I was fast, and accurate. I could sense then that the typing teacher kinda resented my typing ability, maybe because I outpaced some of his business-track students.

One of my favorite stories from typing class: As I said, I was fast, and I would whip through the drills with time to spare. I sat next to Tim, who was only trying to pass the class.  I don't recall if he asked or I offered, but I remember on more than one occasion, finishing my own exercise, then typing his, too. He would sit there and fake-type, grinning like an idiot, and I would type his (including an error or two, for authenticity), then he would hand it in. As far as I know, the teacher never caught on. (How could he? It was typed.)

Oh, and then there was the time that I completely lost my head - I finished something and was so proud of myself, I grabbed the paper from the top and yanked it out of the typewriter, which made that *sound* that you only know if you've ever typed on a typewriter. RRRRRRRRIIIIP! This was a HUGE no-no, an epic violation of the Typewriter Rules. A Cardinal Sin. The teacher pointed right at me - I was busted. He scowled, looked at the clock, looked back at me and said, "There are ten minutes left in the period. I want you to type, 'I will always use the platen release lever on my typewriter' fifty times, and don't leave until you're done. GO."

So, I did exactly as he asked, got it done by the end of the period, handed it to him on the way out the door (trying to conceal my smirk). The teacher was rendered speechless, no doubt at the thought that one of his "academic" students could have completed the punishment assignment so quickly.

While I'm at it, I will also note for the record that I took my own (correcting!) electric typewriter to college and until the middle of junior year, produced my own papers on it. I also typed papers for my less-gifted classmates for $1 per page. Beer money! I only abandoned my trusty typewriter when I was assigned a 30-page sociology paper and decided there just had to be a better way. Once I sat in front of an orange-screened gem in the computer lab, it was as if the heavens opened up, and lo, the angels burst forth in song. I was immediately hooked on WordPerfect, on working and reworking my drafts on a screen and printing them in final on those buzzy dot-matrix printers.

They stopped selling typewriter ribbons shortly thereafter.

My point is this: Although we've evolved from Selectrics and Wang Word Processors (yes, I used those in my first office jobs - shut up) to laptops and BlackBerrys, the keyboard, no matter how tiny, is still in the classic QWERTY layout. I have spent the past 26 years sending words from my brain, out through my fingertips (or in the case of my BlackBerry, my thumbs) and onto paper (and  screens).  If in my lifetime THEY decide that, henceforth, all keyboards should be in some other configuration? Well, I'll be screwed. I won't go. Like that year in college when everyone else was at the computer lab and I was still clickety-clicking away on my typewriter in my dorm room, I will cling to any QWERTY I can get my hands on. And if they should all become obsolete, I will break out my calligraphy pen and nibs and a jar of ink and a ream of parchment paper (which I should stockpile now because who knows how much longer we'll still be "writing" on "paper") and I will handwrite everything. In cursive. Which, I'm told, is also a dying art.  Because the kids nowadays will be typing everything, eventually.

So, yeah, if my class reunion didn't make me feel old, this article about the QWERTY keyboard did. Now if you'll excuse me, it's time for my Metamucil.

'Cause she's still preoccupied...

"1985" by Bowling For Soup. Loved it the first time I heard it. Seems appropriate for this week, no?

Welcome back to "1985 Week"

YOU CAN'T SAY YOU DIDN'T SEE THIS COMING! Blogger + Scanner + High School Yearbook + Chianti + Imminent 25th Class Reunion = Annotated Glory Days Photos! Ready? Let's go!

The official yearbook portrait. Classmates have been blurred to protect the innocent.

 
Danny and I were voted "Most likely to bang pots from the cafeteria with serving utensils" "Most Musical" by our classmates! Oh, and check out the boyfriend's class ring on my left hand. Yes, the back was wrapped with dental floss and coated with infinite layers of pink nail polish, to make it small enough to fit my ring finger. (What, didn't everyone do that?)

 When I wasn't tooting a horn in band, I was flinging a silk flag around for parades. (We didn't have a football team, so no giant halftime extravaganzas for us.) Oh, how I loved those marching boots with the giant, blue and gold yarn pom-poms - they made the coolest clickety-clack sound when we walked.

 
 Before there was "Glee", there was SWING CHOIR. Our repertoire included a Michael Jackson medley and a Fame! medley, complete with choreography. (I loved that sweater - it was a silk-blend in fuschia. Or maybe it was green. No, I'm pretty sure it was fuschia. I think.)

LEST YOU THINK I was not well-rounded, this photo is proof - sort of - that I engaged in athletics, too. See, the Nostalgia Train had already left the station in 1985 - we included photos from our junior high years. That's me, posing with the girls' basketball team. Those uniforms were stiff satin and we were all pretty sure that our parents had worn them when they played basketball for the same high school. 

And, bonus? The guy kicking the soccer ball is my cousin (along with six other classmates who could claim the same thing) - and that was one of the rare times that he was not sporting a cast on one of his limbs. He was That Kid who always had something broken. Oh, and one more bonus? That teacher in the lower-right corner? That was our shop teacher.  We all had to take shop. His name was Kermit. Yes, way.

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So, thanks for joining me for a trip down memory lane. You can thank me for not scanning in the inside covers, which were full of heartfelt inscriptions and wishes for happiness and success always... A.V.G.F.A. xoxo