Darleks

My children backward engineer language. So ... they have figured out that in Aus, many words that have an "r" sound in them have the "r" sound more or less dropped. Hence for instance here, for the word "here", people say "heeuh" rather than the Seattle pronunciation "heer". The backward engineering sometimes misfires for them, such as, for instance, with the Daleks from Doctor Who, who have now become "Darleks"--because they haven't seen the spelling--they're working from what they hear. How kewl is that?

Hooray!

bits of my time in Tacoma.

I used to live in this little house, for about 1 year, with my mum and my sister, while my dad was away fixing angels of death for the U.S. air force in Turkey. The people in the house just to the left, which you can't really see here, used to have loud drunken parties on weekends, which my mum found quite scary. I went up to the Cub Scout day camp at Wapato park, a few blocks from here, where I learned this song.


View Larger Map

While we lived there, we started attending this church, Bethesda Baptist, where one Sunday I went into a little room with a Sunday School worker and confessed my sins to Jesus and asked him to forgive me and come live inside my heart. 17 Years later, when I was raising funds to spend two years as a missionary on LOGOS II, I called the pastor of this church to ask if I could come tell them about what I was doing--I thought it would be nice for them since I "got saved" at that church. But the pastor at that time was hypercalvinist and a bit sectarian, and he told me on the phone that I certainly wouldn't be allowed to come speak to anyone at the church unless I believed certain very specific things, which of course I didn't believe =).


View Larger Map

Also while there, I attended this school, McCarver Elementary. It was 1984. There was a classroom full of truly ancient personal computers which we went into once a week to do stuff on them. My homeroom teacher read aloud to us. She read "Sounder" and "Pippi Longstocking" and "The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe. The whole school got together occasionally to watch a movie in the auditorium. The only one I remember was the animated version of the Hobbit. My awesome cousin Kelly went with me to this school, and we got off at the same school bus stop on the way home, after nearly an hour's ride. She would often have to remind me to get off the bus because I would be so engrossed in a book. After school I'd go home and watch Nickelodeon on TV, and dukes of hazard and Fall Guy and A Team and Greatest American Hero. It was the last year of my whole life that I ever lived in a house which received broadcast television.


View Larger Map