My first 11 years

1986 - Must have been a crazy party because I don't remember it at all.

1987 - The dog was afraid of me because every time he licked my face I cried and then he'd get yelled at.

1988 - I go trick-or-treating at the house across the street and it's TOO MUCH EXCITEMENT.

1989 - We hook the toboggan up to the dog and I end up face down in a snowdrift.

1990 - My parents come home with something purple and shrivelled. "It's your sister," they said but it takes a while before I believe them.

1991 - Frustrated that my parents won't buy me a skateboard or a monocle like I want, I take up knitting.

1992 - I do a fantastic Evel Knievel impression, flying over the holes dug for the footings of a bridge and landing underneath my bike in the river below. It hurts.

1993 - We get family computer #3, an AST Bravo with Windows 2.0 and a colour screen. It's "IBM compatible." Oooh!

1994 - I spend an entire year wearing ankle-length crinkle skirts and coloured leotards.

1995 - I design my first website in HTML. It has blinking yellow text and a grey background. Its url contains at least 80 distinct forward slashes.

1996 - Dad brings home a copy of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. "It plays music," he said. "We don't have a CD player," we said. It killed his enthusiasm right away.