The best Halloween ever

Fall has always been my favorite time of year, not because of Halloween, but because of the outdoor sights, sounds and smells of the season. The leaves cling to the branches in a kaleidoscope of colors—burnt orange, burgundy, gold and olive. When they waft to the earth, they create crisp piles through which young feet (or older ones!) like to shuffle. When you stroll around the block, you inhale the pungent chimney smoke rising into the air from the logs in your neighbors’ fireplaces. And if you’re lucky, you’ll also catch the deer at dusk, nibbling the sweet stems from summer’s remaining day lilies.

To me, Halloween marks the end of fall and hails the entrance of winter. Both here and in Wisconsin, where I grew up, Halloween is often so cold that you can see you breath mist as you traipse from door to door. Children wear long johns or sweat pants to keep their legs warm, hoping they won’t have to hide their costumes beneath coats or jackets. In our family, you went trick-or-treating when you were in kindergarten or first grade, and then you gave out treats at the door as you grew older. My brother Mark, like Peter Pan who did not want to grow up, had a rubber gorilla mask he donned one year while he attempted to scare our little visitors.

In any event, our family’s Halloween nights were for the very young. When I was 16 years old and announced to my parents that I wanted to host a costume party, I think everyone was ready for a change. My friend Pat, a talented artist, volunteered to design paper wall decorations and helped me hang them. My mother and I planned the menu and set a festive table, and my father and brother set up an acoustic system for a haunted house in the basement. Crepe paper streamers and spider webs were hung everywhere, along with lanterns. Everyone brainstormed activities. And, of course, we purchased prizes for all the guests.

When the big day arrived, everyone was appropriately dressed. There was Donna as Mr. Donut, Debbie the Barefoot Nurse, Pat the Rat, Bev the Washer Woman, Nancy the Pumpkin, Serenella the Indian, Luwanna and Teri as the Black and Pink Panthers, Sue the Farmer, Donna the Belle, and Marcia as Mickey Mouse. I guess I was the Queen of Hearts; regretfully I have no photos of myself, since I was the photographer. Before long, the foosball and checker tournaments were in full swing. In the darkened laundry room, my friends and I sat in a circle and joined hands for a mock séance, giggling nervously when pre-recorded shrieks and spooky sounds were piped into the space. I recall at least one silly skit that was performed. We played Pin the Bone On the Skeleton, bobbed for apples, and generally made fools of ourselves.

 

Today I wonder if the Halloween of 1972 is so memorable because it differed so greatly from most other trick-or-treat nights, or simply because it was so much fun to plan together as a family. That year, however, it was the best Halloween ever!

© 2009 Judy Nolan. All rights reserved. 

First stitches, first steps

My first Simplicity half-apron and gray kettle cloth jumper are decades behind me, but I still recall many of the items on Miss Banovich’s 7th grade sewing supplies list: seam ripper, seam gauge, measuring tape, pins, fabric scissors, sewing machine needles, thread, and a couple of clear plastic bobbins. Interestingly, it was my father—not my mother—who helped me collect these items. In fact, I still have my first sewing basket, a rather humble-looking box in gold-flecked white vinyl that dates back to the 1970s.

My mother, whose brief foray into sewing included a set of unevenly cut yellow curtains that she hoped no one would remember, did not enjoy sewing. She was horrified, in fact, when she returned to Germany to visit her mother, and those curtains were hung in a window in her honor. With relief, she passed on to me the darning egg in her sewing basket to mend my father’s socks, along with a stack of trousers that needed to be shortened for the summer. She was my sewing cheerleader, but it was my father with whom I held discussions about how to thread our Sears Kenmore sewing machine.  These days my father wishes he knew what happened to that old Kenmore, but I think it’s likely my mother gave it away when I went to college and bought my own Brother machine. She is no longer with us, so I guess that will remain her little secret.

The garments I sewed and the events of those early years are connected like buttons sewn on a sweater. My boyfriend (who became my husband) was a midshipman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, so every winter and spring during college, I sewed a floor-length gown for the Navy R.O.T.C. balls we attended together. Likewise, I made some of the dresses I wore as a sales clerk while working at Gimbels Department Store during college. And when John and I married, I made my own bridal gown and veil.

In the early years of our marriage, we lived in southern California, where John was stationed as a Naval Weapons Officer. When we moved to the West coast, the sewing machine and cabinet—and all of my fabrics and notions—occupied a significant portion of the space in the U-Haul we rented, along with my numerous books. Eight years later, when our son was born, a Pfaff sewing machine had replaced the Brother, and I sewed many of David’s play clothes.

Today my sewing machine no longer occupies a corner of a bedroom or living room, but sits in its own dedicated space: a sewing room. Of course, that’s not the only place in our home where I create—John says that wherever you find horizontal surfaces is where you'll find my work—but it is nice to have a home base, of sorts! My sewing room is where my Pfaff Creative 7530 sewing machine resides, inside a solid oak Parsons cabinet.

This is also where I write. I love my Mission-style writing desk.

The closet holds quilting rulers and templates, specialty sewing tools, interfacing and stabilizers, and boxes of sewing supplies.Fabric is another story . . . no space in this room!

Along one wall is Dolly (my dress form), who wears a half-finished apron. I like to “dial her down” so that I can imagine what I might look like if I lost some weight!

In a corner of the room stands a chest of drawers for needlework supplies. Next to it is a small couch where I like to do hand sewing, or browse through how-to publications.

Projects are always spilling out of my sewing room into other rooms because my working space is no bigger than a child’s small nursery. Still, this is where many of my Etsy products are created. In short, it’s a cozy place to ponder, poke at fabrics, and produce!

© 2009 Judy Nolan. All rights reserved.

Time capsule: from punch cards to iPhones

Forty years ago on September 2, 1969—when I was just beginning junior high school—Internet pioneer Len Kleinrock led an Arpanet experiment in which essentially meaningless data was passed through a 15-foot gray cable linking two UCLA computers. Arpanet, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, was actually a military experiment, although Kleinrock and his team hoped there eventually would develop an open network for the free exchange of information. Less than a month later, the first two letters of the word “logon” were exchanged between two computers at different sites—UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. By the end of the year, the Arpanet network had extended to a third site, the University of California-Santa Barbara.

By the time I was in high school during the early 1970s—largely unaware of the beginnings of a technology I am using today to write this blog post—the first computer programming classes were being offered at my school. While I sat through advanced German, chemistry and Honors English classes,  Ray Tomlinson introduced the @ symbol for e-mail addresses belonging to other systems, or what we call domains today. When I graduated in 1974 and began attending college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn developed a communications technique called TCP, which allowed multiple networks to communicate with each other. This, then, was the true beginning of the Internet. But I was still ignorant of its existence, although my boyfriend (now my husband) shared some of that early excitement (and frustration) as he sifted through stacks of punch cards in the wee hours of the morning in the computer science building across from Rust House, the co-op where he resided.

When I graduated from Mount Mary College-Milwaukee in 1978 with a degree in English and communication, I worked at a publishing company. The accounting department had just begun using a Wang computer to process its work, but I was still typing my daily correspondence on an IBM Selectric typewriter. I was thrilled, in fact, to be able to choose typefaces beyond the traditional Pica and Elite because of the interchangeable golf ball-type elements that made this possible.  Of course, those metal golf balls often cracked because of metal fatigue! The president of the company would slide a flexible black plastic belt off his Dictaphone machine and pass it to me, marking with a wax pencil the spot where he had finished recording his dictation. He was a thrifty man who was convinced we would save dollars by layering sheets of stationery and carbon paper, and wrapping them around the typewriter platen to make copies, rather than wasting the toner in the Xerox photocopy machine one floor below me. When the head of the accounting department told the president that one day I would use a computer for correspondence, he scoffed at the notion. Today that same publisher maintains multiple Web sites, and I daresay the Selectrics have been retired.

Fast forward to the early 1980s, when the business sector exploded with increased applications of computer technology. Electronic typewriters with a small amount of built-in memory were popular. Exxon launched its “office of the future” campaign, and sold such products as the Qyx word processor and the QWIP fax machine. I worked for a commercial-industrial real estate developer at the time. He bought a Qyx and literally fused it to my mahogany desk with a heat application to prevent theft. I wonder what became of it! We both walked across the street to use the QWIP at the nearby data processing facility to transmit facsimile messages via a telephone modem. The typewriter stored the equivalent of about 3-6 letters, and I can still hear the ka-CHUNK-ah of the paper-wrapped fax cylinder as it rotated during message transmission. You needed to use a photocopy of your message, since the paper was sometimes rather dog-eared by the time the message was sent.

Clunky dedicated word processing machines and personal computers were not far behind electronic typewriters. By 1983, such names as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Lanier, Xerox, CPT, Wang, Sun Microsystems, Apple, Compaq, Brother and more populated the market. My husband and I lived in California, where new developments in computer technology were everyday happenings. As a software support training specialist, I was part of the office automation world, encouraging my clients not to fear the use of a monitor, CPU (central processing unit), keyboard and daisywheel printer. I saw the entrance of the dot matrix, laser and inkjet printers. I still remember gaining access to Vandenberg Air Force Base and NSWSES (Naval Ship Weapon Systems Engineering Station, pronounced “nemesis”) in Port Hueneme, California, where I drove from site to site, providing CPT training support to civilians and military personnel. We were excited about each new technology advance, and celebrated the entry of Harvard Graphics, Ventura Publishing and WordPerfect software into the market. When it was announced that the CPT Phoenix could be partitioned to support both its own software and that of the IBM-PC, we were amazed. When the CPT SRS (Shared Resource System) that could share one hard drive between multiple word processors was introduced, we were thrilled. This was also when a domain system for the Internet was proposed, followed by the use of such suffixes as “.com,” “.gov,” and “.edu.”

By the early 1980s, people began using the Internet for personal use. CompuServe served the e-mail, e-commerce and gaming industries. Remember Atari? I can recall the first Commodore 64 computer that John and I owned. We bought a small television set to use as a monitor, and slid single-sided 5-1/4 inch floppy disks (back when disks actually were flexible) into a standalone rectangular disk drive. These were the days of Zork, a text-based interactive fantasy game that has since evolved into a graphic-based version. Not long after our first computer purchase, we became the proud owners of our first PC-clone, the XT. Since that day, our household has never been without at least two computers in the house!

When our son was a preschooler during the early 1990s, we began using the computer—much as others did—to pursue leisure interests. We had relocated to central Iowa, and I longed to share with others my passion for sewing, quilting, needlework and crafts. GEnie (General Electric Network for Information Exchange), an ASCII text-based system developed in 1985, was perfect for my purposes. It sported a round table (RT) posting system that enabled you to send electronic messages to an interest group. The messages were later read offline. I can recall swapping patterns and tips, and participating in quilt block exchanges. GEnie gave way to Prodigy, a system which purported ease-of-use for inexperienced computer users as its biggest advantage, and finally to AOL, which at one point was one of the largest online subscription services, but today is a company in transition, as it has many competitors.

Since those early days of the Internet, when governmental and academic use were most prevalent, the Internet has likely expanded beyond what Len Kleinrock originally envisioned. While much information can openly be shared, other information is locked behind doors, available only for a price, or through a secure password. People with no programming or coding background (such as myself) can communicate, sell and educate ourselves via e-mail, file sharing, blogs, photos, videos, online shops, social networks and much more. But at the same time, others can abuse the Internet with pornography, e-stalking, viruses, terrorism—and the list continues.

Today’s tots slide a mouse across a pad or their fingers across a touch pad long before they read, while their older teen siblings and 20-somethings tote electronic notebooks in their backpacks and messenger bags. They text messages, send photos, share videos, and surf the Net on their iPhones at all times of the day. It’s not surprising that they might expect  “old people” (in their 30s and 40s!) to be less technically proficient than they are—and in some cases they are correct—but those in their 50s and beyond share a historical perspective about how the Internet began. Happy birthday, Arpanet!

If you are interested in learning more about the history of the Internet, you may wish to visit the following sites:

• “As Internet turns 40, barriers threaten its growth,” Anick Jesdanun, Associated Press Technology Writer
• “CPT Corporation,” Binary Dinosaurs: Tracing the History of Home Computing From 1972, Adrian Graham
  
• “History of ARPANET,” Michael Hauben
• “Histories of the Internet: A Brief History of the Internet,” Internet Society (ISOC)
• “Internet Creators Didn’t Foresee Today’s Web,” AP  Online Video Network
• “Key milestones in the development of Internet,” Associated Press

© 2009 Judy Nolan. All rights reserved.

I've been tagged!

This morning I was "tagged" by Myfanwy, a Welsh friend whose two shops, Sassa Lynne and Paper Patches, you'll find in the handmade goods marketplace at Etsy.com. Being tagged means you're charged with revealing six facts about yourself that most people don't know, and then tagging six other people who need to do the same thing. In that spirit, here are six tidbits about myself that you may be interested to know.

1. Although both of my parents were born in Germany, and I speak the language fluently, I learned the language in school, not from my parents. When my parents became naturalized American citizens, they insisted that we speak English at home. The exceptions were when they wanted to keep secrets from the children, and of course that's all the incentive we kids needed to learn German! Long before my parents realized it, we understood what they were saying.


2. My interest in foreign languages, in general, is what led me to meet my husband. My long-term plan was to become a United Nations translater by using the U.S. Army's excellent language schools as a stepping stone. As a result, I enrolled in the Army R.O.T.C. program at the University of Wisconsin my freshman year. Subsequently, I got involved in the tri-military exhibition rifle drill team, which is where I met John, who was in the Navy R.O.T.C. program. I left the Army program after a semester (not really a good match for me), while John was eventually commissioned as a Naval weapons officer. We married 5-1/2 years after we met. And that original desire to become a translater? Well, for many years I taught German in my community to elementary talented and gifted students. Today one of those students is a homeschooled high school student who meets with me weekly for continuing German instruction.


3. I'm a late-blooming poet. I published my first poem at the age of 45, after swearing that I could not write verse. Never say never!


4. Sitting on my bookshelves is an English-Norwegian dictionary. If I could choose anywhere in the world to travel, I'd love to visit Norway. The history, the geography, the diverse cultures (the Saami in the north, for example), the art and music, history and mythology--everything fascinates me.
   


5. I never had time during any of my formal schooling to take art classes. Perhaps that is why I make up for it as an adult, continually seeking ways to express myself with my hands. On my list of "things to learn" is the art of making the lucet cord. The lucet is a horn-shaped braiding tool that is believed to date back to the Viking and medieval periods of history. The cord that is produced with this tool is flat, flexible and very strong. Once upon a time it was used for lacing, making drawstrings for bags, hanging things from belts, and also for making decorative edging. Sailors used lucet cord for ropes at one time. Around the end of the 19th century, lucet cord was replaced by commercially-produced cording.


6. I wrote my first book when I was 12 years old. The book, Divided Planet, was well into its 20th chapter when I stopped writing it. I don't remember why I stopped, or even where all those handwritten pages are, but I do remember the passion that inspired it. How wonderful to not be inhibited by the Hidden Critic that accompanies any writing I do today!

So, there you have it! To read Myfanwy's post in which she responds to being tagged, visit her blog here.

© 2008 Judy Nolan. All rights reserved.