This is a collection of my memories, year by year. The stuff *I* remember. (One note: I don't expect you to know any of the friends that I mention here, but if you do, hey, drop me a note, I'd love to know what some of these people are up to now.. :) )

1980- I was 10 years old. The end of 4th grade and the beginning of 5th at Meadowlark Elementary School in Eugene, Oregon. Chrissy Voas and Tammy Rinehart were my best friends. I remember my San Francisco Buckleback jeans and my Lawman's painter jeans. I remember wanting a pair of Gelato ice cream pants soooo bad (the one with the ice cream cone on the back pocket). I remember roller disco, and being obsessed with satin clothing. I wore Love's Baby Soft perfume. I was in Girl Scouts, and on my way back from Girl Scout camp in Florence when Mt. St. Helens blew. I remember ash on my mom's blue Pinto. I remember hearing Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" on the radio. I had friends that liked Queen (Another One Bites The Dust) and Devo (Whip It). I watched MASH with my mom. The Great Space Coaster was on every morning before I went to school and watched it while I ate my Waffle-O's cereal and drank my Tang. I wore my hair in little ponytails like Chrissy on Three's Company. I wrote to Bubblilicious telling them that orange was GREAT, but they really needed to have a watermelon flavor. Was completely disillusioned when I saw it on the shelf after getting a "Thanks for your idea, BUT.." letter from them. Stopped buying Bubbilicious. Fell head over heels for "Chico" from Sha Na Na, until I discovered Ralph Macchio on Eight Is Enough. Feathered my bangs.

1981- I was 11 years old. After finishing 5th grade at Meadowlark, I moved with my family to Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, on the Big Island. I wore tube tops and those little nylon shorts with the dove on on corner. Got a nice tan (too bad THAT didn't last thru my entire stay there.. ). Listened to Eagles "Hotel California", Rush "Moving Pictures" (I still love both of those to this day) and ELO with my older (14) friend Terry. Wore Love's Fresh Lemon perfume and Avon's Hawaiian Ginger. Started watching Young And The Restless, around the time when Victoria was born and Nikki wasn't sure if she was Victor's or Kevin's. (For those that don't watch, she was Victor's, and is now doing pretty well for an 18 year old, running a division of her fathers company and all...ok, they upped her age, in the show shes like 23 or something). Went to Holualoa Elementary for 6th grade. I had these way cool neon green satin chinese shoes that I LOVED. I wore feather roach clips in my feathered hair. Hard baseball hats were in (I had a KC Royals one). Ate powdered jello out of the packet cuz the cool kids did. Collected stickers and cool shoelaces.

1982- 2nd half of 6th grade at Holualoa: colored hair with crayola markers. Hung out at the arcade. We got our first Atari. I started up a school paper that I called "The Beat" after the Go-Go's song "We Got The Beat". Listened to them and also Talking Heads "Burning Down The House" and Olivia Newton John's Physical album. Liked the dolphin song.  :) Got REO Speedwagon:Hi Infidelity and Billy Joel:Songs From The Attic for my birthday. Best friends were Justine Smith, Suzi Tuscevski (sp), Leilani Palmer, Jadelyn Lewi, Trevor Zara, Robby Henriques, John Towle, Stefan LaLanne and Cavett Green. Had a HUGE crush on Ethan. Watched Clash Of The Titans and listened to Moon Unit Zappa's Valley Girl and Duran Duran at Suzi's house. Listened to The Cars, Adam Ant, and Bow Wow Wow at Leilani's. Discovered Moody Blues while babysitting. Listened to Missing Persons with Justine. Saw Grease 2 with Leilani. Wanted to be Stephanie Zinone, to the point of writing down every item of clothing she wore in every scene. Fall of 82, Justine, Suzi, Ethan and I all started school at Hawaii Preparatory Academy. Went to see E.T. with my homeroom class. Listened to Men At Work with some new friends from New Zealand, tried Vegamite. Watched "Square Pegs" on TV. Obsessed with Michael Damian on YnR and John Stamos, who played Blackie on General Hospital. Thought Demi Moore on GH was sooo cool.

1983- Justine went to see Missing Persons in Honolulu and brought me back autographs. I think I still have them around somewhere. I turned 13. Finished my school year at Hawaii Prep, produced, directed, etc a play for the third grade class while being the student director of my middle school play. Read and wrote an essay about Lord Of The Flies. Took BASIC programming classes. Spent afternoons goofing around in computer room on the school's DEC 1170's. Thought being on middle school campus and talking to people on the high school campus (5-6 miles down the road) was the coolest. Got annoyed regularly with "Eliza", played with her anyway. :) Watched Night Tracks on TBS. Missing Persons, Duran Duran, Menudo, Cyndi Lauper, Madonna.
Got a really bad poofy perm. Spent the summer hanging out with Trevor at his moms work, an Apple computer store. Played with the first Macintoshes. Justine moved to California. Started 8th grade at Konawaena Intermediate, on the high school campus. Loved Rick Springfield's music. Saw Risky Business. Started using Maybelline red pencils in very black to line under my eyes (I still do.). Flashdance and the ensuing fashions...I had a Flashdance-style pink shirt I wore with jeans and white legwarmers. Saw Breakin'. My little sister could do the pennyroll. Started exploring fundamentalist Xianity because of this club at my school that this GORGEOUS guy (Greg Kendrick) was in. Hung out with Dagmar Conventz, a German girl that I had gone to Holualoa with, and we drooled over Greg and another guy in the group, Kapena (Randy) Pope. Kapena was a senior, but he became a very good friend that year.

1984- Spent a lot of time with my church youth group, fundraising for a trip across the US. Initially, we had a huge group. It whittled down gradually, until only Kim McCabe, Christian Barstch, and I were left, along with the youth pastor (Dean) and his family and Mark Vierra, who we picked up near San Francisco. The trip in itself is another page all by itself, but I do remember going to see The Neverending Story, and playing Q-Bert at a bowling alley we went to. And the Summer Olympics! McDonalds had that game with game pieces that said stuff like "if the US wins the gold, you win a Big Mac! If the US wins silver, you get a..." and so on. Man, the US musta done pretty well (the McD's game was the only way I kept track), cuz I got a lot of free food that summer...:) I think a lot of people did, and that's why they never did that game again.. :) After I got back from my trip, I hung out with Debi Grissom, who was in my church group and had graduated that year, and Lisa Carillo, also in our church group. (Although, after the trip, I got pretty disillusioned with Xianity and by late '84/early '85 had abandoned it to seek my own path.) We wore bandanas as belts and I had the coolest pair of pinstripe jeans. Footloose was the best movie, and I had to keep getting the soundtrack because it kept getting stolen. That fall, I met my "first love", Mike Daniels. He sat in front of me in biology class. He drove me crazy. :) We saw each other on and off until 1988, when I left Hawaii.

1985- End of my freshman year of high school. I turned 15. I dated a guy named Duane Green that spring/summer, and met one of my best friends (who still is), Shaedra Allen. Leilani came back from Honolulu to visit. I held the first annual nighborhood lip sync contest after watching "Puttin On The Lips" on TV. Later I started getting into heavy metal, because Duane and his brother James were. Shaedra and I listened to Ozzy's Diary of A Madman and I bought (after several tries) Motley Crue's Theater Of Pain. And we played spades with our neighbors. I met Brandice Armstrong and Lori Krems (who I still keep in touch with) that fall and we partied a lot and had a blast. My sophomore year of high school, I wore pastels and long chain earrings with ear cuffs (which I still have). We Are The World was HUGE, you couldn't escape hearing it on the radio (as much as I tried). I preferred (when I wasn't listening to heavy metal) Murray Head's "One Night In Bangkok" and Prince's "Raspberry Beret". I read Metal Edge and Circus Magazine and tore out the pics and hung them on my wall. My little brother Noah Maika'i Ka'eo was born. I started getting skinny, and near the end of the year was wearing a size 7. (I went size 13-11-9-7 over 1981-1985 but hit my lowest-5-in 1986 before I started gaining again..)

Click here for part 2: 1986-1989