I remember at 17

I remember at 17 making some choices that would affect the rest of my life. I didn’t realize how big one of those choices was.

In order to graduate from high school with honors in Texas at that time you had to take a computer class. It didn’t matter which one, you just had to take one. The business ones required typing as a pre-requisite and that just seemed silly to me because then I’d have to take two classes instead of just one and I already knew how to type. But there was a class called “computer science” that required algebra as a pre-requisite and I’d already taken that. So I took computer science my senior year of high school without any idea what it was.

And then I ended up being real good at it and going to competitions and lettering in computer science (yes, I am a geek).

And then I took a class in it when I got to college.

And then I noticed that if I took five more classes in it they’d give me a computer science teaching minor. So I minored in computer science.

And then I taught computers at an elementary school for 6 years where I meet some dear friends (hi server host!) who were parents of some of my students and got into theater with them and stretched my talents in that direction. And I set goals as a result of an assembly at the school, one of which was to learn to belly dance. And I learned to belly dance with some other friends who decided to help Cupid out a bit.

And then I met someone, through the computer, who majored in computer science.

And then we started communicating in binary and hex, related to the ASCII codes I’d practically memorized in high school writing a battleship program (which he pulled off my 3.5 inch floppies for me today and I got to play it again!).

And then we put binary on our wedding announcements and got married.

And I skipped a lot of steps, but my life probably would’ve been different if I’d taken business computing rather than computer science when I was 17 in high school.