We admittedly really fell off the attic destashing wagon after the first weekend we started lol; we really have no ambition. To be fair, most of January and part of February was spent getting slammed with Valentine card orders – not complaining!!
Anyway, it snowed a lot over night and was generally miserable out, so the weather combined with equally-as-miserable gas prices kept us inside today. So, what better time to reconvene in the attic armed with industrial garbage bags?!
Granted, I only semi-helped, and excused myself at one point to go and do a walking workout, but in the time I did spend in the attic today, I found some fun things!
I was straight up obsessed with While You Were Out and obviously Teresa Strasser was my favorite. I actually learned the term “gilding the lily” from her (which Chooch claims I say “like, all of the time” apparently). I have a very fond memory of recovering from a kidney infection so bad it landed me in the ER, while laying on the couch and watching WYWO on TLC. Back when TLC had good reality shows. This literally was my comfort show. And I associate it with brownies from the Giant Eagle bakery because it was all I wanted to eat and Henry was like “aye aye captain” and fetched them for me, and then when I gained weight, I blamed it on him but this was very early into our relationship and he probably wasn’t used to that yet and obviously cried alone in the dark.
I emailed Teresa one day to gush about how great she is and when I told her I was from Pittsburgh, she said she went to CMU! And then asked if I wanted a signed picture. Um, heck yeah, lady. I’ll add it to my collection of Melissa Brenna / Jen Horton from Days of Our Lives, David Copperfield, Elvira, and some host of a radio show in England whose name I can’t remember at the mo’ but I’m certain I recently posted about this.
Only bad thing about Teresa is that I listed her as an interest on LiveJournal and that is the fateful circumstance that led my ex-bff Christina to me. Nearly 20 years of tumult later, we talk sporadically but I mostly still hate her for being a fucking lying fake bitch.
Thanks, Teresa.
DUDE NEED I SAY MORE.
Henry casually said, “here’s my restricted area badge” and I nearly dove across 8 boxes of memories to snatch it from him.
“We’ll be keeping this,” I said as I snapped a picture to immediately post on IG.
“Do you know a XXXX XXXXXX?” Henry asked. The name immediately rang a bell, and I remembered that my brother Ryan was childhood friends with a kid that had the same name.
“Well, his dad crashed his car into my house when I lived in Pleasant Hills,” Henry said, handing me the accident report that he has evidently not been able to part with since THE YEAR OF THE INCIDENT: 1999.
I texted Ryan STAT to tell him of this development. It was funnier at first when I misheard Henry and thought he said it was actually Ryan’s friend who did the crashing, because he would have been A BIT young to be driving in 1999. But no, it was the dad and the STORY he gave the cops was that he was eating an ice cream cone while driving and CHOKED ON A PEANUT, causing him to lose control and veer off the road straight into Henry’s dining room. It’s only able to be a funny story now because no one was injured, and insurance paid for Henry’s house repairs so we can all sit back and laugh about it now because really, your man was choking on a peanut?
A LIKELY STORY.
Remember when I was mentioned in one of posts about THE CURE corner that I don’t have the tickets from when I saw The Cure in Canberra, Australia because I tried to laminate them when I came home and it ended up burning them and they became unsalvageable.
Well, I forgot that Robert Smith’s autograph (and Roger and Jason’s!) was still legible even though the rest of the info on the ticket was trashed, so I kept it. Totally forgot about this until today when Henry unearthed it from a crate of “miscellaneous stuff.” I was happy but also felt that same stomach sinking sensation at the memory of this tragedy which occurred in my office at Weiss Meats. Ugh. But! Now I have it displayed with the rest of my Cure concert tickets in my Cure Corner, so I feel a sense of completeness. Thanks, Henry, for finding this and not immediately think it was trash, lol.
I also found a VHS tape of footage from my 1995 Europe trip, recorded by one of the people in the tour group with us! She had mailed me a copy of it at some point after we all returned home and this is a big deal because this was the same trip that STEVE MY CRUSH was on! We still have a VCR hooked up from last year when I found my mom’s old Jackie Sorenson aerobics tape and couldn’t think of anything else that I wanted to do but the PONY-MONKEY on Jackie’s command.
So I made Henry watch this RIVETING home movie recorded by a 15-year-old girl from Minnesota just so I could play Steve-spotting. There is very little footage of me on this tape because when I had recently gotten my hair SHORN against my will (my mom told the stylist to “keep cutting” even though I was prepared with a picture of CARRIE BRADY from Days of Our Lives, wow, two DAYS references in one blog post, THERE’S THE ERIN WE KNOW) and was feeling very self-conscious about it. Amanda did a very good respecting my wishes but I did make it in a few times, like in this clip from Greece where I am looking v. 1995. But it was nice to see footage of my aunt Sharon though even though we fought the whole time lol.
I honestly do not remember THIS DENIM ENSEMBLE at all, but I also recently found a picture of me from the same day of that trip so I think it’s a sign that I should recreate this look for our spring break vaca that may or may not be happening (see aforementioned complaint about GAS PRICES).
Ugh same dumb Leno-smile, even back in 1995!
Of course I got so caught up in nostalgia that I went on an Internet deep dive for Amanda. I actually found her mom on Facebook and from there found her younger sister Natalie. There were a few pictures of Amanda on Natalie’s page, but she wasn’t tagged so perhaps she is a cool person like me, who is Facebookless.
Wait, do you guys still call it Facebook, or the new name whatever it is?
Amanda and Natalie still look like themselves! They have aged super well. Amanda would be a year younger them me, I believe, and her sister is three years younger than me. They were both instantly recognizable to me! I wish I could have found an email address for Amanda but who could say that she would even remember me? I think about that all the time, because I remember so many people with whom I have had only brief encounters, but how many of them ever get a memory-flash of me?! There goes my inferiority complex again.
Anyway, that’s all I got for now. Cleaning out the attic has been so tedious. I hate cleaning a lot. But I also want to have an extra room! Ah what to do.