feeling nostalgic

Now that the student has gone back to school, I have to sit in this quiet home with just my thoughts for company... once again. Not complaining. I'm just saying that this is the new norm. Well, actually there's my husband, who at the moment is nicely snoring in his little man cave after a round trip drive to Pittsburgh. It's raining, like really pouring outside, there's the hum of the washer and I've put on the Greatest Showman because I'm feeling nostalgic... this was one of those CDs (we bought a CD to play in the car because this is from 2017 and we still had a player in our car) that we enjoyed very much. Of course, now I'm playing it off my phone and I remember how much I love Hugh Jackman. I would totally watch a Hugh Jackman concert. 

If you get the sense that all I write about is... the past, you're not entirely wrong. This is one big exercise in nostalgia. The thing that has nagged me for years is that I never got to write them all down, all the stories, just my thoughts about everything. Oh believe me, I have thoughts about everything! I think my friend Joanne wrote that in the high school yearbook about me, that basically, I have a theoretical explanation for everything. This is so very true. I love to theorize <smiley face>. It partly stems from a love of reading and when I ran out of things to read at home, I would start reading... encyclopedias. I never thought about Jeopardy although I've heard that that's one of the ways that contestants used to prepare. It was just something I did in my spare time, because I could only play so much Octopus on the Game & Watch and my brothers were very protective of the Atari console so I guess after I finished what few Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys we had at home, I just went straight for the Britannica. The 6th grade science bee? Uh yeah, step aside losers... I just read all 6 volumes of Science Library in 2 days. You cannot stop this machine. I was total nerd, a female nerd dude: nerdette. This is true. 

I have conversations with my kids, about how we did it back in '94, just like how my dad used to do at dinner, except he would be talking about '74. I enjoyed many of those stories and being the one who actually went into the same industry that he was in (broadcast), I understood much of that culture. My dad is an ECE, one of the very first in the Philippines. I saw his license number once. It was a very, very low number. It was less than 3 digits. His rise from newspaper boy to cameraman to head engineer of a major television network was a story of success that was the result of street smarts and the kind of commitment to the job that is so rare now. The engineers of his age were pioneers. They were hardworking beyond compare and they had the can-do attitude that brought us to where we are today. Well, he did. The pivot to private enterprise was a result of the closure of the networks during Martial Law in 1972 where, in what I'm certain was an epic midlife crisis, he talked about having no job, little saved up, a wife and 4 children. But he went out, bought a new car, rented an office space and started a business. 

When I started applying for work in the broadcasting industry, everywhere I went, my name had recognition... from the engineering department. How useful is this for a talent, not a technician? I'd like to think that I got jobs because of my actual capabilities and not my name, but it was lovely to walk into a new network and have the head of engineering come up and say, I know your father. Or sometimes, I know of your father. He was a legend. 

When I turn 50, dad will be 90. In his 60s, he had acquired a real penchant for Bath & Body Works. I've talked about this before, so my husband and older daughter certainly know. Shortly after the company retired the scent Sun-ripened Raspberry, I went and hoarded a box of the body splash to send him. I was the one who brought home a whole bunch of different body splashes in the 90s and that Dad picked the one that my mom said smelled like candy... yeah, that was definitely an interesting choice for an elderly gentleman. 

One of the guys I knew from college worked at a network where my dad was a consultant for a project. This meant that he occasionally had to go there for meetings and my friend told me that every time my dad passed by, the women would swoon because he smelled so good. I thank my friend for this exciting little bit of info that I will remember for the rest of my life. Just thinking about it makes me smile. It can't be helped. This handsome mestizo that is my father was a lady-killer. Unbelievably, you can still find bottles of Sun-ripened Raspberry Body Splash from online resellers if you desperately wanted it. You just need about $35 to get a bottle shipped to you. I have no idea how those bottles would smell though. 

Shall we continue down memory lane? Oh shoot, memory. I have to ask my husband if we should go get more memory for the laptop OR just upgrade the hard drive. I found my old LaCie hard drive that was instrumental in making family movies. Little kids in the snow type of stuff. But I am afraid to hook it up to my current MacBook because I used it with an older iBook and the connector looks like... firewire and USB and I just don't want my computer to have the tail again!!! It is so time for an upgrade. This is my new job now. Let's go shopping, baby. 

Playlist Recommendation: The Other Side, Hugh Jackman & Zac Efron from The Greatest Showman