The ten and 5 fives meme

I've been tagged!... by my Mississippi blogfriend Terry Thornton.

Ten Things I Was Doing Ten Years Ago

Because I keep my old calendars, I can be pretty specific about this.  (But I think the blog victims I tag can be general, if they like.)  Within a range of a few days on either side of Oct. 17, 1998...

1. Taking an Oceanography class (plus Marine Lab) that was the very last class (from a distance) to complete my undergraduate degree, a BA in Geography from UNC-Chapel Hill.

2. Volunteering in the school library.

3. Driving my 9-year-old to swim lessons and my 5-year-old to gymnastics.

4. Attending a school board meeting.  Not sure if this was because I was writing for my first local paper, the Atlantic News, or because I was actually interested.  Or both!  Which was kind of the idea behind the job.

5. Hosting friends from Massachusetts for dinner.  It has a question mark next to it, so I'm not sure if it really happened.

6. Attending a Girl Scouts Blood Drive.  Once again: for the paper?  Or because I had a Daisy?  No, Daisies wouldn't volunteer at a blood drive.

7. Thinking about going orienteering at a couple of big regional meets, penciled in, now that we had moved north to orienteering country from Florida as of June 1998.  Probably not overcoming the inertia, is my guess.

8. My husband was "on reserve," so I can't tell if he flew out on those days or not.  (I only wrote his for-sure "off" days in the calendar.)  He was a captain, but I think he was flying a smaller plane.

9. Driving both girls to dance lessons.

10. Attending a retirement party in Connecticut for my sister-in-law.

Five Things On Today's To-Do List

1. Hosting friends and their dogs in our backyard this morning.

2. Going to Kingston to observe and write about 5th and 6th graders doing outdoor science on Water Monitoring Day.

3. Attempting to contact (some more) my contact for an upcoming fall/ winter series of stories in the Sunday paper.

4. Picking up the 15-year-old when she gets back from a soccer away game, taking her home so she can get changed and have dinner, then driving her back to the night football game.

5. Working on a new blog, go see: How to Live to 100

Five Snacks I Enjoy Eating

1. popcorn with butter and salt  2. pumpkin seeds  3. celery with hummus  4. cheese  5. Cape Cod Russet Potato Chips

Five Places I've Lived

1. Suburbs of Philadelphia (Havertown, Lansdowne, Swarthmore)

2. South Texas (Corpus Christi and Beeville)

3. Cape Cod

4. Chapel Hill, North Carolina

5. Boca Raton, Florida

Five Jobs I've Had

1. Mom/ kid chauffeur

2. Freelance journalist for area newspapers

3. Assistant manager bookstore

4. (As representative of the many bizarre and crappy jobs I had long ago, worth an entire hilarious post some day) clerk at a Circle K in rural South Texas, working all night (only robbed once!)

5. Selling saltwater taffy on the boardwalk in Ocean City, NJ

Five Bloggers I Tag

How about the last five commenters on my blog who are also regular visitors to Atlantic Ave.?

1. James, a suburban Atlanta dad with a move-to-NH attitude (he's hot sauce)

2. Mark from Mass., who is the opposite of cranky about the Red Sox win last night (hot sauce)

3. Marie, who roams her Blue Ridge mountain home with a camera and needs a new tripod (hot sauce)

4.  Nan, who gives us the best book reports and recipes from our very own North Country (barbecue sauce)

5. Nostalgic Tim from upstate NY, with that gorgeous golden retriever

UPDATE

JAMES was just back from his honeymoon 10 years ago, likes cheese because he's a cheesehead, lived in Chicago, and was a baseball camp counselor.

Crab mallets and trolley garters, pop guns and wobble wedges, flue stops and egg poachers...

MARK was writing for newspapers 10 years ago, including a story about local 5 & 10s (see the above tantalizing lede).  He snacks on potato sticks, which are potato chips in the wrong shape.  He has lived in Denmark... Maine.  He was a canoeing counselor... at a girls summer camp.

Comments

[Tim McGuire]

WOW....and thanks for mentioning my blog, an honor from you!

[Marie]

Hmmm. A new blog? And for the record, if I am fortunate to live to be 100, it won't be because I've remained celibate:0

[James]

I've always loved lists like these because, even though we read people's sites daily, you can still extract "Hey, that's a cool nugget of info!" from posts like today's. I'll put mine out there hopefully by day's end.

Loved the "only robbed once" comment.

[Carroll]

Interesting new blog project, Amy -- as if you've nothing else to do in your copious spare time, right? ;-)

I love that you sold saltwater taffy on the boardwalk -- what a quintessential East Coast summer job!

[Terry Thornton]

"Robbed once" sounds like the title for a novel I hope you are writing. Interesting lists from an interesting person. Thanks for participating in the meme and allowing me to "tag" you.

Terry