The magic of books

I take full credit for being the first Harry Potter fan in my family.

I borrowed Sorcerer’s Stone from a friend at school in 7th grade and fell in love.  When we visited Granddad that Christmas I randomly wandered into a room, found Chamber of Secrets lying around, and immediately started reading it.  So then we had to go buy a copy of the first one because Monica hadn’t read it yet and obviously she couldn’t start the series with the second book.  She got hooked (you’re welcome), borrowed Prisoner of Azkaban from a friend at school that spring, and let me read it too.  Then we impatiently waited for the new book to be released that summer.

Annual family vacation, summer 2000.  Hot Springs, Arkansas.  I love this picture…

…but I did NOT want to get out of the car!  Goblet of Fire‘s release date was during our vacation, I’d managed to convince Mom to buy it at a store somewhere when we stopped for other things, and I had just found out that Ron had been taken as a hostage in the Second Task!

Even worse was when I had to be dragged away at pretty much any point from the Third Task on.  That might be okay when you’ve read it before and you already know what’s going to happen, but the first time?!?  Like when we checked into a small hotel with an attached restaurant and needed to eat dinner but I was in the middle of the graveyard!  That was not a pleasant meal, haha.  As soon as I could, I escaped back to the book.  My punishment?  No swimming.  Which was perfectly fine with me because who wants to swim anyway Harry is fighting Voldemort and what’s going to happen and how in the world is he going to get out of this one?!?

The rest of the family probably thought I was crazy.  But during our 2003 summer vacation while Mom was reading Order of the Phoenix for the first time (Monica and I insisted she read the books so often that she finally gave in), she got so caught up that when she pulled herself back to the “real world” for her navigation duties she didn’t know what state we were in!

To prepare for the epic finale, we read the entire series out loud in the summer of 2007.  So much FUN!  Usually just one chapter a night, Mom and Monica and I taking turns as the narrator, pausing occasionally to discuss our theories for the seventh book.  (We were somewhere in Half-Blood Prince at the beginning of July, so Monica sped through on her own and was ready for Deathly Hallows as soon as Amazon delivered it, rejoining our nightly reading sessions after she’d finished.)  When Harry hid his potions book, I made the comment that it wouldn’t surprise me if we’d seen other Horcruxes casually thrown in like the locket had been (I felt super smart for noticing its brief appearance in Order of the Phoenix), and I specifically mentioned the “tarnished tiara” and somehow Monica managed to keep a straight face!  Once we finished Half-Blood Prince, we took a break from reading out loud and I jumped straight into Deathly Hallows.  I read it twice on my own, Mom read it after me, and then we returned to our nightly reading sessions.  We finished reading it out loud in late August, just a few days before I headed back to Vandy for the hardest semester of my life (but that’s another story).

So happy birthday, Harry Potter!  Thanks for letting me grow up with you.  And thanks for still giving me something new every time I come back.

I’d stare out at the sea

This was a very foggy day at Acadia National Park in Maine in the summer of 2004 (Dad and I took a side trip while visiting colleges).  I had no idea he’d taken this picture until I found it in his boxes of slides.  And I love it.

Standing on the shore alone.

Staring out at the water.

Waiting for answers.

Trying to see into the distance through overwhelming fog, wondering what it was hiding.

Hands in my pockets holding onto the safe and familiar, knowing very soon I’d have to jump into that fog even if I still couldn’t see where it led.

At the same time, I remember feeling safe in the midst of all the uncertainty.

“Okay, I have no idea what’s coming.  But I’m here.  And right now that’s enough.”

I’ve got a story I’d like to tell

Anyone who knows me (or has seen my car) knows I love Hanson.  But only a few people know the story of how it all started…

It was early 1997 and we’d finally gotten cable.  “MMMBop” and “Where’s the Love” had already caught my ear on the radio, but what really captured my attention was seeing the music videos on MTV and VH1.  They were just regular kids having fun!  To be completely honest, at first I wasn’t entirely sure whether they were girls or boys.  After a few viewings I decided they were really cute boys and the drummer was the cutest (I actually remember making conscious decisions on both counts).  From that point on, I was hooked.

Then October rolled around.  My 11th birthday (four days after Zac’s 12th birthday).  I couldn’t remember ever wanting anything more than I wanted the Hanson CD.  I immediately noticed that the present from my sister was the right shape, but I didn’t fully believe it until I ripped off the wrapping paper and saw Middle of Nowhere staring back at me.  THANK YOU, MONICA!

Is this what I think it is…?

YES! HANSON CD!!!

Fast-forward to Christmas.  Or, more specifically, our church Christmas party.  By that point I’d outgrown sitting on Santa’s lap, but for something this important…  True story: I asked Santa for tickets to a Hanson concert.  Without knowing if/when they were actually going on tour.

So this is kinda awkward…

…but I want tickets to a HANSON CONCERT!

But wait!  There’s more…

When Hanson announced dates for the Albertane Tour the very next summer, I was absolutely devastated that there was nothing in Texas (at least when the first dates were announced).  How would I ever get to see them if they didn’t play anywhere nearby?

Of course, we did take a family vacation every summer…  You’d think with something this important, I’d remember every single little detail, but I’m not even sure anymore whose idea it was.  I think Dad’s?  Anyway, someone looked at the tour dates and noticed one at the Nissan Pavillion in Washington, D.C. on July 2.  We did plenty of other things (visited Boston and Philadelphia, climbed the Statue of Liberty and counted the steps, spent the holiday with family who lived in the area, etc.), but we basically built our vacation around the concert.

And to an obsessed eleven-year-old girl and her thirteen-year-old sister (who was quickly pulled into the obsession too), that’s pretty much the definition of perfect.

Hanson symbol we made in the sand at Cape Cod

The rest is history.  Eighteen years, fifteen concerts, multiple meetings (including one fan club interview), and six studio albums later… Hanson is still my favorite band.  And always will be.

They’re singing happy birthday

Since this is a birthday blog project, I guess I should include some birthdays!  The majority were held at our house and involved Canadian bacon & pineapple pizza.  Highlights:

• For my fifth birthday, I had a princess party in the backyard.
• At my sixth birthday party, we drew Little Mermaid pictures in chalk on the unfinished gameroom floor (we were in the middle of adding on to the house).
• I had a sleepover for my seventh birthday!  The first of many…
• My parents went temporarily insane and let me invite all the girls in the class to my eighth birthday party.  Plus Mom took us out to the pasture to ride her horse, Chase.

5th birthday

6th birthday

7th birthday

8th birthday

8th birthday

• I didn’t have a party for my ninth birthday…
• I had my first ice cream cake for my tenth birthday!  I actually turned ten at my party.  And we made Mariah Carey music videos wearing costumes from past dance recitals.
• At my eleventh birthday party, we made our own t-shirts using a computer program and iron-on transfers.  Then we went out to the pasture to ride Mom’s horse again.  Most of us rode in the arena, but Amy was a bit more experienced and rode out in an open field.  Chase spooked, she fell off, and he stepped on her and cracked her pelvis.
• My twelfth birthday party was small.  Just me, Anita, and Ashley.  We watched Titanic and tried to count the bad words like we did at all our sleepovers that year.

10th birthday

11th birthday

12th birthday

• I have no pictures from my thirteenth or fourteenth birthdays.  Sad face.  I don’t remember much about them either, just that they were small non-sleepover parties and we played laser tag one year.
• For my fifteenth birthday I had a sleepover again.  We went bowling and rented Miss Congeniality and Josie and the Pussycats.
• My sixteenth birthday party started with two performances of the choir/theatre production of Love, Love, Love (Kate and me onstage, everyone else in the audience).  Then we went to my house for a sleepover, where I turned sixteen at midnight.  We watched The Princess Diaries and A Walk to Remember.

15th birthday

16th birthday

• For my seventeenth birthday, I had a double birthday party with Kate (because our birthdays are only a week and a half apart and we’re the same person anyway).  It was super fun, despite the fact that guy-I-was-totally-in-love-with-even-though-he-already-had-a-girlfriend actually brought his girlfriend along without asking if he could.
• Kate and I had another double party for our eighteenth birthday.  After random fun stuff at her house, we went swing dancing and got to dance with a bajillion people during the special birthday dance!

17th birthday

18th birthday

And that was my last birthday party, if such things are defined as a gathering of friends with activities including singing, blowing out candles on a cake, and opening presents.

I’ve still found ways to celebrate since then though.  Some big (Hanson concerts, Vandy Homecoming, trip to NYC that got postponed by Frankenstorm) and some small (dinner with parents, various theatre performances or rehearsals).  Not sure yet what I want to do this year, but I think I may actually put in a little effort and plan something.

Even if you’re little you can do a lot

I give you these images as proof that I was once the shortest person in my family.  Also as a brief introduction to the epic family vacations we took every summer (plenty more on those later)…

It’s time for high adventure

My counselors and me

I joined Camp Fire just before I turned five.  My sister Monica and I had gone to their summer Day Camp for a few years, and I was SO EXCITED when I was finally old enough (seven) for Resident Camp!  Monica could have gone earlier, but she waited until I could go too (claiming she didn’t want me to get jealous that she could go when I couldn’t, but really she just didn’t want to go without me).

Summer 1994.  My first overnight camp!  A whole week away from my parents!  And oh boy did I have some adventures…

I actually wrote about it at school, using one of those canned journaling prompts.  And then I copied it into my diary:

I’ll never forget the week I was at resident camp.  It was really important to me.  I learned how to swim on my back.  It’s really easy now.  I saw some rabbits.  On Thursday morning we went to a country fair!  That evening I got to be one of the hay bale queens!  It was fun!  I was cute.  I got to have freckles!*  That night we went to a dance.  Cheryl and her boyfriend Bustin** danced together.  Katherine went, “Kissie kissie,” and rubbed her fingers together.  It was funny!  On Friday morning Bustin busted into our cabin and stole Cheryl!  He woke me up!  Then he took Cheryl and guess what?  He tied her to a bed!  We were doing flag that morning and guess what?  She had to stay there during flag!  For a minute they had another counselor too.  But she got away!  Katherine and I were hoppers.  We were scared!  When Katherine, Alexis, and I went to riflery Bustin threatened to shoot us!  But we threatened to tell Mary Kay to make the horse Rusty mad.  You know why?  So he would buck Bustin!  He also kicked us out.  One day that week Cheryl got locked out.  Katherine says she kicked Bustin.  But if she did it doesn’t matter.  The first time we went to riflery we collected about a million be-bes.

*I let my counselors give me a makeover.  They braided my hair and drew freckles on my face with eyeliner.  And I really wish there was a picture…

**Cheryl was one of our counselors.  Her boyfriend was also a counselor.  His name was really Justin, but we called him “Bustin” for obvious reasons.

EDIT: I found this in my parents’ filing cabinets enclosed in a letter from Taleen, the other counselor whose name I’d forgotten!

And that was only the beginning.  I had no idea what discoveries still lay on the horizon…

I went back to Resident Camp every summer until 2001 (except 1999 when I tried a 2-week camp with a friend).  All the years blur together now and for the most part I have no clue which adventures happened when, but there were plenty:

• Visiting the “haunted” cabin Zuni at night, listening to the legend of Zuni inside the actual cabin, and getting terrified when someone started throwing rocks on the roof
• Escaping from an epic mud fight by running into the arts & crafts cabin
• Dancing with a boy for the first time (to “Are You That Somebody” by Aaliyah)
• Asking a boy to dance for the first time (to “This I Promise You” by N’Sync)
• Losing my glasses multiple times to always have them turn up miraculously by the end of the week

Then there were things that happened every year:

• Participating in awesome camp activities like swimming, canoeing, archery, riflery, horseback riding, various arts & crafts, etc.
• Singing fun camp songs with motions (maybe that’s why I started making up my own motions in music class at school…)
• Writing letters home on specially purchased Lisa Frank stationary (oh boy those would be hilarious to read now…)
• CROSSING THE SWINGING BRIDGE

THE BRIDGE (1995)

THE BRIDGE (2000)

Seriously, the bridge was one of my favorite parts of camp.  It was strategically placed at the camp’s entrance.  Like a gateway to adventure.

The trees you get to climb

Scanning old slides, I’ve been amazed at how many pictures there are of me climbing trees.  (No wonder I gave Brandy a treehouse when writing my American Girl books!)  I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves this time, so without further ado, I’d like to present…

“Baby Marthas In Trees”

I feel pretty

Jumping a few years to junior prom!  I had to do this one today, because prom that year was actually on April 17.  (Prom was open to juniors and seniors, but this was my junior year so I call it junior prom.)  This picture was taken on our way from dinner to the dance.

5 of us stuffed into the backseat of Kim’s Corsica on the way from Spaghetti Warehouse to the Hyatt – SQUISHY! (So says the caption in my high school scrapbook)

Kim is driving.  Her date took the picture.  Then there’s Sammi, me, and Suzy sitting in seats like semi-normal (semi-formal?) people, with Kate and Lisa lying across our laps.  Hey, it was less than a mile…

We’d bought my dress the previous summer (on sale at Dillards for like $30 I think) and I was super excited, as evident in my journal entry from July 11, 2003:

Oh hey, I got a prom dress!!!  It’s REALLY pretty – ankle length (longer, maybe), light green with light blue mesh on top, beads on the front, and detachable straps (but I am sooo not wearing it strapless).  I can’t believe I get to go to prom this year!  🙂

I wrote tons more about the actual event, but that would make this post way too long.  So I’ll just stick to other assorted comments scribbled in my scrapbook:

• yay for lotsa random adventures!
• no, I’ve never eaten pizza from the dumpster
• yay, we’re all so PRETTY!!!
• yay DANCING!
• cool people dance in circles!
• blow-dried eyes!
• yummy Spaghetti Warehouse
• rawr at evil straps – I ended up going strapless
• yay for pool at the Union afterward

Felt like a movie star with everyone taking pictures of us!

I can’t imagine my high school life without these girls.  They were with me during my “soap opera” year, whether that meant struggling through it side by side, contributing to the drama, watching in amusement, being there for support, or some combination of all the above.

Prom itself was relatively drama-free, thanks to a robotics competition the same weekend that kept the person responsible for most of the drama (at least in my case) from attending.  So I could just have fun with my girls without getting distracted by guy-I-was-totally-in-love-with-even-though-he-already-had-a-girlfriend…

…but that’s another post.  If I decide I feel brave enough to write it.

You’ll be forty and I’ll be nine

In today’s edition of actions-have-consequences: listen to your mom’s warnings even if you’re in the middle of a tantrum.  Otherwise, you might throw your glasses across the room one more time and get your birthday party taken away…

But even though I didn’t have a party for my ninth birthday, my parents still made it memorable.  They set up a scavenger hunt with clues all around the house, ultimately leading to a dresser drawer in Monica’s room where I found my American Girl of Today waiting for me!  (Yes, that is a Pocahontas birthday cake in the first picture.)

First clue

Another clue

Hidden treasure!

Happy Birthday!

We’d been fans of American Girl for years.  Monica got Samantha for her eighth birthday, and I got Molly for my sixth birthday a few months later.  As soon as I saw the new American Girl of Today in the catalogue, I had to have one.  I think later they were available with different hairstyles, but in the original release they all had long hair and bangs.  I did too.  So I just had to get one with brown hair and blue eyes (and add glasses) and she’d actually look like me!

I named her Brandy, after one of my heroes at River City Twirl & Dance where we’d been taking dance classes for four years.  (I don’t think I ever told Brandi I’d named a doll after her though.  Still not sure if she would’ve thought it was flattering or creepy, haha.)

She came with six blank books, which I recently rescued from our library.  The inside cover of Meet Brandy: A Family Story (Book 1) says, “Finished on Jan. 17, 1996,” and the inside cover of Brandy Learns a Lesson: A School Story (Book 2) says, “Finished on October 23, 1996.”  Rereading them now is highly entertaining.  Most of the plot details came directly from my own life, and then I gave her things I thought would be cool to have.  Like a bigger family, with an older sister AND older brother, plus younger twin sisters.  And a kitten named Snowball.  And a TREEHOUSE!

I wrote plot outlines for Happy Birthday, Brandy: A Birthday Story (Book 4) and Brandy Saves the Day: A Summer Story (Book 5), and I know I had a draft for Book 4 at least on an ancient computer.  (I’m really hoping that’s one of the computers still hiding in the pile of stuff in the gameroom, and that it’s possible to pull files from it!)  I don’t think I ever started on Brandy’s Surprise: A Holiday Story (Book 3) or Changes for Brandy: A Winter Story (Book 6).  But what better time to finish the series than now?  It’s only twenty years later…

Step one

Just feels like it’s time to create a website and watch what happens.  Stay tuned for the random ramblings and adventures of a musical-loving Catholic engineer…