On Saturday's blog I mentioned that I'd talk about having the same email address for life. I wrote about it, but it turned into a voluminous tome and so I decided to move it to my website as its own page. Otherwise, this weblog became overwhelmed with it and it's way off the topic of the reunion.

Please remember, you can join in the conversation here if you like by visiting www.blogger.com and getting a user ID. If you provide me with that, I'll set you up with posting priviliges.

What's the deal with Krispy Kreme donuts? Remember we had a Krispy Kreme donut place around the corner from Bishop O'Reilly? To the best of my recollection, they were just regular donuts like what you'd find at a Mr. Donut or Duncan Donuts. They even served them every day in our cafeteria. Well, something must have happened to the company since after 65 years, it's suddenly an overnight success. They opened up a store in Denver, nearly 50 miles from here and now people are making early morning 100 mile round-trip donut runs, bypassing dozens of Winchell's and Duncan Donut stores along the way to get to the most desirable donuts of all, the ones from Krispy Kreme! They are selling them for door-to-door fund raising drives. People are lining up for them. The last time I checked, the store in Kingston had been converted into a chiropractic clinic. This may come as a surprise to those of you still living in the Valley, but Krispy Kreme has a new cachet and has suddenly been 'discovered' by the rest of the world! :-)

I exchanged some email with Arlene recently and I volunteered to be the Classmate's email contact for the reunion so she could spread out the workload a little more. I've been trying to collect email addresses lately and have gotten 20 good addresses from fellow class members. You can see them here. Please email me for the username and password to access it (you should have received it in a previous message). I did that to prevent them from getting discovered by spambots which are little automated programs that scour the Internet looking for new email addresses to send out unsolicited advertisements known as 'spam'. Classmates is a nice service, but you have to pay dues every year ($20 to $36) in order to access the features such as sending out 'hi' notes. I've found the 'Hi note' feature to generate only about a 20% response rate. I suspect that many of the addresses on the Classmates website are old and no longer work, so that's one of the reasons I'm trying to get a larger list of known good addresses assembled. I learned that regular mailing addresses age at the rate of 20% per year, meaning if you have a list that's a few years old, it's likely to have lots of out-of-date information in it. I suspect that email addresses age even faster. Next time, I'll talk about having an email address for life...

I just got off the phone with Karen and it looks like she's made great progress in contacting just about all the members of our class. There are only a few missing members. She and Arlene have put a lot of effort into this reunion and so have several other committee members including Chuck Brennan, Mike Laton, and Dorothy Semanek. The schedule of events has changed a little. The school tour has changed to Thursday and instead of a happy hour on Friday, there will be a family night at Victory Pig in West Wyoming. As you know, their pizza is famous and in one of those odd coincidences, I just posted the recipe for a VP-like pizza in yesterday's weblog. Victory Pig has an adjoining golf course/driving range/arcade and will be fun for the whole family. Don't forget to respond to Arlene if you're going to the reunion. I look forward to getting a more complete list of attendees from Karen soon as the attendees list on this website is only a partial one. There are lots of people who still haven't confirmed that they'll be going and quite a few that still owe Karen a picture (myself included!)

I'm going to post something for those of you who no longer live in Wyoming Valley. When you move away from the Valley, you'll notice that the pizza across the country has a 'sameness' to it and it's not very good by the high standards we grew accustomed to in the Valley. I recall growing up and being able to identify a pizza with just one bite. Each place used a unique recipe. The only kind of pizza you find out west are the national brands, Dominos, Pizza Hut, Papa John's, etc. One of the most unique and popular pizzas in the valley was Victory Pig, a recipe later adopted (stolen?) by many places such as Pizza L'Oven in Forty Fort, Pizza Perfect in Trucksville, Pizza II East, and a host of others. Sometimes Terri and I crave that deep dish greasy pizza and then realize that we're nearly 2000 miles from it. Well here is a recipe for those of you who are no longer in close proximity to good pizza.

If you don't feel like learning how to 'blog' here, you can always sign the guestbook on the reunion page. Blogging is quite popular with the younger generation who use it to maintain somewhat of an 'online journal' for their friends to read. It's like having a web page without having to learn HTML or even have a hosting site. You can access it from anywhere just using a browser. I first heard about it 6 months ago and then later found that an associate was using it as a kind of 'groupware' collaboration tool. The nice thing about it is that you can go back and fix your posting if you made a typo or just wrote something really dumb. If you've ever participated in on-line discussions, you'll realize that ability alone is a very nice feature of a weblog. When you get really skilled, you can add links to your posings. There's a little globe with a chainlink up in the right hand corner of the editing screen and it allows you to insert HTML into your posting even if you don't know what that means. It also allows you to type in bold or italics without having to know the HTML for that either.

Now that you can see how it works, you can just add to it by getting a login on www.blogger.com and join in if you like. It's been so quiet around here....

A Weblog is an easy way for anyone to contribute to a web page that can change dynamically. That's right, anything you post will be put up on this page for all to see. You can edit or delete any of your postings later, unlike a guestbook. It just involves visiting www.blogger.com and getting yourself set up as a user. When you have done that, send me an email with your information and I'll add you to the list as a team member of this weblog.