Odds and ends

79-year-old Claudia Johnsen is holding an essay contest to determine the distribution of five valuable properties - an apartment condominium in Alexandria, a townhouse condominium in the Watergate, a country home near Dunn's Gap, 1/3 share of the Oxon Park Apartments, and about 124 acres of undeveloped, wooded, waterfront property on the Potomac. Seriously. All you have to do is write an essay, in 75 words or fewer, explaining why you want the property, and submit the $100 entry fee, and you could own one of these properties - you do get to choose which property you want, although you have to submit a separate essay for each property - within the next year. Get your entries in soon, though; the state of Virginia only allows a certain number of entries per contest. (Yes, these properties are all in northern Virginia and suburban Maryland.)

I had the High School dream last night - not only was I naked (save my bathrobe), but I hadn't graduated because I'd forgotten to finish a test (in Russian, a language which I've never studied - although the Cyrillic alphabet somehow mutated into a combination of hiragana and Greek characters), and after I did that, I couldn't remember which class I had next. Oddly, Ian J. made a cameo appearance.

Having forgotten to take my daily 15 mg of Lexapro today, I'm in something of a low mood. Hopefully this will be rectified when I go home.

Having managed to get to work at 5:15 this morning, it looks like I have a long and hopefully-productive afternoon ahead of me.

So, all in all, a positive morning so far.

Aw yeah

But my new magenta hair doesn't have to be a complete disaster. I just need to find people with hair dyed cyan, yellow and black and start a band called The Halftones.

toastyfrog is back. It's hard to describe how happy this makes me; Mr. Parish is one of the most consistently clever writers I can think of, to the point where if he and Sarah Bunting wrote a book together I think my heart might very well explode.

Photographs

...and apparently I need to make some corrections. My sister, who was a fifth-grade student at the school when it burned down, has a better memory of the events than I do, and in addition had first-hand reports of the fire. (One final edit - I finally found the year in which Hereford High School opened and replaced Sparks High School!)

I'd anticipated that one of my first projects with my new digital camera might be to go and take photographs of my old elementary school, and so it was. I wish I'd had more photos to take; unfortunately, I didn't want to spend too much time, and the quality setting I was using only allowed me 10 photos. (9 are shown here, due to interference in one photograph.) With any luck, I'll be able to return soon - I live about ten miles south of the school - and get some more photographs.

The Sparks Elementary School (formerly the Sparks Agricultural High School, which moved to a building about five miles north in 1953) burned almost to the ground on January 8, 1995 - the weekend after students returned from winter break. The fire apparently started in the lower levels, near the boiler and music room. It was discovered by custodians who were setting up for the Sunday church services in the auditorium/gymnasium. (I had previously reported that January 8 was the day students returned from winter break, that the principal discovered the fire, and that the fire started on the upper levels - which is how my memory has events playing out. I can't find any reports either way, but I do trust my sister's recollection of events, since she was closer to the source than I.)

I attended Sparks Elementary from 1985 (the beginning of second grade) through 1989 (when I left 5th grade). I remember the classrooms, the art rooms on the lower floor, the library at the far end of the upper level (I recall particularly that during my 5th-grade year, the librarian had surgery to remove cataracts), the gymnasium on the lower level and the cafeteria in-between the two. The gymnasium doubled as the auditorium, and on that stage I sang many concerts in the elementary-school chorus and performed as Friar Lawrence in our 5th-grade production of Romeo & Juliet. I could probably tell you which teacher taught in every classroom on the second floor (with one exception, because I was never assigned to her classes) and I could at least tell you what was taught in every room on the first floor.

Now there's just a grassy field and the remains of the old front-end, built well before the rest of the school and used to house the first Agricultural School classes.

( Photographs of the remains of the School )

Note to self:

Being assertive is not the same thing as being the bad guy.