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This month, Bronzie Beat asked the questions instead of Christina, but with her blessing. I'm getting to them only at the end of the month, of course..
Bronzie Beat's August questions
It took me a while to think of this, because it actually has been a while. I'm pretty sure the most recent is "Trees", a children's music album by Billy Kelly and Molly Ledford (2015). My family have been fans of Molly's previous "kindie rock" band, Lunch Money for years, and we surely bought this at a live show.
I had so many crushes in middle school and high school that I'm sure I can't remember the first. But whoever it was, I'm sure they didn't know how I felt about them – I'm a Scorpio, and secrecy is like life to us, especially in matters of the heart.
That's a very hard question.
1994 is probably peak nostalgia year for me. I was in my last year of college, had a close friends group, was already in a relationship with the woman I married two years later, and am still married to. I was studying anthropology in college, but with a computer science minor and an intense hobby in computers, at a time when computers were really exciting, and not, you know, [Mermista voice] uuuuuuggghhh. I was less developed as a person, but I had a really well-developed *persona*, which seemed to suit me well at the time. It was a lot of fun, in very many ways.
2014 was the year my second child was born. I was a lot wiser, but not so much as might be hoped, and I've had to do a lot of learning and growing over the last six years. Things were stable for me; I was switching from one reliable state job to another which promised to be less stressful for the same pay. I wasn't happy, though. My depression was poorly controlled that year, and it would take a lot of therapy and a year of trying different medications to get to a reasonably stable place. Really the thing I'd want most out of 2014 is a do-over...
When I was thinking about this before, I was generally of the opinion that city and country are both fine, but the suburbs are the pits. I still think the suburbs are the pits, but I'm going to pick city.
We live in an old inner-ring "streetcar suburb" that's now considered a "downtown" neighborhood as the suburbs have grown out past it, and we have a good sized back yard for the area, which we've completely freed from grass and converted into a garden. Of course, when it's too hot to work outside for 2-3 months out of the year, that garden can get a little wild, so now we're faced with a deadline to clean it up to make the city government happy. At about the same time we got that deadline, an empty septic tank that we didn't know about, from before our neighborhood was on city sewer, collapsed under our aboveground swimming pool. We had to drain the pool to keep it from collapsing further, and now we're trying to figure out how to get the tank filled and whether the pool can be saved.
I love the aesthetic of the Grid Compass, and I love its screen, even if it's quite small relative to the total size of the laptop. The problem is, I can't really use it for anything. It has some useful built-in software, but since it doesn't even run MS-DOS, it would be hard to find anything else for it. I could maybe use it as a terminal, but I just turned down a great deal on a vintage DEC VT420. I live in a small house with very messy kids, and there's just no room to have anything that isn't actually being used.
My wife would appreciate the Macbook, though. She's currently got an HP ultrabook that we bought used, and she's running up against its limits (4GB RAM, small SSD) because she's gotten into video editing. I'm a big ThinkPad fan, but she hates their chunky design. So if I were given one for free, it would almost certainly go to her.