Beren's Corner

beren44, just so you know where the name actually comes from:



It's the chick with the light blue hair and the red eyes.




And, yes, I'm all for that language filter!

ayanami some more info.. they in turn invited me to Austria. I spent Christmas and New Years at their house in 2007. I didn't make it to Germany, but I could see it from the mountain top near their home, in the extreme western tip of the country. The whole area was absolutely beautiful, but damn it was cold! I was there 11 days, and it got above freezing for maybe 4 hours, the whole time. I'm a summer boy. I HATE cold weather! And wow, snow-skiing in the Alps kicked my butt!

There was a trail that we hiked on one day, which was like a fairy-tale trip up the path to Rivendell. Just unbelievably beautiful, and wouldn't you know, I lost almost all my pictures from that day, due to battery failure in my camera.



And just like DoTheMath I really figured that you were a military brat, and a native American. Your command of the language is flawless!

'Das leben ist shön',  is the only phrase I remember now. My only other language is Spanish.

I've been a water skier my entire life, like since 6 yrs. old, and snow skiing on several occasions, since I was about 19. (Gotta take a pretty good road trip to get any place ski-able from where I live, LOL). The Alps were a whole 'nuther level, though. The 'easy' trails were more like the harder of the 'intermediate' trails here.

I was coming down with terrible cold and ear-ache that morning, running a fever. I'm sure that didn't help my stamina or balance. Yep, my career is done on that gig. Gimme a nice warm lake and lots of sunshine! I would love to visit Europe again in the summer, and catch Germany, Spain, Italy, and Greece! Sounds like you live in a cool place though, cycling around everywhere would be nice



ayanami Now there is some advice worth remembering!

now now, Hari Seldon play nice here. I've never seen a single anime-show, and chia pets grow up in days, anyway!

I'm so sorry to hear this! Hugs your way!

ayanami  ,  (funny how most of my posts start with [@ ayanami]),

I agree with everything you said about Facebook, yet sometimes it has its purpose, and some shiny moments. I have connected with long lost friends from my younger days there, and once in a while something special like this happens. It relates to my dear friend that I lost recently. Sadly fitting the moment, he is the upside-down fellow in the photo.

They popped up this meme, from 3 years ago, which was already 31 years old in the making. I'm willing to bet you weren't even born yet when this event occurred. We had our fun back in the day, and you have seen a couple of pics of me, so... dare ya to guess which one I am!

I promised you a true college story, Jemma Simmons , so here you go [tagging ayanami too, just cuz]  Life was crazy back in 1978! As soon as I made the comment in the shout box about you switching to a red sharpie, this whole story popped back into my head. Talk about red! And what makes it even better, is that when I was trying to compose the post in my head, the phrase 'Ladies and gentlemen: the story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent' came to mind, so I hunted up this. And the fact that the show name was DRAGnet just made me laugh even more. You'll see what I mean, when you read the story below the video...


In my brief semester as a jazz guitar major at North Texas State University, (now UNT), I procrastinated getting in, made it at the last minute, and got put in an 'overflow' dorm, which had actually already been shut down, and re-opened for the excess of students that year. Like me, most of them were slackers and barely got in under the wire, that's why we all got stuck together in that dorm.

Needless to say, this made for a pretty wild party environment. (It WAS 1978, after all)  And with 5 floors of girls, and 1 floor of guys, it was pretty topsy turvy, to say the least. I mention that because it is relevant to the resources I had available for this story.

We decided to have a Halloween party in combination with another dorm, all told it was between 500-600 people that showed up. I for whatever reason, had made up my mind not to go. About 45 minutes before it was to start, I started seeing all my friends getting dressed up and changed my mind, and had to put a costume together in a hurry! I chose to go as the devil, and here's what I did.

First, I made a mad dash to town, to try and find a costume and some face paint. Sold out everywhere at that point. I bought a can of red spray paint, a roll of tin foil, about 5 feet of 1" diameter foam rubber tubing, and 2 yds. of cheap red fabric. I used the fabric and a collar made of cardboard, to fashion a Dracula style cape. I 'borrowed' a mop handle from the janitor's closet at the end of the hallway, attached a coat hangar twisted around the end of it to form the other two prongs of a trident, wrapped the coat hangar with tin foil to beef it up to the same size as the mop stick, and spray painted the whole thing red.

I then fashioned some horns to clip onto my head out of coat-hangers covered in tin foil as well, and spray painted that. The
rest of the foam I painted also, and made a long tail out of it.

This still left me without anything to actually wear! This is where the girls in the dorm come into play. One of them was fairly close to my size, body-wise, and had a full black leotard, tops and bottoms. So I was dressed head to toe, in black, with a 5 ft long red cape. That left only my face and hands exposed.

This is where it gets really interesting. With no face-paint available, one of those charming girls convinced me to paint my ENTIRE face and neck with her fire-engine red lipstick. My hands as well. Well, it worked. I ended up winning Best Costume prize that night! And I got the new nickname 'El Diablo', which stuck with me entirely for the rest of my time there. I don't think I ever heard my real name spoken again that semester.

There was a hitch. I used about 2 whole jars of her cold cream to try and get that lipstick off my face, and was still day-glo pink for a good week anyway. Every pore on my face was gunked up with that damn stuff! Now you see the earlier reference to Drag-net!   Oh, but I would not trade that memory for anything, it was a truly insane night, for other reasons that I really cannot get into without incriminating people for real And first prize was worthy too! The newly released Rolling Stones album 'Some Girls'.... LOL although I traded it to a friend for a copy of Pink Floyd's 'Wish You Were Here.'

So there you have it.










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