Erkel is my kindred spirit - Patti's Recap Part VII

Disclaimer - this post is not really very interesting, and it's very long winded. Too bad I'm not getting paid by the word (actually - I'm not getting paid, period!). 

So. I'm a nerd. Like.. a super nerd. I've been a nerd for a long time, but I'm especially nerdy as of late.

Newest most awesome fun way to pass the day? Listening to the police scanner. Yup. Though I appear to be perfectly normal on the outside; a typical young(ish) person - headphones in, listening to my iPod.. the truth is, I'm totally engrossed in the latest goings on in my town. Missing persons? Public drunkeness - I'm hearing it all!

I think part of it is because I'm no longer working in/near my city center, and because we're so isolated where I am... I just feel really cut off from the 'culture' of my town (hahahaha - culture being illegal activities), and this is my way of feeling like I'm a part of it all.

I've always had respect for police officers as figures of safety and authority (my dad is retired RCMP), but now.. it's reached an entirely new level. Of insanity.

I can't help but nod at police officers as they pass me by. I'm all like "hey, tough shift, eh, buddy?" in my mind. I heard there was a pizza party and wondered where my invitation went. I have favourite dispatchers, favourite police officer voices (they're the ones who clearly pronounce what they're saying so I have an idea of what is going on), and favourite 900 codes. Who does that? I may as well have a CB radio installed in my car. Except that I don't own a car. So I'd install it on my bike.

The nerd thing isn't really new, though.

When I was 14, my dad, a member of the RCMP, got transferred to the place I live now. We had to leave all of our friends behind, and for me it was right in time to start grade nine. I was moving from the comfy little town I've known my whole life, and headed for the 'big city'.

So.. I had no friends in town. And along came the internet. This was 1996, people. This was the age of the internet where you would type in a webpage, go to the washroom, make some tea and sit back at the computer just in time to see the first images start to load on the page you'd navigated to. I was absolutely fixated on the possibilities that the internet had.

Back in day there were a lot of communities online of young girls between the ages of 11-18. My new friends. We would chat and yack, and most importantly, we made webpages. Personal webpages, basically blogs in their infancy. We found an outlet to vent our frustrations, share our dreams, and be creative.

And did I ever create. Holy cow! In a house with 6 other people, I could have my own tiny corner of the internet and do whatever I wanted with it. Maybe I had to wait to work on my webpage until after midnight (usage used to be tallied by the minute, with free internet time between the hours of 12am - 7am), but I could do whatever I wanted. And I did.

I programmed like crazy - learned html, and stayed on top of current trends (woah! Mouseovers!!). In notepad, I hand-coded to my hearts' desire! I loved web design. Loved it! Was anything in the world more fun than figuring out how to create something visual by using a different language? I told myself I was bilingual - I spoke English and HTML.

I did eventually make friends, and it became clear to me that I was, what I dubbed as an "internet geek". My friends couldn't understand why I absentmindly 'typed' on tabletops while talking to them. They didn't realllly care to hear about how alt codes worked, or how tables totally shortened page load time. But I still chipped away at it. And this is what lead me to discovering a career in graphic design.

My college program focused on print design, and when I worked at my design firm, I was so pampered - web design was done up in photoshop, and our amazing web developer was responsible for making it happen (super talent!). I got soft!

I tried to stay on top of the amazing effects CSS offered, but web languages change so fast... my knowledge became obsolete.

(Wow. This is a reallllllly long story. Oops. Sorry about that.)

ANYWAY. When theGuy and I thought about our weekend-long wedding plans.. the fact that we had to organize campers, etc., we realized that we would definitely benefit from having a wedding website. Our lovely MC is a programmer, and we knew that he would create something lovely.

But I was inspired. I knew what I wanted, and I wanted to work it out myself.

So I headed over to trusty blogger, and set about designing a webpage for our wedding. While making it not look like a blog. In retrospect, I probably should've started from scratch because the work-arounds were ridiculous. I pulled out my hair, I read til my eyes bled. And I figured it out. And it reminded me why I got into design in the first place. Overcoming the obstacles. Problem solving. Workarounds. In many ways, these themes directly related to my relationship with Ryan. It all just fit together. It was fun.

A hunk, kissing a nerd.

So basically.. the point of this lonnngggg, ridiculous post is that it's pretty much pointless. Except that I do believe: "Once a nerd, always a nerd." But a good thing about nerds? They get 'er done!