This is strange. In a new, um, development that is the weirdest yet, I may soon be
in the same cup size as the well-endowered
href="http://weetabix.diaryland.com">Weetabix. (No, I'm not growing more;
she's shrinking.) That's just bizarre on so many levels. In my case, mostly the
level a bit less than halfway between the armpit and the elbow. I can only
conclude that band size has more to do with apparent size than I had ever
realized.
Moving on, here is are my Quiz questions from the lovely, pale and interesting
href="http://trancejen.diaryland.com">TranceJen. First, the Rules, because
part of doing the meme is agreeing to pass it on:
1 -- Leave a comment in the guestbook or notes if you want to be interviewed.
2 -- I will respond; I'll ask you five questions.
3 -- You'll update your journal with my five questions, and your five answers.
4 -- You'll include this explanation.
5 -- You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed. Here
are your questions.
Here are Trance's questions:
Dichroic, you call yourself a Jill of all trades and mistress of none. If you
had to limit yourself to three and only three activities for the rest of your
life, which would you choose? (I'm talking extra-curricular activities, by the
way.) Would you choose things that you're already quite good at, or things that
you want to improve upon?
Reading, for one. I can live without rowing and all the rest of it; I can't live
without reading. Anything else is a distant second. Or, wait, does sex count as an
"extra-curricular activity"? If so, then it's not quite such a distant second.
(Though I still spend a lot more time reading.) And I think my next choice would
be traveling, rather than rowing, though that one would be close. If sex doesn't
count, then rowing as a third.
2. Rowing. Your love for the sport is very clearly evident. How did you get
into it, and did you think that it would become such a big part of your life? What
is it about rowing in particular that really makes you happy?
How did I get into it? Rudder had started rowing with a local club that was still
fairly new. (The Bay Area Rowing Club of
Houston, aka BARC.) He said, "Please just take this class and try it. If you
don't like it you can always stop." That was in 1990. One of my favorite tings
about rowing at the club level (as opposite to collegiate or elite crews) is that
anyone who wants to row, can, and can even compete. (How you do in competition is
another matter.) I'll never be the fastest boat on the water (much too short), but
on the other hand I row my own boat and run my own training so no one can tell me
to stop, either. And club rowers do tend to be supportive of anyone who wants to
row. Also, you can choose to row in an eight, four, double, or single, so you get
the choice of working with a crew or alone; it's a very different experience, and
different things work better for different people. Right now I really like being
in my own boat and running my own training; I don't have to wait for other people
or worry about coaches making stupid decisions.
3. Tell me how you and Rudder came to be. You are allowed to be mushy, if you'd
like. People who've been married for ten years are allowed to mush.
This is a good story, but I warn you, it's a bit long, though not too mushy. There
was this guy, PigFarmer, who I used to work with. Actually, more precisely, we
worked for the same company and used to party together. He left that company and
went to work somewhere else. I ran into him at someone else's St. Patrick's Day
party, and he invited me to a Tacky Party he was having a week later, on March 23,
1990. I went, garbed in my obnoxiously bright men's large red-flowered Hawaiian
shirt. (Well, and pants. Not that tacky.) He'd invited a bunch of people from his
current company, including some young engineers.
Now, there's some backstory essential to understanding why I was so thrilled to
see them. After graduating Penn (East Coast, Ivy League, large Jewish population)
I moved to Houston where I knew nobody. The people I was working with were mostly
born and bred Texans or Cajuns, Baptist or Catholic, with an Associate's degree in
Drafting or Design. (There were a couple of engineers, but mostly not very
interesting people.) It was a huge culture shock, and though a lot of the people
were warm and hospitable and great to go drinking with, they were also determined
to make sure this Yankee college girl didn't get above herself. I'd been dealing
with a variety of brilliant, well-educated, thinking people in college, who
largely had liberal-ish opinions on a lot of issues and these were much more
conservative people with different interests, at different stages in life and,
honestly, mostly not nearly as bright (of course there were exceptions on both
ends). So I was extremely happy to meet a bunch of other recently-graduated
engineers. One of them was Rudder.
Now there's his backstory. He had a couple of female friends from college
visiting, both of whom were trying to hook up with some of the other guys at the
party (one of whom lived with his girlfriend, but I didn't know that then). The
one wanted to get Rudder paired up with someone so she could go off and snog
without guilt, so when she and I got to talking, she said, "Have you met my
friend, Rudder? He's really nice." Oddly enough, I remember looking over at him,
trying to picture him without the mustache he had then, and deciding he had a bone
structure that would age well. (
href="http://riseagain.net/dichroic/images/aragorn.jpg">It has.) Next thing I
knew, I was in a car with Rudder and another guy, going to get the other guy's
boat. (The party was at a house right on Clear Lake, near Houston.) Then six of us
went out on the lake in the boat. The other two couples immediately lunged at each
other, so Rudder and I sort of looked at each other, shrugged, and began kissing -
- there obviously wasn't much else to do! We kept it pretty much to liplock,
though before we headed in I did notice one of the other women pulling her shirt
back on.
Before leaving the party, he asked for my number, and to my astonishment, used it
soon after. Then he started coming over after work, since I lived right by his
company, and shortly after unofficially moved in. We officially decided to move in
together in June, so when his lease ended we looked for an apartment we both
liked. I moved into to it for real in September, when my lease ran out. So if
you're counting, that's only six months after we met. We got officially engaged in
November of 1991, and got married July 4, 1993. That, as Churchill said, was only
the end of the beginning.
4. Talk to me about Massachusetts.
If you ever have an opportunity to work in Worcester, MA, run away. Quickly. I do
like Boston, though (except that driving there sucks rocks), and there are some
beautiful and no doubt ungodly expensive houses in its surroundings. I have to say
though that I hated Worcester so much that I tried to avoid it on weekends and so
missed some things there I've have liked to see, like a museum of armor and a
library good enough to be mentioned in Nicholas Basbanes' books. I think I could
live in Boston; there's a huge amount of good folk music aorund, which is
something I still miss from Philadelphia; there's lots of rowing; and it's an easy
drive to go camp in the White Mountains in NH, which we loved.
5. Travel. If you could hop on a plane tomorrow with an unlimited amount of
cash, where would you go and why?
Had I but cash enough and time ... I'd buy the damned plane, get whatever licenses
I needed to fly it (probably IFR, Commercial, and Multi-Engine) and fly everywhere
I wanted. There's no one place I could see and die happy: I want to visit much
more of Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland again, Italy, the obligatory visit to
Israel (preferably when they're not fighting much) and Egypt, Japan, Iceland,
Chile and Peru, Costa Rica, South Africa, New Zealand's North Island, more of
Australia including Tasmania, more of Alaska, Prague. And I'm sure there's more
I'm forgetting and places I've never thought of that I'd love.
Anyone who wants to be interviewed next, let me know in the GBook.