Reader Request: Where Was I On April 12, 2005

After the anticlimactic ending in my attempts to figure out where I was on January 13, 1999, I asked readers if anyone was curious about a new date for me to research, and one commenter from northwestern Arkansas was very curious about my whereabouts on Tuesday, April 12, 2005.

What do I know off the top of my head? I was a senior at DSU and lived at 912 North Egan with Chris Ahrendt and Jason LaPlant. Well sure, anyone off the street could have told me that much. We need more info, dammit!

This search will be without one primary source of data, because I primarily used my DSU e-mail up until college graduation in December 2005. All DSU e-mail accounts have been disabled, obviously. I inquired about that a few years ago when there was a problem with an MLB.com order which was still associated with that DSU account. I e-mailed DSU and asked them if there was any way to log in, and they were all like “Are you crazy? We deleted that six years ago. Most students get new e-mail accounts, or never used their college e-mail accounts for personal correspondence.” So there’s no way to see what I was doing from a collegiate standpoint. Disappointing.

I did on occasion use my Hotmail account, however. One e-mail received on April 12, 2005 is in the record books: an e-mail from Mom sending me her newest “Mom Column,” an old feature on the website. On that day, Mom wrote about sheltie Simba getting mud stuck to her rectum which then caused her poop to back up and form an unthinkable mess, which Mom had to fix. (As you can see, the archive of that post lives on ryanglanzer.com/mom).

Also, we can rule out Facebook. Social media hadn’t yet caught on. It wasn’t until late 2005 that I first heard about Facebook. And Twitter was nowhere on my radar.

But that’s okay, because I was blogging at that point in time, and posted something on April 13, 2005 (but after reading it, it was clear that the blog was written on the 12th, the date in question.) How do I know this? Because I mention watching the Twins game while writing the blog, and mention that the Twins had beaten the Tigers 5-4 behind a mediocre outing from Joe Mays. A quick look on baseball-reference.com shows the box score from a 5-4 Twins win over the Tigers on April 12, 2005. Clearly, I spent that night at my house at 912 North Egan watching the Twins game. “But wait!” you say. 2005 was the year the Twins tried to broadcast games on their own new team-owned network, Victory Sports One, and as we all know, no cable providers would pick it up! So how could you have watched the game? Well, I recall that after a week with no one getting to see the Twins games, they switched back to Fox Sports North, a channel which we got.

Another reference to April 12 was featured in a blog post a few days later, when I mention that ryanglanzer.com had set a new record with 102 visitors to the site in one day.

However, the rest of the day cannot yet be accounted for! Loyal commenter, I won’t settle for just knowing that I watched a Twins game at night, started writing a blog post, and that a bunch of people came to my site. Clearly, a lot more happened that day and there’s more searching to be done.

What about photos? Are there any dated photos from April 12, 2005 in my library? While I have photos from a game of frisbee golf (which my blog indicates took place on Saturday, April 9) and photos from a small gathering at our house (which my blog says may have taken place on Thursday the 14th), there is no clear evidence to any photos on the 12th specifically. Here are some pictures from that week, however, just to give you a better feel.

So what would I have been doing during the day? There must at least be a record of my college class schedule that semester, right? Well, yes. A quick search finds that in a January blog post, I wrote this excerpt that perfectly lays out my spring schedule.

This last week was the first week of the spring semester. I have 18 credits this time around, which is two more than last semester. On Tuesdays and Thursdays my schedule is pretty easy with Advanced Writing at 8 and E-Commerce at 9:30, and then I’m done for the day, although I’ve been scheduled to work those afternoons. Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays are a bit tougher with Illustrator at 9, Art History at 11, Technical Publishing at noon, and Graphic Effects II at 4.

So the 12th being a Tuesday, we know that I had Advanced Writing at 8am and E-Commerce at 9:30, and then my day was finished. But it says I was scheduled to work on those days. Where did I work that spring? Well… according to yet another blog post…

I got a work study position in Enrollment Services. I’ve worked there all week, which so far has been a good time. I work with Kristin Kirkeby, a good friend of mine from many of my classes. In fact it was Kristin who led me to pursue the job. So far it’s been a lot of filing papers, sending out mass mailings to potential students, and tagging along on tours of campus.

One could ascertain that I was in fact spending a couple hours in the afternoon over at Enrollment Services, earning an extreme minimal amount of money in a work study program. But could I confirm any of this?

Well, yes.

My next idea was to pop in an old CD I had burned from 2005 with a bunch of college crap on it, which for some reason was conveniently sitting right underneath our TV all by itself. Of all the hundreds of burned CDs and DVDs I have kept, this was the one I needed and it was sitting right in front of me. I immediately undisclosed a document where, for a brief time from 2003-2005, I kept a one-sentence recap of each day. What a score this was!

Now, before I tell you exactly what it says, I need to preface this with a disclaimer. I am not insane… I don’t think. At this point in time, I simply liked to keep archives and records. And truth be told, I had a LOT of free time on my hands. I mean, like I said, I was done with class for the entire day before noon!

Now, onto that blurb about April 12, 2005.

April 12, 2005: Class, work 10:50-12:50, treats. Work III. Softball canc. Twins, Idol. POTD: Brooke McNaughton. S: 30

Well, this is a bit cryptic. Clearly I worked from 10:50am to 12:50pm at Enrollment Services, and someone brought treats! Hurray! Work Ill is probably short for Illustrator, a class that I earlier mentioned I was taking that semester. Clearly there was a softball game scheduled that was cancelled for some reason. Later, as I mentioned before, we watched the Twins game and apparently American Idol. A co-worker at Enrollment Services, Brooke McNaughton, was awarded with a “Person of the Day” award, given each day to a new person I met or interacted with, in a brief attempt to branch out and be more sociable. Though we had many classes together, I almost definitely wouldn’t recognize Brooke today.

All of that seems fairly sane so far. A bit odd, yes, but not medically insane. Until the last part of the note, which says S: 30. That was a note that indicated which shirt I had worn that day. Shirt #30 was described, in a separate document, as an “off-white long-sleeved button-down” shirt. It was the 11th time I had worn that shirt already in 2005, ranking it in the top 10 amongst the shirts in my closet. Like I said, I had a lot of free time on my hands. And really, look how useful that note is. In some sort of hypothetical situation, if cops were trying to review some sort of security footage from 4/12/05 and saw a man in a white button-down long-sleeve shirt on camera, they’d know it was me, and I couldn’t possibly have been at the place of the crime… Or, it was me, and I would be rightfully indicted.

After rummaging through the other files on that disc, I realized that there was nothing on the disc that could ever potentially be used for good, and there were lots of fairly depressing Word documents where I had started rambling off Top 100 lists or the first 4 pages of an original play. Realizing it was time to move forward and stop hanging on to such ridiculous things, I backed up the handful of documents worth keeping and then DESTROYED the disc forever, cutting it in half.

So that pretty much wraps up any doubt as to what happened on April 12, 2005, and then some. For the record, those were some pretty fun times, our final weeks living at the famed 912 North Egan. It was that great year that Jason decided to move to Madison and go to DSU, which he did for one semester before dropping out and working full-time at McDonald’s. Chris was in his final semester of college and madly in love with Carol Irvin, and spent most nights on the phone with her until midnight. Friends like Josh Schuh, Jake Drotzman, Jesse Cooney, and Dave Becker were frequently found at my side at Lon’s Cocktail on a weeknight singing karaoke and consuming dangerous amounts of cheap beer. I gave a mediocre effort towards most classes, doing just enough to get by, and would leave Madison that summer for a final season of Valleyfair.

Got any other dates, readers?