Brrrrr!

I took this picture on the way home yesterday and, judging by how it felt while I was getting gas, I’d say that was correct.

I was home over the weekend and I cleaned out a closet from my childhood. I found a lot of things that brought back memories, although most of it went in the trash because I’m not overly sentimental about such stuff. We found some old cassette tapes with recordings we had made when we were little, and it was fun listening to them (though I was reminded how awful it is to find anything on a tape: fast forward, hit play, fast forward, hit play, fast forward, hit play, rewind, hit play, etc.)

Some of the highlights were a friend and I making a “radio station”, Nathan “calling” a fake baseball game including one sequence that went, “Strike one! Strike two! Strike three, he’s out! But he tried hard so we gave him a home run anyway!”, my mom calling into a radio show (a real one this time) on Valentines day trying to win a $25 gift certificate to some restaurant for the most interesting “how they met” story*, a tape made for my dad in which a very young Rachael makes up a song that roughly goes, “I love dad, I don’t want him to be sad, I don’t hate him even though I said that.” Finally, the gem find of the day was a tape my mom made of herself singing to see how she sounded. We listened to it for a while before she found out and came running in to destroy it. She was very embarrassed even though it sounded good, so we got to tease her all day about her “demo tape”.

I took a giant box of papers and stuff to go through when I got home. As I was unloading the box from the trunk of my car, the bottom ripped out. All the papers from my life fell into the snow with a hardcore wind swirling around. I think I grabbed everything except one paper which blew away, but I scraped up my hand on the pavement and I think I pulled a muscle trying to get the box and the other box I put under it in the house.

Okay, time to go through that box (or what’s left of it)

*My parents actually had a kind of cute “how they met” story. My dad was a bouncer in a bar and my mom was there for her birthday. She had a balloon and the people with her were trying to pop it as a goof. She had to go to the bathroom and she asked my dad to hang onto her balloon so they couldn’t get it. While she was in the bathroom a fight broke out in the bar and my dad had to break it up. When she came out of the bathroom, she saw him breaking up the fight with one hand and holding her balloon high above his head with the other hand so it wouldn’t get popped.