GregHowley.com

How appropriate that the five hundredth post on my blog comes at a major turning point in my life. The largest one since I married Linda back in February of '04. I'm back to work today, after a week off. And that week away seemed less like the time away you take on a vacation and more like the time away spent at a summer camp, where it's more than just time away - it's a whole different world. It feels almost like I've been living someone else's life. Until today, when I'm back at work.

I thought post number 500 would be a good opportunity for an "about me" post, in which I recount some significant stuff about my adult life.

So let's see... let's start in high school. My friends and I were in many of Ken Ferris's TV production classes, and constantly had a camcorder or two on loan. I've got a ton of old videos on tap, and you'll see many of them in the coming weeks. Most are better than that silly Ronald Reagan cereal commercial, I promise you. Just wait til you see the exploding snowman or the blender stunt Paul mentioned. (so long as I can get his permission to post it)

Ken Ferris was the chorus and TV production teacher, and a huge influence in my life. Little wonder then that when I went to college I majored in Mass Media with a minor in music. Meanwhile, I got a job at a new arcade that had just opened in my hometown of Bristol, CT. It was called Skooters. I started making pizzas in the back, but ended up a supervisor and got to run the Laser Tag league when it started. That was wicked cool.

At CCSU, my grades weren't great, but I met a girl named Elisa Bernstein, whom everyone else knew simply as "Shorty", and eventually got engaged to her. But in early 1997, the realization hit me that her personality and my own conflicted so much that should we get married, it would end in divorce, and I made what I still maintain was the most difficult decision in my life, although it was probably also the best decision I've ever made. I broke the engagement. It was the right thing to do, and I've never doubted that, but it was incredibly hard to break the heart of the girl I loved.

Sometime shortly after that I was finishing classes at CCSU, and got a internship at WTIC 61, the local FOX affiliate in Hartford. I was working in Master Control, switching between programs and commercials. I got to watch the movies we'd air and edit them for commericals and content. It was cool getting to decide where in a movie the commercials would be placed, and cool getting paid to watch movies, but the hours were terrible, the pay was terrible, and there was no room for advancement. So I left and started work at various insurance companies, since that's where the work is in Hartford. Payed decent, but it was boring as hell.

It was around this time when a couple friends who I played D&D with discovered something called a LARP. The one we tried was a CT-based game called Fantasy Quest. We tried it a few times and eventually got heavily involved, Rich and myself eventually becoming "Keepers", the group of about 6-8 people who ran the game. That lasted for a few years until my Lindy Hop proclivities left me no time for LARPing.

So, Lindy Hop. What is Lindy Hop? It's the original form of swing dance. The pure form. And it changed my life. It started in 1998 when my friend's wife suggested that we hit The Bar With No Name in Hartford on a Thursday night for swing night. Sounded fun, so I went. They never went back again. I never missed a week after that. I branched out and started hitting monthly dances in West Hartford, and then hitting the East Lyme and New Haven dances, about an hour away. I was dancing 5 nights a week on average, for years. No lie. I took lessons in Wethersfield from "Jitterbug" Jane Dumont. In April 2001, I placed 3rd in the Open Lindy Hop Jack & Jill division at the North American Dance Championships. That was a moment for me, since there were hundreds of people competing nationally in that division.

I kept dancing for years, attending dance camps in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, visiting competitions and dance parties, and in 2000, I started swingmonkey.com as my first web project. It's grown enormously, and now has close to 1000 users.

I think it was 2000 when I was laid off from my insurance company job and remained unemployed for 10 months. At the end of this stretch, I got lucky: Travelers in Hartford was taking people off the street and training them in COBOL. I'd had a bit of programming experience from my days on the Commodore 64 and later QBasic and some minor Javascript. I passed the tests and ended up being a programmer, although I got away from COBOL fairly quickly.

In August 2001, I met Linda at a dance camp called Swing Out New Hampshire. I'd actually met and even danced with Linda before in New York and in Connecticut, but we'd never really talked. She was living in Weehawken, New Jersey and working as an architect at Perkins-Eastman in Manhattan, the largest architecture firm in the country. When we left the camp, we made plans to get together in the city for my birthday.

Then came 9/11. I kept in touch with Linda via IM that day to make sure she was okay, but she had a lot of friends that had more direct exposure to that day's events than she did. She wasn't able to get out of the city until the next day, on a ferry.

Although people were telling me I was crazy, I still drove down to Weehawken that Friday and Linda and I went to a dance together. Our first date.

I ended up moving into the Colt Building in Hartford - that's the armory that made most of the weapons through World War 2, and all the way back to the old west. It looked like hell on the outside, but the spaces inside were quite nice. It was there that I started teaching Lindy Hop in a friend's studio on the 4th floor, and running Sunday night dances.

In 2003, Linda and I moved in together in a cute old farmhouse in Brewster, NY. In February of 2004, we got married in Florida, on the beach.

In late 2004, Linda got a job offer in Colorado: she'd be building an entire community. The pay and the lower cost of living made for an offer we couldn't refuse, and it would end the crazy commute we both had - four hours per day in the car was too much for me after a year. So we moved to Colorado.

And that brings us up to date, and to the most recent significant event in my life - the birth of my daughter Lia on May 27th, my father's birthday. It's funny how these things work out.