(no subject)

Gakked from dremiel:

In 2011: I will turn 47. I am working full-time as a desktop publisher and trainer at a mid-sized software and hardware engineering firm. I've lived in my current apartment for almost 7 years now, and I share it with Ripley the Wonder Cat and Spencer the Fearless. I'm taking a class in coppersmithing where I'm almost done with my first bowl (!). I just put in my application for the Austin Celtic Festival in November and once again I'll try to get into the Blue Genie Christmas show. I'll be selling my jewelry at the World Horror Convention in April. I'm going back to San Diego Comic Con in July--I already have plane tickets and a place to stay. I plan on getting things put up for sale on my etsy page by the end of March.

In 2001: I was 37. I was living in a small duplex in a much more central area of town. I had just started messing about with bead stringing and it was taking over from sewing and cross stitch as my creative outlet of choice. My cats were Rissa, Bogart, and Tommie. I had been working for the mid-sized software and hardware engineering firm for not quite a year. I wasn't on the internet as much as I wanted to be since I had dialup like everyone else. I only vaguely knew what fanfiction was. I had just started gaming again with most of my old crew and a few new ones. I had a shiny new DVD player and felt very high-tech. I was not volunteering to work any conventions as I had done the Art Show for two World Fantasy Conventions pretty much back-to-back. Within a year I would lose both Bogart to a car and Tommie to complications of long-term diabetes, and move to another duplex where I was burglarized twice.

In 1991: I was 27. I was living with friends in a double-wide mobile home in Arlington, TX and working my first real job out of college as a GIS technician at a regional Council of Governments. My mother's cancer was coming back, and she would be gone in a year. I was going back to Austin as often as I could, since Arlington had all the charm and grace of a parking lot. Living with the friends was interesting and uncomfortable at the same time. (They were both serious drama queens and the fights could be epic. One is still my friend, one isn't.) I was very, very broke and paying off my debts through a debt consolidation service, so I didn't go to many movies or go out much. I did sew a lot and made a lot of weird stuffed animals. Helped run another convention.  Had a fling with a friend, which I will never regret. Had Tommie and Bogart. Developed an eternal loathing of filking.

In 1981: I was 17. Living in the dusty hell that is Midland, TX and a senior in high school. Need I say more? I was planning on going to another WorldCon (went to my first when I was 16), Denvention 2. I would get my braces off right before graduation. I was working at WaldenBooks in the mall, driving a white Malibu, and I had just about 2 friends in all the world. (I still keep up with one of them.) I would go off to college later that year (Trinity U in San Antonio), where I would fall in love and discover that I wasn't cut out to be an engineer after all. (It took longer to figure out I wasn't cut out to be a geologist either.) My mother was alive. My oldest brother was alive. My father was alive. My sister still had her act together, and I was playing D&D with her and our boyfriends. I read a lot and was writing Star Wars fanfic without even knowing what that was. I could not wait to leave Midland and never come back.

In 1971: I was 7. Living in Midland, in first grade. Was reading at about a sixth grade level (or higher). Star Trek was in reruns and I couldn't understand why there weren't any new episodes. Played all over the neighborhood and made things with my grandmother, who taught me how to sew by hand and with a sewing machine. I remember reading On the Back of the North Wind. I was checking books out of the library with my own card. Laugh-In made me laugh even though I didn't get all the jokes. I spent holidays with my daddy and my sister in Houston; one brother lived with us. I came back from Houston wearing a headband and saying "man" a lot. My oldest brother came to visit and I thought he was the coolest grownup ever. I'm pretty sure I had an accent you could cut with a knife.