I decided to revamp the look of my website this weekend, since I’d resolved to finally move to a new webhost as my hosting fee was coming due. I’ve recently become kind of obsessed with owls (random) so I decided to go with a fall-like owl theme. I couldn’t find any pre-made wordpress themes that fit the bill, so I found a theme and modified the heck out of it with the help of firebug and istockphoto. I’m pretty pleased with the results. I know that probably zero people will ever see it, but since I do this site for no one but myself, that’s A-OK with me. 
As it often happens when I revamp my site, I started to get all reminiscent about the beginnings of my blog. I visited the Internet Wayback Machine at archive.org and typed in aliwolly.com. The earliest iteration that popped up was from December 2004 – my pink landing page, which linked out to my photo albums (the older ones were self-hosted) and my blogger blog. So that was fun to poke around in, but then I thought, “Huh. 2004? That’s the earliest?” Then I remembered that my original website was hosted on my PC and used dyndns.com to point a url to my PC’s IP. Yep, turns out I’ve been a geek for a long time. So I threw aliwolly.homeip.net into the wayback machine and found a version of my blog from 2002: pre-blogger. I probably originally built the site in Sept 2001 on tripod.com before I moved it to my PC. It’s completely intriguing that there’s this internet archive project out there and that something as insignificant as my website is archived in it. I guess, so far as websites go, mine could be considered pretty old – “online since 2001!” – but I can’t imagine that it’s interesting to anyone but me.
My old posts are endlessly fascinating to me. I decided to look back at October 2002 – I was pretty verbose that month with 42 posts! – and laughed my ass off reading my posts from 10/13/02. The first one relates a story about a Pizzaria Uno’s dining experience and me pulling a typical Ali move and speaking without thinking. Telling your waiter that your leftover pizza would “smell like ass” is apparently a good way to get it taken off the bill (and embarrass everyone you’re dining with). The second post is about the time that I learned the expression, “Soup to Nuts” in one of my grad school classes – but thought the prof said, “Soupy Nuts” and suppressed giggles ensued. Actually, the whole month of October that year has some pretty good posts – I wish I could get back to writing like that again. Lately work is just all-encompassing and I am so tired by the time I shake work out of my head that I just go to bed. Sigh. Speaking of… Goodnight!
Popularity: 70% [?]
Filed under meta | Comments (2)It was the first week of school in my sophomore year, which was my first year in the High School at Shen. The Shen High School was a large two story building and I was nervous about finding my classes in the confusing two story building. The first few days were stressful for me and I was very glad when the first Friday of the school year rolled around. An entire weekend of freedom stretched before me and it started off that afternoon with the annual “country fair” at the Shen Methodist Church, which was right behind my house. The fair was nothing special, but it was something that we got excited to go to as kids because it was so close by and there were games (every year one of us won a goldfish) and you could buy fudge and baked goods and candy.
Beck walked home with me that day after school so that we could go to the fair together. As we walked by the football field we started to hear music – the opening chords of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” by The Beatles. There were two guys walking up ahead of us carrying a boom box (is that really what they were called?!) and blasting Beatles music. Since they couldn’t us, Beck and I started to dance to the music as we walked along. I remember I didn’t even know that it was The Beatles that were playing at that time – Beck had to tell me what we were listening to. We laughed to ourselves as we walked and danced along, and then we heard one of the guys say to the other something like, “… I think I left the batteries in my locker…” and when they turned around to head back towards the high school we immediately composed ourselves and walked normally, completely ignoring them as they walked past us.
The second they passed us and could no longer see us, we started dancing again. We were having so much fun grooving to the music as we walked along that we didn’t even realize that the music wasn’t fading away. Suddenly the two guys were walking with their arms over our shoulders introducing themselves as Doug and Doug. We were appropriately mortified. They were also heading to the country fair at the church and were apparently Beatles fans. They were listening to “the blue album” – 1967-70 (disc 2). I loved every song that I heard as we continued to walk towards the fair and my obsession with The Beatles had begun.
I bought my first Beatles recording that night in the basement tag sale at the fair at the church. Rummaging through the piles of tapes for sale for $.25, I found an extended play cassette tape of the blue album. It didn’t have a case, but the song titles were printed on the outside of the cassette. I gladly paid my quarter for it and it became my sole source of entertainment for the next few weeks. I began to notice The Beatles everywhere – songs in commercials, new albums being released, “Beatles Sundays” on the Oldies Station on the radio. I taped the songs as they came on the radio station and my collection grew. I went to the library and borrowed books on The Beatles to feed my obsession. I bought “Live at the BBC” when it was released (I vividly remember reading the booklet that came with that CD during Biology instead of paying attention to class). I wrote lyrics to Beatles songs all over my brown grocery bag textbook covers. I convinced Mr Golden one of my World Cult/World Lit teachers to let me do my term paper on The Beatles. I bought enough Beatles t-shirts for every day of the week… and pretty much wore them every day of the week. I had coffee mugs, posters, puzzles, blankets, every album on CD, a few actual vinyl albums… I was a girl obsessed.
My obsession didn’t survive much into the college years. I, of course, was always a huge fan of The Beatles, but I started to listen to other music (gasp!) and focused my obsessions elsewhere. But lately, with all of the Beatles press – the new Rock Band game, the release of the remastered albums – I can feel the tug of the obsession. They’ve become the only thing playing on my iPhone and even though I’ve never played any version of Rock Band, I want the new game. I know that I won’t become obsessed again in the way that I was in High School (there’s been something else occupying the number one obsession slot in my mind for the last year and a half or so), but I’m having fun rediscovering a band that consumed me for almost four years half a lifetime ago.
Popularity: 21% [?]
Filed under nostalgia | Comment (1)I was bored tonight while I was waiting for my iPhone to restore after I upgraded it to the 2.1 firmware and then jailbroke it (using the Pwnage tool), so I started poking around Hulu. I knew that there were clips from SNL on there, but I thought that they were all newer clips and didn’t realize that they had some older ones up there. I stumbled upon an old Celebrity Jeopardy clip and laughed until I cried. I remember listening to these with Eric and Ryan and Beck. Eric used to talk just like Will Ferrell’s impression of Alec Trebeck all the time – it’s really catchy. That was around the time that Beck and I went on our Ghetto Fabulous Trip to Europe… we ran around Edinburgh doing Sean Connery from Celebrity Jeopardy Impressions (“Then the day is mine!”) for days before we realized that it was probably really obnoxious to the Scotts… But we continued to do it anyway. 
Good times…
Popularity: unranked [?]
Filed under Geek, nostalgia | Comment (0)