For those of you who don’t know, this is the brain child of -R- from And You Know What Else. It’s basically a day where people all over the internet get a chance to post anonymously on someone else’s site about anything they’d like to share.

This post here is not my post. (Although, let’s be honest, I so could have written it.) It is from some person who is the writer at one of the blogs below. I don’t even actually know who it is! (But I would like to! I like the way he/she thinks!)

So please be nice to my visitor and leave lots of comments!

Below is a list of all the participants of today’s Blog Share. Please go click, read and share the love. (Which means that the post I wrote is on one of the sites listed below.)

Not the Daddy
O is for Olson
Red Red Whine
Rediscovering Me
Reflections in the Snow-covered Hills
The Reluctant Grownup
Sauntering Soul
Serendipity Now
Snarke
So, This Is a Treadmill
Thinking Some More
Time for Change
Together They Come
Wondering and Pondering
And You Know What Else
Andrea Unplugged
Arctic-ulate
Bright Yellow World
Bwildered
Catheroominations
Did I Say That Outloud?
Dispatches from the Failed Mommy Club
Full of Snark
Heidikins
Hot Chicks Dig Smart Men
Just Below 63
The Little Goat

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<rant>

Do you ever find yourself saying “Back in my day…” and laugh a little because you realize that is what your parents said…and your parents parents..everything comes full circle, and it’s all starting to hit a lot harder lately. It’s amazing to me how far everything has come in the 3+ decades I’ve been around. I can imagine how my family felt….

Back in my day, I had to walk to work, uphill both ways….

Sometimes I just feel old. (and I’m only 32)

Back in my day, we had to go to the library to do research.

We knew what microfiche was.

We used ditto machines that would stain your hands if you touched the copy before it was dry.

We had to know how to spell, and a mistake made on a typewriter was time wasted.

We had to make phone calls, read gamer magazines, or just figure it out in order to complete video games. There were no walk thrus mapped out for you on the internet.

We made mix tapes, and couldn’t just buy a song on a whim.

We used to have tape making parties, and didn’t illegally download torrents to complete our collections.

We had to buy movie tickets at the movie theater, and had to wait in line at Ticketmaster outlet locations to secure good concert tickets.

Our cell phones, if we had one, didn’t fit into our back pockets

Our Dungeons and Dragons games were played on paper.

If we were making plans to go out, we had to make sure we were at home to receive the call, and no one else was on the phone otherwise the caller would get a busy signal.

Everyone had cash at all times because no one took debit cards.

You had to set your VCR, and hope the tape didn’t run out, or a family member didn’t record over your favorite shows (e.g. the day I lost Ren & Stimpy to my mothers soap opera).

Saturday Night Live was funny.

Celebrities were a mystery, and we knew little about them, and what we did know was interesting…not what they had for dinner.

Action movies used actual fire, not CGI

Yoda was a puppet.

Hot rods were muscle cars, and not Honda Civics.

You actually had to call your friends to find out how they were, not just read it on Facebook/Twitter/Myspace.

The only reality TV was The Real World and daytime talk shows like Sally Jesse Raphael.

Def Leopard > Britney Spears

We only had 8 bits.

Cartoons were hand drawn.

The video store was a hot spot on a Friday night.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was an actor.

Jesse Ventura was a wrestler.

Al Franken was Stuart Smalley, and gosh darn it people liked him.

Michael Jordan didn’t just sell shoes.

Jennifer Lopez was a Fly Girl.

Paula Abdul was a Laker Girl

Gas was $0.93 a gallon

Porn came in magazines, or tapes that you got from your friend who stole it from their dad.

Your friends living room was your chat room.

I think that my generation had a lot more patience than the current one. We had to work for information. It wasn’t just handed to us in a Google search box. Kids these days….

</rant>

For those of you who don’t know, this is the brain child of -R- from And You Know What Else. It’s basically a day where people all over the internet get a chance to post anonymously on someone else’s site about anything they’d like to share.

This post here is not my post. It is from some person who is the writer at one of the blogs below. I don’t even actually know who it is this time since R went and changed up the rules.

So please be nice to my visitor and leave lots of comments!

Below is a list of all the participants of today’s Blog Share. Please go click, read and share the love.

And You Know What Else
Andrea Unplugged
Blue Soup
Bright Yellow World
Bwildered
Caity of the Keps
Catheroominations
Citystreams
Daily Tannenbaum
Did I Say That Outloud?
Dispatches From The Failed Mommy Club
Face Down
For The Long Run
Full Of Snark
Heidikins
In Java, Literally
Just Below 63
LizLand
Malfeasance
A New Duck
NonSoccer Mom
The North Is My Snowcone
Not The Daddy
Operation Pink Herring
Pants, Pants, Pants
Red Red Whine
Sassy Buster
Sauntering Soul
Shushing Action
Snarke
Snow-Covered Hills
Swimming With Sharks
Thinking Some More
Trueish Story
Way Way Up
Whiskey Marie

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…And Then One Day, It Wasn’t A Drill

When I was a teenager I once set off the fire alarm in a school. It was summer and I was helping my stepfather install some tile in a portable so no one was around. I was curious to see if the alarm system would work, afterall, it was summer break. Well, to make a long story short…it worked. Needless to say, my stepfather (and the janitor who had to come in from home and shut it off), was not impressed.

A few years earlier, the house next door to where I grew up burned to the ground, the result of a cigarette carelessly flicked into a garbage can. I remember my stepfather waking me up and sitting around the kitchen table with my sisters, ready to leave at a moments notice if the winds outside blew the fire close enough to our house. My parents told me it was one of the few times where the three of us were completely silent. I remember being quite scared at the time, of course. The thought that I might lose the place I grew up in sickened and worried me. Fortunately our house was spared. Next door, one young man escaped the inferno by jumping from a second story window. A second young man was not so lucky, succumbing at the scene to smoke inhalation.

As a result, I never fool around when it comes to fires – or fire alarms. Occasionally, as a teacher, I bump into situations where some student sets it off for a lark. Early in my teaching career, I had a situation where I thought a bored student had set off the alarm and I went through the motions of leaving the school with my students. This time however, it was the real deal.

The school I was working in at the time was the largest in the board, actually one of the largest in the entire province – close to 500 students from Kindergarten to grade 6. Once I had led all my grade 6 students to the appropriate assembly area out in the playground, I did a quick head count….1…2…3…4…5…6…7…8…9…10…11…12…13…14…15…16…17…18…19……It slowly dawned on me that I was one student short in my count….one student…one life. I did a recount. And then another. 19. I looked around for him but couldn’t see him through the sea of bodies. At this point I assumed it was just a drill and I remember joking that I wished students would at least wait until the afternoon to pull the alarm rather than doing it at 10am on a Monday morning.

I left my students in the care of a colleague and went on a search for my missing student. It was then that I saw flames shooting out of the side entrance of the school. I know of very few scarier situations where you are responsible for young lives in the face of a situation where you have no control. Outwardly, I exuded calm. I passed by a group of Kindergarten students who were crying and didn’t want to add to their anxiety by showing panic. Inwardly, however, I most certainly was panicking.

Wailing sirens announced the arrival of the fire department. I began to seriously entertain the possibility of re-entering the building to find the student. I had to find him. I just had to. After what seemed an eternity, I spotted my missing charge standing next to another teacher. To say I was relieved would be a gross understatement. I wanted to give the boy a good dressing down for putting me in such a panic. This was a kid that could be quite stubborn and difficult to deal with. It was a rare day that he could follow instructions. Really though, I was glad he was safe. Turns out he had turned left when the other students had turned right after leaving the class. He had wandered off to find a pair of running shoes and quickly separated from the rest of us, eventually leaving the school through another exit. I was so relieved and so pumped up on adrenaline that I was visibly shaking at this point. The relief I felt was indescribable.

The fire was extinguished within a few minutes of the fire trucks arriving. To make a long story short, it turned out that the boiler room had caught fire. Most of the damage (thank goodness for solid brick schools) had been contained to the boiler room and a storage room. The fire meant we got an unexpected mid-February holiday for about a week while the affected areas were cleaned up and the smells were dealt with.

Occasionally when I reflect back on my career to date, I find myself pondering this incident, which wasn’t really all that long ago. It’s a situation I hope I never experience again and something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Looking back on that day, I learned many things – life is precious, always be diligent and above all, a ringing fire alarm may not always mean “just another drill”.

I’m actually participating this time. Which means the anonymous post I wrote is posted on a site somewhere else. In exchange, I’m letting someone post anonymously here.

So please read and comment. Be nice to my guest.

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Sometimes I wish I had never given out my blog address to anyone I know in real life. Of course it is my own fault; the vision of hundreds of comments pouring in on every post too much for me to resist even if it means I occasionally have to email my own mother to remind her to comment. Still, it would make it so much easier on me if I could always write what I felt like writing. Like, for example, how I sometimes wish I were Hermione Granger because she is smart and cute and HELLO, she is a witch at Hogwarts and fights against the evil Voldemort to save all our hides. But then I would get an email from someone like my sister about how she is just too embarrassed that she is related to me because of how huge a nerd I am and then I would feel kind of silly for admitting it even though it is totally true.

I could also write about the time I peed my pants at a sleepover from laughing too hard when I was in seventh grade and how that bitch Stacy Vernholder that called herself my best friend told the boy I was crushing on about the incident, but then she would probably somehow find my Spacebook page and then my blog and then I would get a nasty email about how I should forgive and forget. And you know what? I don’t care if it was 1992, I AM STILL MAD.

I could write about how I am still waiting for my man to buy me some bling bling and declare his intentions without him freaking out and going into his “I don’t believe in weddings” spiel. Yes, we’ve had this conversation my love, now will you please just shut it and get thee to a diamond store? I would write about how we’ve had the No Weddings discussion many times, how I am in agreement that weddings are dumb but marriage itself is not, and if he wanted, if he asked, I would do it up in City Hall tomorrow and have a party later so that someone can buy me that breadmaker I’ve always wanted.

I could tell the world about how I am a totally selfish jerk because I can’t even imagine having a pet right now, let alone a baby, and I wouldn’t even have to worry about the multitude of phone calls I would take from my mother informing me that my uterus has a shelf life and don’t I care that she has always wanted to be a grandmother? Hold on Mom, there’s a bottle of Shiraz on the other line. Can I call you back?

But see? Now I’ve gone and spilled the beans. That’s what happens when you have the freedom of anonymity. And maybe some of you will guess who wrote this post, but even if you do, at least I won’t have to answer to you in real life and that will make all the difference. 

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If you want to check out all the other Blog Share posts, here is the complete list:

Vent Vox
Turn On The Stars
Trudie – Life After AC
Swimming With Sharks
Stefanie Says
Shhh! Librarian-In-Training
Sauntering Soul
Sass Attack
Reflections in the Snow Covered Hills
Red Red Whine
Our Simplicity
One New Duck
Oh My Seven
The Occasional Truth
No Lady
Nancy Pearl Wannabe
Muse On Vacation
Messing With Texas
Melliferous Pants
Lizland
Live Work Dream
Just Below 63
Jonniker
Java Literally
Heidikins
Full of Snark
Face Down
Ex Everything
Everything I Like Causes Cancer
Did I Say That Outloud?
The Daily Tannenbaum
The Coconut Diaries
Citystreams
Catheroominations
Bright Yellow World
Breath Smiles Tears
And You Know What Else
Alyndabear
3 Carnations