Oh my...

The stunningly patient and mighty fine SML has embarked on a massive project to digitize the myriad photographs that we have sitting around, albeit neatly in our storage room, in photo albums. I'm not kidding when I say it's massive and my wife has thrown herself into it with her usual tenacity and laser-like focus on getting the J-O-B done.

These pictures chronicle our more than twenty-six years together and the family that we've created. It's been a lot of fun to see all these images again. The memories are wonderful! We've laughed a lot as we've relived them. Tucked in these pictures, however, are some not so fun images. These are images from my own awkward growing up years that remind us, painfully so, just what a cruel mistress puberty can be. The choice is now yours to take a look into my past...

6th Grade 

I'd like to thank the creators of the 'Peter Brady Stone Cold Cool Pre-Teen Boy' collection for my shirt and to the Wright Brothers for inspiring the designers of the shirt to make a wing structurecollar that would allow me to take flight, literally, during dust storms in Arizona.

8th Grade

Because apparently I mistook my last year before high school as an opportunity to impress on everyone that I had a future career as a lawyer/banker/insurance salesman.

High School Junior Prom

So you would think that things would have gotten better for me in high school. Yeah, me too, but they didn't. Glasses version 4.0, which darkened in the sunlight, did nothing for the 'cool' factor. Nothing. The plaid was a nice touch though, or at least that's what was dictated by the powers that be in 1983.

Senior Photo

This photo has appeared in the blog before. Just a man-boy in his shorty shorts, helmet hair, bleached polo shirt, and his water ski. Nothing says 'I'm a proud high school graduate!' than this. Nothing. People, seriously, this was one of three in the "High School Graduate" series for which I posed. 

Freshman Year of College

Finally, in my freshman year at university, it appears from this photo that I may have finally been able to slip free from the cruel clutches of teenage angst and its evil overseer, the previously mentioned puberty. From this picture, taken in the lobby of one of our dorms, which has long since been torn down (a dagger, a dagger to my heart!), me and the swirly faces were having a good time. There I was sockless, sporting a Swatch watch (one of many from the collection I had at the time), and a smile. I'm proud to say I think I was shaving four days a week at this point! Bottom line, I was still a dork, albeit a happy one.

A few years later, at that same university, I was now a happy, grown up dork, shaving every day, twice (take that puberty!) if I had to take a test late in the day at the Testing Center / Hall of Judgement. I would soon stumble across a beautiful young woman, who while we were dating would get a picture of me at the height of my awkward years from my mother, upon which Mom wrote, "If you can love him like this, you can love him any time" or something to that affect, and love me she did and still does.

I'm a better man because of that love. Heaven knows, I'm still a dork. And now, instead of my pictures being mucked up by the cruel mistress of puberty, I now am fighting the malevolent middle-age monster and all that means. I better go make sure I don't have some freaky hair protruding from my ear now. I'm out.