Changes

In the years since I took my first computer class at our community college back in 1989 lots of things have changed. In the beginning I just wanted to run the office at the storage with a computer program. My first computer came from Costco, or maybe the store was still the Price Club. Anyway it was a Packard Bell. And compaired to the computer I have now it didn't do very much. It did have a hard drive with 20mg of memory. Wow! For a few years back then, I was alone at the storage. My husband and I had separated years before and my children were grown and out on their own most of the time. David joined the Navy where he he was found to have schizophrenia and he spent some time in the Navy hospital before being discharged. That is a whole other story.

I took an ROP class in commercial design...old fashioned commercial design where we worked with pen and paper...not computers. Other students talked about computer desktop publishing using CorelDraw and when I saw the software for sale at Costco I bought it. That was the beginning of my life with computers. After I closed the gates at the storage I could work on the computer as much as I wanted. As software got better, we all needed better faster computers. My first community college classes were in real estate. I got a sales license but I already had a job running the storage and never got into selling real estate. The beginning computer class was an eye opener. The class had two different groups of students...older people like me that wanted to catch up with this new technology and young colllege students. By the end of the class most of the older students had dropped. I hung in there. The hardest part of the class was writing programs in basic. URF! One student brought in a chewed up floppy disk and told our instructor that his dog ate his homework. The final exam was really hard. One young man turned in his final and left while the rest of us labored on. I answered all the questions and no one else had left. So I took my exam to the instructor. He asked me if I was sure...guess he meant did I actually get through it. I remember telling him that it was a good as it gets. Later when the grades were posted, I was one of only two students with an A for the class. That made me feel really good. After that I took more computer classes and real estate classes and then discovered the art classes. I was having a great time. The most amazing thing happened to me. I found out that I could learn and get good grades in my classes. My child hood had been full of stress. I loved my mother but she was basically an angry person. Then I was shy and going to school was never easy for me. I got through it and even made it to college for awhile but there were many times I would have to read something over and over before I could remember it. Looking back I think it was the total stress of trying to get through my days in some sort peace. I always read a lot.

Then I married a basically angry person and the stress continued. We raised four children, each with their own set of problems. Our oldest was our nephew. Our first child, David, was six months old when our nephew came to live with us. We had a daughter and another son. The years when the children were little were wonderful and fun. I thought my children were perfect and good. My mother had been so angry at my sister and I so much of the time. There were lots of spankings with the hairbrush and yelling. My children didn't need any of that! But the good times never last. My children were faced with the worst drug out there. Meth, when they were still in middle school. It was something I had never heard of and the only thing I could tell them was to not use drugs. Not to try it because it sounded dangerous. They looked at me and swore that they wouldn't use, but they lied. Kids lie to parents. So both our nephew and our youngest developed drug problems. My daughter was one of the lucky ones...she didn't get hooked. David didn't do drugs.

Learning that David was schizophrenic was the greatest tragedy of all. But then my youngest son has had had problems with crystal meth for years and years and that is another tragedy. He is Hailey's dad. He has spent most of Hailey's life locked up...for failing drug tests whenever he got out on parole. He was never guilty of the original charges he went to prison for, but took a no contest plea for a short time in jail and probation. I've gotten off what I meant to write about.

The wall paper on that first computer was the Corel tiger. For some reason I love that photo. So for all these years the one thing that has pretty much stayed the same whenever I get a newer better computer...I use the Corel tiger for my wall paper most of the time.

If you have been to my blog before you will notice that I have changed my design. The picture at the top now is one I created with an early paint program. I did work on it a bit later but basically it is the same as it was twenty some years ago.