Gym Class: Not for Nerds
My least favorite class was always gym class. I never liked penmanship much either, but gym was far worse. Especially for a nerdy kid like me, gym was an hour a day of the...
Tagged: elementary school
Growing Up with the Cub Scouts
There wasn’t a whole lot to do in Dupo, Illinois back in the late 1980s / early 1990s. Thankfully, I got involved in Cub Scouts. Most of the boys in my core group of...
A Literal Kid
I was a very literal kid. More so than most. Like the other kids in the gifted and talented class, I tended to take words and terms at face value. Somehow my left brain...
Guerrilla Redecorating
I was probably around nine or ten years old. It had been a normal day at school, so normal that I don’t remember anything about it. But when I came home, my world turned...
My First Computer: The Tandy 1000HX
It was my tenth birthday. I spent the afternoon in downtown St. Louis with my dad. When I came home, there was a computer in the living room, a Tandy 1000HX. “Happy birthday,” my...
No Smoking
I hate cigarettes. I always have. If there’s even a whiff of smoke in the air, I can smell it. And while I certainly have my share of bad habits, smoking is not one...
The Railroad Crossing From Hell
For a while my family lived in a small town named East Carondelet, Illinois. We lived in a little farmhouse several miles out of town, and we had to drive on a scary levee road...
Drinking Coffee as a Kid
I invented Starbucks as a kid. Okay, not really, but I wonder if I could’ve. Back in the 1980s, before gourmet cafes became all the rage, I liked to mix up elaborate drinks. Sometimes...
Memories of MS-DOS
My first exposure to MS-DOS was at my aunt’s house. She had an old IBM computer in the basement. It had an amber monitor, and all the words on the screen were a hideous...
Gifted and Talented
Back in grade school, I got admitted to the “gifted and talented” class. Once a week, I went off to the school library for an enrichment session. It was supposed to give us a...
