Where were you 10, 20 and 30 years ago?

I read this on a friend's blog today and, I'll admit it, I stole it from her. She didn't "tag" me with this "meme," and she explains below, but I think the topic is interesting and thought I'd give it a shot to remember back in my own life.

Where were you 10, 20, and 30 years ago?

In the blogging world, when you are ‘tagged’ by a ‘meme’ it means that there is some topic or (usually) a question going around that a blogger writes about and then challenges other bloggers he or she knows to answer as well. Some consider the practice silly or rude for a variety of reasons, and some bloggers refuse to participate. However, if you find the question one of interest you can search by labels, titles, or keywords – or just follow people’s links – to spend hours seeing what others have to say about that topic!

Here goes for my life:

November 1997: I was 25 and had been a reporter at the Greeley Tribune for four months. I was covering night cops (i.e. keeping up with the police beat at night), working from 1 p.m. to 11 or midnight each night. It was a very lonely time in my life. New town, new job, few friends, stressful job. Work was my entire life. I lived in a dumpy duplex apartment near the University of Northern Colorado. I had some interesting neighbors, to say the least, and I remember being a little scared when I came home at night. I tried to make that place my home, but I couldn't wait to move out, which I did the following spring. My job eventually got better, too, and I made some friends. I stayed in Greeley and worked at the Tribune until May 2004.

November 1987: I was 15, a sophomore at Arvada West High School in Arvada, Colo. I had braces and ate a chocolate shake and sour-cream & onion potato chips for lunch each day. (How did I manage to be so skinny back then? Duh . . . I was 15.) My high school at the time was only a three-year high school with 10th, 11th and 12th grades, so the sophomores were the babies of the student body. Even so, that first year of high school was a much better experience for me than my entire three years of junior high. I had a few good friends, and I'm still friends with them today, if you can believe it. I worked really hard to get good grades. Most of my afternoons and weekends were spent doing homework. I knew I wanted to be a writer and thought I'd probably go into journalism. My hardest class that year was biology. The easiest and most fun for me was 10th grade English. I remember my English teacher saying in front of the whole class how good I was at grammar and punctuation. I was mortified -- being smart wasn't "cool" (that didn't happen until college). But it was a foreshadowing of things to come. That understanding of the English language has served me well as a journalist and a journalism teacher who now is a stickler for good grammar.

November 1977: I was 5 years old, living in the home I grew up in in Arvada, Colo. My older brother was 8, and he and the other boys in the neighborhood tortured me mentally. They'd sit around on their bikes in the middle of the street. I'd come along and try to join them with my pink bike with streamers dangling from the handlebars. They'd make fun of me. Somehow, I just didn't get that I didn't belong. I also had an adversarial relationship with my little brother, who was only 1 year old in November 1977. He was too young to truly be my adversary, but I resented having a little brother (I wanted a little sister) and was adjusting to being the middle child, not the youngest anymore. (In case you're wondering, I don't think of my little brother as an enemy anymore. I'm glad I grew up with two brothers.)