Whoa, it's Abby, Baby!
From Telkoth.net
Okay, so many many moons ago I lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and went to Pillsbury Elementary School, a science and math magnet school, which apparently sounds really fancy, but I never did (nor do I) pay attention to the names of things. If I did, I wouldn't care about a no-foot-ball-team University like George Mason University. What I do care about is the people, and my friends at Pillsbury were totally awesome. I can name them now, though my spellings of their last names might not be right at all:
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[edit] Carly Stoner
I'll list her first, 'cause I totally had a crush on her. I wanted to tell her all the time, but I was always too nervous... on the last day of the school year, I would tell myself "I have to tell her, it's the last day, I really have to tell her," and I never would. On the last day of my last year at Pillsbury, I wanted to tell her, and didn't. To my delight, we ended up attending the same Middle School, but I still never ever got to tell her. I did get to sit really close to her during my going-away party, before I moved out to Oregon, though, and that was probably as sexy as a 7th grader can think sexy is.
[edit] Ian (Gavin) Watt
This kid taught me how to play Magic: the Gathering, back in the days of Fallen Empires! He also had one of those black and white Mac classics, on which we played lots of great games. He was definitely a cool kid, and probably had a period of his life where he always had his dirty blonde hair hanging in his eyes which he would shake away, and all the girls would go like "oh god, he's teh sexy!" If he did, he totally loved it. Oh, and his first name is actually Gavin, making him Gavin Watt Jr., but he hated that, so he went by his middle name, Ian.
[edit] Zachary Veronikas
Zach was the opposite of Ian - he was a kinda' big kid, who played lots of video games and bought Nintendo Power Magazine. I learned all my video-game playing secrets from him, like how to get the warp whistle on World 1 Level 3 in Mario 3. I think he was kinda' nervous when Ian and I talked about girls. Anyway, I spent the night at Zach's a lot, and would inevitably wake up before he did, so I'd start up Mario Paint, and make a little animation, and leave it running for him when he got up.
[edit] Abby Sweiger
I'm talking about her last, 'cause she's the point of this article, so it's a good lead-in to the rest of what I want to talk about :) Abby was a total tom-boy - played sports, etc - and probably my best female friend. At one time she even asked me out over the phone, but as mentioned I liked Carly, so I told her to hold on, ran to my mom and asked her to tell me that I couldn't go out with Abby, which she hesitantly did, then ran back to tell Abby that my mom said I couldn't. Which was totally lame, and Abby thought so too and made fun of me for it the next day. Oh, she also made fun of me for being an atheist, something about worshiping test-tubes, or something? She picked on me a lot, but she was still one of these four awesome-awesome friends I had in elementary school :) Oh, and she had a Sega Genesis which I played Sonic the Hedgehog on.
[edit] Moving On...
So, why the hell am I typing about all this? 'Cause a few days ago, I got an e-mail from Abby! She'd looked my name up on-line, and of course found me because I've got PsyPets and other things out there, and e-mailed me! The first thing she noticed is that I'm still in to programming :P And it wasn't long talking to her that I found out that she's still in to sports - playing Hockey, etc - and still a tom-boy (read: has a girlfriend). She's not on-line as much as I'd like, but talking to her is so amazing - my brain goes crazy, remembering all this random crap from elementary school. Trying to remember it all reminds me of trying to piece together a dream: I remember specific scenes and events, floor plans, people, and the stuff I've written above about everyone... but everything inbetween in a haze.
Floor plans always seem to stick out in my mind. Check this out:
[edit] Abby's House
[edit] Ian's House
[edit] Zach's Room
[edit] Random Stuff From Elementary School
- My 3rd/4th grade teacher Jennifer Hanzack (sp?) called me and Abby "mole" and "mouse", respectively, because I didn't like the sun (I was a programmer even back then :P), and Abby made weird squeeky noises.
- The D.A.R.E. guy that came to talk to us during 5th or 6th grade scared me so much, I paid a kid $1 to rip up my report that I was supposed to read, so that I wouldn't have to read it.
- In 5th or 6th grade, we played this crazy game where we were split in to teams, and there was a big board hanging on the wall, and each team had a boat, and first we were trying to get our boats to land, and once there set up a colony... and the teacher, every round, had cards that described a weather event, or something else, that would hurt or help us, and she also had these cards which represented resources, like food. And that same kid I paid to rip up my report for the D.A.R.E. officer, I had him steal resource cards from the basket while I distracted the teacher with questions about rules, or something else trivial.
- There was this girl... Carrie! (took a bit to remember the name). Tall, blonde... and she had this fatter friend, who was usually angry about things (there was this one time where she was angry, and insisted she could fry your brain cells by looking angrily at you)... don't remember her name... This was 5th or 6th grade again, and we as a class had built this mini house out of wood (big enough we could fit in it)... the "house" was put in a corner, but at an angle, so there was this triangle made up 2/3rds of classroom wall, and 1/3rd of the "house" wall. And that "house" wall had a window in it, so you could crawl into the corner, which I liked to do. So anyway, I remember once I was there, and Carrie was inside the "house", and she asked for a pencil, or eraser, or something... but first she said "Ben?" to get my attention, and I said "yeeeeessss?" in this bizarre way, just to be weird, and the fatter girl laughed about it, like that I had said it sexily, or something. Actually, that might have been a different girl that had laughed about it... ah, I don't remember, but anyway, something like that.
- This other kid, Brian, was way more computer-skilled than I was, and ran his own BBS out of home. My memories of his computer system remind me of something out of the anime Lain.
- Oh, and we had a Mac Classic in the classroom, and SimCity was installed.
- And Hypercard was, and still is, way better than lame ol' Powerpoint.
- We had a "multimedia" class where we could use camcorders to record things, and we were supposed to make little movies. Oh, and they showed us Laserdisc programs. Anyway, these movies... There was a Ben Lovenson, and he must have liked mystery books, or something, 'cause our projects were these still-motion mysteries using magnet animals... we'd put them on the side of a metalic drawer thing... black... and then we'd record for a moment, and move them, and record, and move them, etc... one of the mysteries I remember, it was something where someone had stolen something, and so the detective animal-magnet-thing was asking questions, getting alibis, and the guilty guy was like "yeah, well, I put this cloth under the leg of my three-legged table to stop it from wobbling" or something like that, but three-legged tables don't wobble, so he was lying! And therefore the criminal.
- Oh yeah! About the title of this article: "Abby Baby" was a nickname that this Mong kid, "Kou" as Abby reminded me, used. "Abby" and "Baby" are anagrams of each other, so he thought this was very clever. He also drove her crazy. There was Kou, and also Pong, and I think it was Ian who came up with "Would you like some grey Kou-Pong." Kids are so clever and funny! (Ow.) And as I recall, Kou and Pong both always smelled funny. I know it's not nice to say, but they did!
- There was a museum where they had some kind of Mong, hand-made tapestry thing hung up, which dipicted military-types chasing all the Mong away, before they came to the US, and the US Government said "Sure, we'll take you. Um... you can go... to... Minnesota. Yeah... that place is pretty cool, I guess." I think there was something like a Rainbow Foods (grocery store) or something else like that on the tapestry. Oh, and that museum also had those dishes, where one person would sit at one, and another person would sit in the other, on the other side of the floor, and you'd whisper and be able to hear each other! Oh, and the stairs to the second floor played notes, so I jumped around in order to play "row, row, row your boat."
