Tag, Schmag

I've been "tagged" by Jaime, aka DOB, aka Jason's wife. Now, usually, I would be WAY too cool for a tag, but who can resist an opportunity to talk about me? I know I can't.

One of the lamer "rules" of the tag is that you have to tag 5 other people, and if they tag 5 people, and if they tag 5 people then you would have a nice little tag pyramid scheme. So I will choose to tag myself 5 different times, so that I can talk about myself even more.

In each tag you need to mention 5 random things about yourself. Those are the rules that I know of, and here are the 5:

1. My music

I love music, I always dreamt of being a DJ ever since I got my first radio when I was 10 at Christmas. I also got the Ty Detmer Heisman Trophy poster (with autograph!) that hung above my bed until my mission, right next to the boogers I wiped on the wall. Ugh, that makes me nauseous just thinking about it. If my kids do that, I will have them fed to the wolves.

Anyway, I spent many an hour listening to KJQ with my fingers perched on the "Record" button so I could record my favorite songs on the blank tapes I purchased with every cent I got. My first favorite song was "Message in a Bottle" by the Police because I liked the "SOS" part at the end.

Good memory about blank tapes, which I hope Baldwin will forgive me for mentioning:

When I was 13-ish, Baldwin was in love with this girl Linda Rowberry (yes, THAT Linda Rowberry) and talked about her non-stop. She lived in the hated 5th ward, our rival basketball ward in the next neighborhood over. We always would walk by her house when we weren't walking by my crush's house (Katie Howard).

Baldwin is in the middle of this picture, with the red hair.

Anyway, I asked Baldwin if he had any old blank tapes he wasn't using, and he gave me a couple. One day I was listening to aforementioned blank tape, which was only about halfway full, while I was doing something on the other side of the room. After the last song played, I let the tape run because I was too busy doing whatever I was doing (probably creating some make-believe football league).


After about 10 minutes, a song came on, but not directly recorded from the radio, it was being played externally, because you could hear the ambient noise. The song was "She's Like the Wind" from Dirty Dancing, and Baldwin was singing along to it. At the time, Baldwin was in an extremely gay singing group called "Footnotes" that frequently sang lame songs at our junior high assemblies that were probably titled "We're Bestest Friends" and "I Love You Like I Love My Other Handicapped Friends". His love Linda was also in Footnotes with him. Anyway, I immediately stopped working on my composite schedule for my fake league and ran over to the radio and turned it up so I could hear every possible sound. Baldwin was doing a pretty good job keeping up with Patrick Swayze, but it was still very amusing. Once the song ended, there was a pause, and then....

"Oh Linda, Linda, Linda, Linda, Linda...

"Oh Linda, Linda, Linda, Linda, Linda...

"Oh Linda, Linda, Linda, Linda, Linda..."

And on and on like this for a minute or so. Highly amusing.

At this point, I will say that Baldwin is one of my all-time best friends and I should say that he is one of these characters that is always madly in love with a girl. He is happily married and has a beautiful daughter, and his wife is lot more of a catch than stinkin' Linda Rowberry.

Back to music. I have a list of my all-time fave bands and songs, but this deserves its own blog. I will get to it later.

2. My stuffed animals

Just like my radio, I received my first quality stuffed animal (from here on out referred to as "Stuffedee"--Mom's word for it) for Christmas, in 1986. I remember it being 1986 because I brought him in for Show & Tell in 1st grade. He was a lion, and I named him Gibby. My brother Brian (from here on out referred to as Bohnzee) got a hippo, and Kurt (JoEllen calls him Kurtis-woo, but that's just lame) got some sort of lame stuffedee, I think a dog. Well, when Mom saw how much fun we had with them, we kept getting more and more of them. I collected Lions and named them starting with G: Gary, Gary Jr., Griffith, and Harry. There's only so many Lionesque names that start with G. Brian collected hippos and rhinos and named them Blab I, Blab II, Blab III, Blab III Jr, Tlab, Mlab, Tlab Jr, etc. Kurt started getting cooler animals, like tigers, but he named them lame names like "Fred" and "Mikey", so his animals weren't as cool.

I was mad that Heidi was in this picture above because her stuffedee was so lame. Brian looks like such a nerdbag! Almost Dustin Ormond-esque.

Anyway, we played all sorts of games with them, most common were football and basketball, and each had their own qualities: some were fast, some were strong, some were slow (those were usually the stuffedees that we inherited, a few of them were the extremely low-budget pillows with faces drawn on them: "Hug Me" and "Snowman", the slowest and most uncoordinated of the bunch). We also had extensive wars. The stuffedees had their own language, and the most original phrase was "Eh!" (pronounced "Enngghhh") that showed approval, excitement, or general happiness. Hours of entertainment. Gibby and Gary moved to Boston with me.
In my arms is Gary, on the table is Gary Jr. and Griffith. Liesl is holding a worthless walrus, so worthless I don't recall his name.


3. My TV

When we were little, TV was FORBIDDEN AND UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCE YE SHALL WATCH. Except the following:

1. Mom and Dad gone
2. While Mom was teaching piano lessons (M, Tu, Th from 3-5, right during Disney afternoon. The WORST part about the M, Tu, Th schedule is the Duck Tales that had the "To Be Continued..." because we NEVER got to watch how it ended on Friday.)





3. Any sports--I'd even watch the lame sports on Saturdays so I could get much more TV in.
4. Saturday morning until 9 AM. "Captain N" was my favorite cartoon, albeit short-lived.





















5. Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers and whatever filled the 1:30 pm spot. "Today's Special" (featuring Jeff the Extremely Creepy Mannequin and "Hurry, Jody, Hurry!") was allowed for about a year and that was on at 10 AM, although whenever Jeff turned into a mannequin and vice versa (via the Plaid and Embarrassingly Ugly Magic Hat), I could never watch.
















6. Any "Anne of Green Goblins" episode on KBYU.

7. General Conference. More tolerable because it meant we were watching TV. Listening to it on the radio? Death.

We had this old, tiny TV we had in the dining room and you had to play with all the knobs and antenna to get a good reception. After a while the power button broke so we had to unplug it every time we wanted it off. When Mom and Dad were upstairs, Neil would turn on "Magnum, PI" sneakily and keep the volume super low and we would all crowd around, while Neil would holding onto the cord to turn it off in the event of Mom. When we heard stirring upstairs (right above the TV), we would all tense up until it stopped. If the stirring turned into steps across the floor to the stairs, we would yank the cord and goosestep around the house, whistling innocently. I usually fled downstairs to the basement.

We used to have to rent a VCR every time we wanted to rent a movie. Everything we rented was in black and white because Dad loves the classics. I remember we rented "Shane" for Craig's birthday and I was super excited cause it was in color. Of course, this was 1990-something and color and been long since invented.

Eventually we got a new TV and a VCR, and TV became a more regular part of my life. My parents have their shows that they watch ("Jeeves and Wooster", "P&P", "Everybody Loves Raymond"), so even they caved in to the mindless entertainment of TV.

Now, I can watch TV whenever I want. Well, not at work. But you get my drift. I do think watching TV is a huge waste of time, but I think I deserve after slaving away at work all day. I wish I could read more books without getting extremely sleepy, so that is why I don't read much.

4. My plans

I love to make plans. I make plans years and years in advance, calculate how much money is necessary for these plans, and then budget accordingly. Even if a plan is just a dream, it's fun to me to figure out the logistics and see how and if it would work. A lot of people would say that this makes me fairly unspontaneous, but I would say that this makes me MORE spontaneous. Because I always know where I stand with future plans, I know whether a spontaneous plan to go to NYC for the weekend is a good idea or not. It also enables me to take my excursions around the world.

Not to sound like I'm old and experienced, but I am older and more experienced every day and I realize that past planning has led to future and present benefits. And poor planning has led to painful prices to pay. If I would give anybody advice, I would say to make a reasonable budget and stick to it. The key words there are: reasonable--give yourself allowances for wants, not just needs; and stick--you need to stick to it and make sacrifices, or you'll never reach that goal of going on a safari in Kenya!

That was my soapbox.

5. My maps

I have always loved maps. We had a large world atlas at home, and I used to plan trips around the world, which probably has something to do with my love of seeing new places. That's all I have to say about that.