woodridge posts

Class Reunion: Ten Years

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I had my high school ten year class reunion just on Saturday, for those of us who graduated from Woodridge in 2000. We had it at the Lion’s Lodge (or something like that, my first time there) in Cuyahoga Falls. It was organized by classmate Rebecca Gerstenberger (now Setty).

The turnout was very low. I think 10-15 classmates plus some spouses and kids showed up. That’s from a pool of around 91 classmates. I have to wonder how many normally come to these things. One made it from Texas, the rest were pretty local. There was even a girl from my brother’s class who’m I had worked with at the Lizard for a while and even went on GOBA with once, so in a way I knew her better than my classmates. She was married to someone from my class.

I did miss the “second part” of the shindig though, held at the Wing Warehouse or something like that. It was set up after the original event was and there were more likely other people there. I had to feed and walk my parents’ dogs though. They probably could have waited for me to at least appear for a bit at the second part: Oh well.

A few people I didn’t recognize at first (John Parker looks very different with short hair and beard and several more years), but most people looked pretty similar or just a bit older and more heavy set.

I got to talk for a bit with several of the people who showed up, but not in depth, and there were a number I didn’t talk to at all. With the ones I talked to, it was mostly a “hi there, what are you up to these days, I’m …” kind of thing, and then I fell back to my usual quiet sitting and listening. John Rummel happened to be a web developer like me, working with ASP.NET on a company’s intranet: I talked to him briefly about it, but not much more of a conversation than with others really. I guess developers don’t get together though for coding parties or anything like that. It seems like I won’t be seeing any of those folk for another ten years though. I might hear an occasional bit of news on The Facebook, but that seems to be it.

I was somewhat hopeful this event could change things. Seems like things are made to keep me on this path.

Haley Litzinger: New Site for an Old Friend

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It just so happens that Christian Bryant, a previously former friend of mine from my Winking Lizard days, lives almost right across the street from my new place of employment at Cogneato. And it also just so happens that his girlfriend is another previously former friend of mine named Haley Litzinger. She went to school with me in my Woodridge days, was in my class, and we were two of the three percussionists from our class in the school band. We also had seen each other a bit in college at Kent and then on very rare occasions after that. I saw Haley drive by after work one day, found her email address on her website, and emailed her.

Haley is trying to make a career as an artist, a notoriously difficult task. She does these very interesting paintings that are composed of multiple layers by painting on and combining layers of a transparent substance resembling glass. They are very interesting to look at, and she has sold quite a few over the years, but not enough to make a living or a name for herself. She built a website (the one I found) to more easily show her work to clients or galleries. She’s no web guru, so the site currently looks sub-par, unpolished, and is missing a lot of content. It also has a splash page and second home page that takes forever to load and site navigation only on the home page.

So I offered to help her fix up the site. After talking about the project, I will be creating a new site for her from scratch. It will be a very simple site, so it will probably not take long at all. Even though it will only have four basic pages/sections, the gallery section will have a lot of individual images, each with their own page. I decided to use WordPress because of the images, giving me a fairly powerful image management admin section without much effort. To make it more interesting for myself, I decided to delve a bit deeper into HTML 5 for the site. I will likely post about this soon.

I hope that I can provide her a better and more successful site. She wants it to be very simple design-wise, but I hope I can give it enough substance to give it a more clean and professional look.