  Good afternoon, one and all! I've been digging through my computer files today, just for kicks, and I realized how incredibly sentimental I am! It's bordering on packrat. I have a feeling it stems from having lost absolutely all of my possessions in a fire at a young age, and I don't want to take anything for granted...ever. I sometimes still miss some of the photos that we'll never see again. I save a lot of my favorite e-mails.
I also save letters and cards from Christmas, birthdays, and my times away at things like Governor's School. (Most of you know that I am a card fanatic...nearly everyone gets a Christmas card. I fell down on the job this year, though, with graduation and moving...sorry! ) Some are silly, but most reveal little things about my friends that their written words capture more eloquently than any photo. I even have some that I saved from my time at Hendrix. It's a way to keep those friends around, even though I rarely see them.
I also take lots of pictures. I'm about to start working again on the scrapbook I started in the fall, and I hope to put lots of pictures on this site in the near future. Digging those out of the closet will be a monumental task, though! I don't know how many of you really want to see what I looked like at age eight, but I might post one or two to give you an idea. Let me just say that any photo from 1992 to 1999 inevitably showed off my metal mouth. My high school classmates swore I was born with braces.
Try playing the trumpet like that. It hurts like nobody's fool after about three hours. When I made the All-State bands, a few directors took notice that I was, in fact, the only trumpeter with braces that year, and always had sympathetic words. I would just reach in my pocket, produce a tube of Anbesol, making them laugh and realize that I knew how to handle it. Of course, that year was particularly difficult, since I also had the added pain of having the darn things tightened the day before I left for the clinic! For those of you who never experienced the torture of braces, a tightening, or, in orthodontic circles, an "adjustment," makes eating cereal a daunting task.
AND...when you get them on for the first time, they rub nice raw spots inside your mouth. I remember taking Twizzlers and jamming them under my lip to stop that. My trumpet playing left semi-permanent square indentations, too! Of course, at the orthodontist's office, they try to make things fun for you, like letting you pick the colors of the little rubber bands that go around the brackets. I chose a light sea green once and never did it again after someone called me "Salad Shooter. " School colors were popular, too, but the yellow and black made me look like I had holes in every other tooth.
I began asking for generic gray. I didn't mind the way braces looked. Another odd thing...one of the nurses added an interesting twist to my look. I had requested metal braces instead of clear, and my top ones were metal. However, when I went back for the bottom teeth, for some odd reason she placed clear brackets. They felt kind of strange, but I didn't smile much with my bottom teeth anyway, so it was no big deal.
Except for removal. They remove the clear ones differently than metal, and if you accidentally open your eye, you could be gouged by flying brackets when they pop the suckers off. I should know. Ahh...physically painful memories. I think I'll go outside and add a sunburn to the list. I look downright ghastly this year, since I don't have Premiere Tans around the corner. 
