The acquisition of the scanner has brought to life a barely-dormant nostalgia within me, and I’ve spent a good bit of the past several days poring over my old photos, scanning them, and transferring them over to our server. I expect that there will be at least a couple of “ah, those were the days” posts in the near future. I’m sure I’ll get bored with it sooner or later, but for now I’m too caught up in reminiscing to be be much embarrassed by my own narcissism.

These first two pictures are my sophomore- and junior-year school pictures from high school. They were taken in 1988 and 1989, making me 15 and 16, respectively.

It’s the custom at my old high school (and I’m assuming in most other American high schools, as well) for seniors to have portrait sittings and choose a collection of photos, rather than going with the usual school photos that everyone in the younger grades gets. I had two sittings, because I cut my hair two weeks after the first one and I wanted a new one to show off my new ‘do. The following four pictures are from those two sittings. (Yes, I did have a lot of those sweaters — they were all the rage in rural Idaho fifteen years or so ago). I was 17.

Over the course of that year I continued cutting my hair shorter and shorter, so that by the time prom rolled around in April, I had a chin-length bob. I also thought I was unbearably fat, something of a teenage epidemic, unfortunately.

The penultimate picture (don’t you just love that word, penultimate?), in which I’m wearing a red sweater, did double duty as an engagement photo, and I made the youthful error in judgment of marrying my high school boyfriend less than three months after graduation. Here I am in my wedding finery, with my three best friends — each of us all of eighteen years old. (“It was a teenage wedding …”)