Thursday 13

I saw this Thursday 13 last week at A Gentleman’s Domain, and he got it from his friend, Di.  Looks like a cute TT, so I decided to give it a shot.

Thirteen Firsts

1. First Job – I’ve told you about my first real job, at Mr. Steak.  But I had a couple of odd jobs before that.  The first was probably when my friend Jennifer and I would go to Pizza Hut and offer to fold boxes for take out, and in exchange, we would get pizza and soda to take home for dinner.  Awesome.  Another barter type job I had was cleaning out the horse stalls at a stable near my house, where I would clean out a stall or two in exchange for getting to ride one of the rental horses.  Also awesome.  Though Stockton in the summer gets HOT, and horse shit in heat STINKS, so I usually bailed around noon.
2. First Blog Post – Way back in 2002, I gave blogging a very short try.  It didn’t stick. I wrote one post, and thought, this is pointless, and went away.  Gosh, if I had stuck with it, maybe I’d be a big time blogger like Dooce!  Probably not, though.  Here’s the post I wrote back then.
3. First Airplane Ride – This would probably be 1970, moving from California to Fairbanks, Alaska.  I don’t remember it, as I was only 4.  I do remember moving back to California in 1975, though.  My mom shipped Richard and I off first, then joined us two weeks later.  So we were flying alone.  Of course, there were three seats in our row, and so we shared with a poor man that I’d love to apologize to.  I remember when the drink cart came around, he ordered an alcoholic beverage, but Richard and I had already ordered our cokes.  So here we were with our drinks, and he had to pay for his.  Uh oh, we thought, mom didn’t give us any money.  We’re screwed.  Luckily, of course, sodas are free, so we didn’t have to pay.  Whew.  I remember worrying about that for quite awhile.  At another point, we were bored, and I was having my Smokey Bear beat up on Richard or something, and hit the poor man next to us in the face.  My Smokey had been eaten once by the dog, and wasn’t in the best shape.  The man said, “Excuse me, you hit me with your rag”, to which I indignantly replied, “That’s not a rag! That’s my bear!”  He apologized.  No wonder he needed a drink.
4. First Boyfriend – 8th grade, Mike Bettencourt.  His best friend was dating my best friend, so it made sense that we would give it a shot.  Of course, my best friend was having sex with his best friend, and I wouldn’t even let Mike do more than hug and kiss (no tongues!  Gross!), so he was a frustrated guy.  Oh well, I mean, I was in 8th grade, he was in 9th.  We were too young anyway.
5. First Trip to Europe – Actually, only.  Ted and I went to London, Amsterdam, and Paris on our honeymoon.  It was FANTASTIC.  Except for the food in London.  And poor Ted had a cold.  But other than that, it was great.  My favorite city by far was Paris.  I was worried I wouldn’t like it, because it would be hard to be somewhere where people don’t speak English, and I don’t speak French, but it was fine.  And beautiful.  And romantic.  And the food was awesome.
6. First House – To own?  The two bedroom townhouse that we live in right now, and tried to sell last year.  Stupid housing market.  First place I ever lived on my own? (with a roommate, but you know, away from my mom’s house)  A flat in San Francisco, on Fulton Street, a couple of blocks from USF and the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park.  Two bedrooms plus a sun room, hardwood floors, a formal dining room, a fireplace, and a back yard for the dogs, all for $850 a month.  Sigh.
7. First Pet – First pet of my very own, I would say, because we had quite a few cats when I was little.  That would be Samantha, my wonderful dog.  Even if she did chew up my smokey bear.
8. First Time Skiing – 8th grade, I think.  My friend Jennifer’s mom was dating a guy who loved to ski.  Since I was 5 years older than Jennifer, they would take us with them, and Jennifer and I could ski all day, and Linda and her boyfriend could go off and ski all day.  It was a lot of fun.  I think we went three times that winter, and I felt like one of the rich kids at our school, with my skiers tan and all.  Very cool.
9. First Thing I Wrote That Was Printed – A letter to the editor to my local paper. When I was in 7th or 8th grade, a drunk driver had struck and killed two women in our town, one of whom was a teacher at my Jr. High.  His mother wrote a letter saying how everyone was vilifying him, but he was a good boy and he was heartbroken about what had happened.  That pissed me off, so I wrote a letter saying that gosh, sorry he’s heartbroken.  The families of the women were heartbroken, too.  And part of me still feels that way, though part of me also now has the empathy to know that yes, his stupidity had ruined not only their lives, but his as well.
10. First Broken Bone – I haven’t actually broken any bones, though when I was quite small, my mom was teaching me to peel carrots, and had to leave the room to go to the bathroom.  She thought she put the knife out of my reach, but of course, I reached it, and practically cut the end of my finger off trying to slice carrots.  My mom says my finger tip was hanging by a thread of skin. She called the hospital, and they rushed in a specialist in a helicopter from San Francisco (we lived in Berkeley at the time), and he reattached it, including all of the nerves.  Did such a great job, I don’t have any nerve loss, and I can’t even tell which finger it was.
11. First Hospital Stay – When I gave birth to Maya.  I’ll admit it, even though I was 30, and wasn’t going to have a horrid operation or anything, I was scared.  When they told me I was going to have to stay the night before her birth, to be induced, I cried.
12. First Time I Met My Sisters – It was New Years Day, 1988.  The day after my 22nd birthday.  I had met my father for the first time in October of ’87, so now I was flying up to Portland to meet my sisters.  They were 17, and I went to High School with them one day, and I must admit, I fell in love with them, almost like my parents had just brought them home from the hospital.
13. First Vote – I turned 18 at the very end of 1983, so my first chance to show my power at the polls was in 1984.  I know I voted for the Libertarian for President, but in my memory, that means it was Ron Paul.  But a little bit of research tells me that in fact, it would have been David Bergland. I switched to Democrat in 1988, after discovering in the primaries that registering as ‘Independent’ didn’t mean what I thought it meant.  I thought I was independent of a party, and could vote however I wanted.  No, it meant I could only vote in the Independent Party’s primary.  Sigh.