Thursday, February 15, 2007

Getting Back Into It

Yeow. It's been nearly three weeks since I last wrote in my little blog, and for those of you who may have come to depend on me writing here every few days or so, I am sorry I have let you down. I don't know what happens, but every once in awhile, I just don't feel like writing - simply put. That's what has been going on during those three weeks. So nothing serious has happened to me; just simply laziness, I guess. I come rejuvinated and energized to do some serious writing the next few weeks.

The last time I wrote to you, things at work had not been very pleasing. Many changes have taken place within the time I last wrote, including personnel changes on each crew and a new schedule. There was some awkwardness to get past at first when dealing with different people on the crew, but all of that is now in the past. I must admit, there were a couple of days there where all of a sudden, those changes affected me hard and I was depressed. I even seriously considered posting out of my department. But I tell you, I feel much better about circumstances now, and feel we have the best crew in the mill (just as I thought with the old crew, before things were changed around). Yes, we do have our weaknesses and there are areas of the mine as a whole that the crew is not all that familiar with. But, we are working through those issues. I think it really helped me that I worked with many of the people on my crew already in the past, otherwise I think the transition would've been more difficult. But all in all, things are going much better at work than what I reported to you last. Even the schedule seems halfway decent, although our crew has only had to work two 12-hour shifts thus far. That changes this coming weekend.

I don't want to focus too much on work in this particular blog, since the previous two blogs were heavily focused on work and were rather negative on my part. I just wanted to update the readers out there who may be interested in knowing what all has happened at my place of employment during the past three weeks. Now onto the other half of the blog:

I don't know how I came to think about this, but I began to recall a high school memory from out of the blue. I don't know if I had been day dreaming or what, but I remember my class bringing a live band to our school back when we were freshman in high school. Oh yes, I remember what made me think of this. There was a clip regarding a local band playing at Michigan Tech University in Houghton on the local news, and in the clip was a band setting up on Tech's gymnasium floor. I saw that picture, and then I remember what we did back in high school. See, our class was sort of revolutionary in a way. We wanted to do things differently instead of doing the same traditional activities year after year. All of the school dances during high school usually consisted of a deejay playing songs. Well, the one dance we hosted during our freshman year, we brought a live band to the school. And I can tell ya, it was one of the coolest things I had ever seen. The atmosphere in the gym was electric, the lights were bright, and the music was quite loud. We even held the dance in the new gymnasium instead of the old, where all of the other dances were usually held. It ended up being a "sock hop," which meant we couldn't wear any sort of shoes on the gym floor, since it was the main gym for playing basketball in. We had to protect the floor, so we basically just danced in our socks. And I can remember being on the dance floor with only a dozen other people, but it was a blast. It had been years prior to that that a live band was brought to our school; I had heard as far back as the 1970's. So we were doing something unique that hadn't been done in a long time. And I can't take any credit for this, since I was not part of my class' elected representatives. But it was one of those fond memories that I enjoyed about my group of classmates.

Another case of us wanting to be different; when it was our turn to host the junior-senior prom, we held it at a venue where it had never been held prior before. It was held in a luxurious hotel in downtown Marquette. And although it was a beautiful place, I must admit it was a little too cramped for comforts, in my opinion (not a lot of space on the dance floor). It was a nice evening and an event worth going to (even though my date for the prom was a total disappointment), and another example of our class wanting to be different. We even held different fundraisers that no other class had ever hosted. Let's just say we wanted make things interesting and fun for people. It's one of the things I admired about my class; we dared to be different, and it never hurt us in the end.

It's amazing how out of touch I am with everyone that I graduated with. I don't even know where the majority of the people from my class are nowadays. I remember people telling me to "stay in touch" and to "never change." Those are some of the messages in my yearbooks, in fact. No, I haven't really changed much, but I certainly am not in touch with many of those people, I hate to say. And this year marks the seventh year I've been out of high school. It seems like so long ago, yet not really. I remember reliving memories regarding the year 2000, especially those involving the Y2K scare. It seems like yesterday, and we're already seven years removed from that event. Unbelievable.

So even though the years continue to pass by, I still recall some rather vivid memories of high school. And I had better write them down now because soon enough, I probably won't be able to recall very many as the years breeze on by.

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