Class of 1990 Week 13

Monday I hit my head on the desk in English class and thus spent the rest of the day into Tuesday putting up with remarks about my head banging. The volleyball team started practicing during girl’s phy-ed. That’s the problem with having so many teams and only one gym. So those of us girls who did not play on the team—about five of us met with Mrs. Barker in the weight room next to the gym and lifted weights. I generally enjoyed any phy-ed activity that did not involve running or playing on a team. Being unathletic is bad enough. Having people mad at you because you are unathletic is just cruel.

With Thanksgiving it was a short week. Wednesday was odd in that I arrived home to an empty house after school. Next Bob, Sarah’s boyfriend showed up, then Mom and Dad and finally Sarah who got a ride home from UND with Kerry. Thursday morning we had church and then Pastor Allen and his wife and newly adopted son William joined us for dinner. The week had an odd feel, sort of like Monday, Tuesday, Friday, Sunday Saturday, Saturday, Sunday. I was already anticipating missing Mom and Dad when I would head off to Concordia University Wisconsin the next year. I spent my break reading, watching TV, playing on Dad’s computer, and starting to paint the posters for the volleyball team.

REG

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Class of 1990 week 12

Most of my notes from that week are about trying to get my writing done for the Institute of Children’s Literature (ICL) course and feeling stressed about school work. On Monday we did our first lab in Physics. I was partnered with Jr. Jennifer and managed to burn my hand while fire polishing a glass tube. Terry told me that he hoped I got blisters. I attended the yearbook meeting and spent time writing body copy. Most of the week I was fed up and frustrated, but Friday I was getting a grip on things including finishing a major rewrite of my ICL story.

I finished the small drawings for the volleyball posters. Mr. Kappel approved of them. The next step would be to trace them onto a transparency and then use an overhead projector to make a poster for each member of the team, each of the student managers and one for the coach. The basketball cheerleaders did the posters for those teams, but for the volleyball team it fell to me as part of my student manager duties. Generally Peggy and I did the posters and the guy managers put up the posters on our wall in the gym. I also made smaller signs for the team member’s locker. Those were easier, because you could just run them off on the copy machine. Then it was just a matter of coloring and cutting them.

Saturday I got up before 6:00 a.m. and drove to Niagara, ND and picked up Linda then we picked up Cari and Erich and we all headed to Carrington, ND to plan a joint District Lutheran Youth Fellowship gathering with South Dakota. The gathering would be in Aberdeen, SD. It was a productive, fun, but very long day. One the way home I got a terrible headache and was in no shape to drive the all the way home so I followed Linda to her home. Once there I started feeling really sick and threw up. Oddly after that I felt much better and was able to drive home. It was weird.

REG

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Class of 1990 week 11

It was a busy school week, homework-wise. The roads were very slick on Thursday. Friday we had off of school and Mom and I went shopping in Grand Forks. I did some Christmas shopping, including gifts for Sarah and Rebecca as Sarah was going to visit Rebecca in Hong Kong for Christmas that year. I continued to procrastinate on my Institute of Children’s Literature writing assignment that was due in the middle of October. I finally started putting a draft together in the middle of the week. The week before mom had cut off three inches of my hair and nobody at school noticed. On Veterans Day I wrote, "The walls are down and the people are crossing into West Berlin."

I did a lot of work on the yearbook that week. In class I traced numerous pictures of wrapped gumballs for the page numbers. After school I attended a yearbook meetings. Margo and I worked together to write copy for the grade school classes. We had sent survey questions to the rooms, but the problem was that the larger the class, the more material you had to play with, the less copy you needed to fill the page. The smaller classes had less quotes and more space to fill. We did a lot of laughing as we tried to stretch the comments into body copy. I’d come up with lines and Margo would write them down and count the characters to see how much more we needed to write. Occasionally I’d make notes on paper and Margo would try to read them and then get frustrated by my handwriting and spelling. A lot of times brain storming involved making exaggerated hand gestures. I would put my hands on my head and then extend my arms completely saying “ummm” and then bring my hands back to my head repeating this until I finally came up with another phrase for the copy. It was completely silly.

my first NaNoWriMo

I finally did it. Encouraged by a girlfriend from Alaska I'm spending November taking a stab at fiction. I'm doing my first NaNoWriMo http://www.nanowrimo.org/. As the website says it's 30 days and nights of literary abandon. In November you try to write a 50,000 word novel draft. Revising is for December. On day #2 I'm already 11% done. That is well ahead of the daily word output of 1667 to stay on track and right now I'm feeling really good.

Part of what helps is knowing that more than 100,000 other folks around the world are doing the same thing. I met about 20 of them last Friday at a regional party at the Milwaukee Area Technical College library in Oak Creek WI. By signing up for this I also get the pep talks and these are great. My favorite quote from a recent one has this:

You will also, however, write some flagrantly nonsensical chapters, create pages and pages of dialogue that make you cry (in a bad way), and endure a few shameful days where the only thing keeping your word-count afloat is the fact that your protagonist has a habit of reading the dictionary aloud whenever she gets nervous. And she's always nervous.

I have so far avoided any nervous characters but you never know--I could have my main character, who works at Milwaukee Public Library, do some long stints of shelf reading and if desperate fill a few pages with call number gibberish.

REG

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class of 1990 week 10

For weeks Miss Kassian had been giving vague and odd instructions to members of St. Thomas Operation Contact (our schools peer counseling team.) She told them to keep the 30^th free. At one point she told them to bring balloons, and then two days later told them to forget about the balloons. The week before, she told them to invite guests. I won’t lie—I had a rather cynical attitude towards the group and their mission, particularly the mandate to help raise people's self esteem, but I was grateful for the invite Kevin gave me and to be included in whatever was going on. So Monday after a normal school day, I went home and then left for town at 7:40. It turned out to be an elaborate costume scavenger hunt. We divided into teams of three and were each given a number and a list of houses to go to. At first we didn’t know what we were asking for and you had to get your clues in the right order, so you would knock on a door and then give your number and they would tell you if they had anything for you. They could also tell you if they had something that you would have to come back for, so a lot of the homes we had to go to more than once. It was a lot of walking around. I was on a team with Kevin and one other female but my journal has only two cryptic sentences about the whole thing.

Halloween in St Thomas and the week leading up to it were the only times the town had a police presence. The sheriff would send a car or two around because the normal Halloween fun involved pulling anything that wasn’t nailed down into the street or shifting things around town. Generally as long as nothing was destroyed or vandalized the police didn’t interfere. A few of the scavenger hunt parties were stopped by the cops and asked what they were up to.

In the end we all found the bits of our costumes, and put together the clues that lead us to a party at Miss Kassian's house. It was a fun night. We decided to wear our costumes the next day to school. I got home and to bed around 12:30. After, I reflected that physics would be a whole lot better if Miss Kassian put half the effort into lessons plans that she did in organizing the event.

October 31^st I wore my costume to school as did most of the students who were on the hunt. Mrs. Hollis also wore a costume. My legs were very sore from all the walking around town the night before. Aside from homecoming float building it was a rare thing for me to be in St. Thomas and not be at the school. I spent the night of Reformation Day at home. Dad had planned a showing of the Martin Luther film, (the old black and white one) but no one showed up. I was not surprised.

Now I’m not entirely sure this next thing happened my senior year, but I know for a fact that it happened on November 1. As usual anything that was not nailed down got moved. Most of the picnic tables from the city park found their way to the front of the school along with a realtors “For Sale” sign. Early in the day Mr. Hanson (who was also on the park board) got on the intercom and called all the boys from 7^th grade to senior to report to the gym. Once there, he marched them out of the school to carry all the picnic tables across the street to the city park. After the guys were back in class, he then got on the intercom and thanked them for being good citizens and volunteering for this civic duty. What really rankled the girls was that he only called the boys, when the girls were just as responsible for the disheveled state of the town.

Wednesday was parent-teacher conferences. Mom went but mostly to visit socially with some of my teachers. When I asked what they said she just said, “Oh, they all like you.”

That same day I got a library book from the Carnegie Regional Library in Grafton in the mail. I had requested it over the phone. Mrs. Kappel was insistent on us reading book report books from the country and time period we were studying in Lit., ideally they had to be from the school’s own library, but she let me order the book from Grafton. I was reading Oscar Wilde’s play “The Importance of Being Earnest.” I read it twice and then gave it to my dad who spent two hours carefully unfolding the bent corners of the pages and carefully erasing pencil marks in the margins before reading it himself. It didn't hit me until after I handed in my report that my father's name is the the Hungarian form of Earnest.

Thursday was Peggy’s birthday and we celebrated all day. We had cake in PDP, cake and milk in Computer class. Then the high school all traveled to Crystal ND for a pep rally for the girl's basketball team who had earned a spot in the regional tournament. We got back in time for study hall and then after lunch had cookies in Shop. English we spent writing captions. I also started working in earnest on the posters for the volleyball team.

Friday we got an inch of snow. I made some nice progress on my bookcase in Shop. That night I babysat for the Bigwoods until 1am. Saturday it was cold and muggy, 40 degrees, and rained for about an hour in the morning. I loved it (I’m still weird like that) and noted that it would have been a “perfect spring day.” Sunday after church there was an Aid Association for Lutherans dinner after church. I got a Frisbee with their new logo on it.

REG

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Class of 1990 week 9

Mrs. Kappel liked the gumball machine I drew. Another student had also drawn one that was nicer but he failed to keep his in the size limits so mine got used. The fall concert was on Tuesday. I was glad when it was over. I also took and distributed my senior pictures to my classmates. On Wednesday I was studying for the ACT, but I took some time out to redesign my signature. I didn’t like the way it looked and I didn’t want it on any forms that would follow me to college.

Friday the grade school had its annual Halloween carnival. I got a little checker board from the fishpond in the first grade room and played a game against Terry when I got back to study hall in the library. I would’ve won if the bell hadn’t rung.

Saturday I left for Grand Forks at 6:32am to take the ACT. I was in the same room as Peter. We later learned that we had the same version of the test. That year big changes were made to the test. I thought I did OK, but I had a brain freeze on part of the math portion. Mom and I went out for lunch after and then that evening I babysat for the Bigwood’s. They didn’t get home until around 2:15am. I was asleep on their couch when they came in. Once home, I was thankful for daylight savings time.

Sunday I taught Sunday School, then I was the only one from St. Paul’s who went to the Lutheran Youth Fellowship Zone Rally. Still it was good to see all my friends from camp and I enjoyed the hay ride. Instead of playing the radio, Dad and I talked all the way back home.

REG

lhg edited and approved.

Class of 1990 Week 8

I lamented that just as we finished one chapter in Physics and started a new one Miss Kassian would put the next text date up on the board. Mr. Hillious was not there for choir on Monday so I spent the last hour of the day straightening up books in the library. On Tuesday an earthquake hit California delaying the World Series. All the news focused on the quake. On Wednesday the boys kept trying to get teachers to talk about it to avoid getting anywhere with lessons and perhaps avoid homework over the break. As I wrote it in my journal:

No teacher would get into it with them. They tried the hardest in English and almost got it when we started talking about the Great Vowel Shift. “Shifts? That’s sort of what those two continental plates did…”

We got out of school at 2:30 and had the rest of the week off for the Teachers convention. I was only a few days out from my story deadline for the Institute of Children’s literature, so I got very busy doing everything but writing the story. I stripped posters off my wall and rearranged the furniture in my bedroom (the journal has before and after diagrams). I wrote letters, drew gumball machines for the yearbook. Friday I got my senior pictures back.

Saturday I went to Grand Forks to spend the weekend with Sarah at the University of North Dakota. All her suitemates were gone. We walked around campus, watched TV, and then Bob called. I finished reading the book I brought and had nothing to do while she talked so she suggested that I should wash her dishes. So I did, but I kept making smart comments and she got sick of hearing it so she closed the room door and locked me into the suite area where the sink was until she finished talking. When she hung up we played a “rousing game of cribbage.” We ordered pizza for supper. Sunday we went to Wittenberg Chapel. We both napped and then in the evening went to the Michel W. Smith concert at Chester Fritz auditorium. I saw a few people I knew from Girls State, Lutheran Youth Fellowship and even a group of students from St. Thomas. Mom took me home after the show. I finally got to bed at about 1:10 am.

REG

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