jolpadgett.com  

Recently, I unearthed video tapes from my time in the Navy. This sent me off to google a number of old friends, with one success story. Then I began to think about how people would find me via google and that lead me to this post.

Read without context, the following seems self-indulgent (a blog self-indulgent? Never!). But I figure if I list out where I lived, where I worked and other key events from my life on a single page, people searching for me online would have an easier time at it.

My name is Joel “Jol” Padgett and I was born March 10, 1969. Growing up, my friends and family called me Crickett (Cricket in case they can’t spell it my way).

I was born and spent my first few years in Galax Virginia (more specifically Hillsville and Woodlawn). I attended Kindergarten at Woodlawn Elementary, at least mostly. During that year I contracted Encephalitis and spent a few months at Roanoke Memorial Hospital.

I moved to Bassett Virginia and started 1st grade at Stanleytown Elementary, in Mrs. King’s class. I stayed at that school until 6th grade and had the following teachers (2nd - 5th grades respectively): Mrs. Shockley, Miss Erin Mccallister (my favorite ever), Mrs. Shackleford and Mrs. Payne. My father briefly lived in Blackstone Virginia and I visited him there a few summers.

I moved to Rocky Mount Virginia for 6th grade and half of 7th, attending Rocky Mount Elementary and then Rocky Mount Middle School. I had Mrs. Frith for 6th grade, but 7th is when I had multiple teachers like a big boy.

I moved back to Bassett and finished 7th grade and then 8th grade at Bassett Middle School. Ninth grade brought me to Bassett High School where I stayed until the end of 10th grade.

Then I moved to Richmond Virginia and attended Marshall-Walker High School for half a year; dropping out in the middle of 11th grade (stupidly after mid-term exams, haha). During that time, I started working at DrugFair. After leaving school, I took a second job–this one at Hardees on the overnight shift. I quit Hardees because 2 full time jobs was too much to handle.

I got fired from DrugFair and went to work across the parking lot at the A&P supermarket. I quit there after a year or so and ended up working at Friendly’s until the end of 1987.  During my time in Richmond, I mostly hung out at Video Circus on southside.  Also, I was really into the BBS scene, under the handle of Kamikaze King mostly.
I joined the US Navy in February 1988, turning 19 during boot camp in San Diego California. I was in Company 908 under EMC Gregorio. After 8 weeks there, I spent the next month across the river receiving training at the Data Processing Technicians A School.

After a month home, I went to my first duty station, NSGA Misawa Japan, on Misawa Air Force Base. I worked in 50IS division and lived in barracks 544 until I left Japan at the end of 1992.

Moving to Arlington Virginia off of Columbia Pike, I started working at BTG in early 1993. Summer of that year I moved to the Del Rey section of Alexandria Virgina. I met my husband (”Le” “Lee” Hong Van Le) then, on October 29th 1993. It was only because I knew people that he knew in Asians and Friends Washington that we even spoke the first time.

I lived there for 7 years until the beginning of 2001, when we moved to Courtland Towers in the Courthouse area of Arlington. I also left BTG to work at Sandbox.com from November 2000 until November 2001. During my time at BTG, I worked at NMIC in Suiteland Maryland and at Bell Atlantic/Verizon in Arlington among other places.

I returned to BTG, which had been bought by Titan Corporation during my time away. I worked onsite for OCTO as part of the DC City Government and then joined a team developing web applications for the Administrative Offices of the US Courts where I still work. Titan was bought by L-3 Communications.

We recently bought a condo in the Ballston area of Arlington.

Zooba

After we bought our condo in October 2005, I canceled all of my book club memberships. I thought that living a block from the library would be enough and it was sure to save money overall. I have borrowed a handful of books in the last year but I am not sure I can continue this process.

I checked out two books in December, one a baseball statistics book and the other a mindless thriller from James Patterson. The Patterson book, The 5th Horseman, was in bad shape. Inside, the spine was visibly broken.

Today, I returned that book and checked out two more mindless thrillers, another Patterson book and one by David Baldacci. The Baldacci book is missing the first 22 pages and a huge chunk of the final pages are detached so I have to keep track so they will not be lost.

I could mark this down as a problem with borrowing from both the New Books and Best Selling Thrillers sections combined. These books probably get the most reader traffic, and probably readers who aren’t as careful as others. The books I have checked out that were in their permanent home and with a little age usually do not exhibit this level of wear.

Regardless, I have signed up for an account on Zooba.com again. This is a service run by the Book of the Month Club where you create a queue of books from a large list and they automatically send the top choice available to you monthly for $9.95–that includes shipping. Also, if one book a month isn’t enough, you can Buy Now any at the same price.

I added 63 titles to my list, but I need to go through a lot of the broader categories to find more. Each month new titles are added. It seems as if BOMC uses this to get rid of books that fail to sell to expectations from their line of book clubs. That doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t find good or popular books here.

I will use Zooba to get my fix of newer or popular books and the library for older titles. And the library will benefit because they will get my bought books once read.