Things Forgotten While Packing

I'm always forgetting things and then feeling guilty about them.  For this vacation I was getting things squared away at work, packing, getting Christmas ready early, and dealing with end of the year finance decisions.  Oh, and keeping tabs on my social life.  I'm not used to having one of those.  More than a few balls were dropped on the way to vacationing in Minnesota.

On the outside chance that this will be a reference to help the next time I'm preparing to vacate, I'm going to list forgotten things.

Only two were a big deal.  I forgot to pick up my meds, even though I had arranged to have early refills ready at the pharmacy.  One of them is something that's a federal offense to mail, or I'd have had Dear Son pick them up and mail them.  After some coordination and stress, I think we have a fix.  DS has picked up the paper prescription from the local pharmacy and mailed it overnight.  It should be here tomorrow afternoon.  

There's a pharmacy only seventy-five miles away that can take my insurance.  They've already pulled the other prescriptions.  It should work.  It won't be convenient, but it should work.  Maybe we can combine it with some other shopping, so that S-2 gets something out of the drive.

That's one.  Two was losing track of where I put the Barnes & Noble gift cards.  DS found them this morning.  They had been tucked for convenience and safekeeping into the big box of Christmas cards.  It would have been a perfectly sensible place if only I had remembered that I did that.  DS will be mailing them out later today.  

With those two things fixed, the other little things seem minor.  I forgot shampoo.  The recharger for the phone is in one of the boxes that I got ready to mail before I left, but that didn't quite get mailed.  DS took care of that, too.  I left him cash for that.

The last noticeable thing was the thumb drive with all of the stuff that I was bringing to work on.  I had carefully filled it with everything.  I filled it early and I thought it over and added a few more things here and there.  I thought that having my bookmarks would make life easier, and, since DS was asleep, I left it in the computer to ask him in the morning.

I did remember to ask him.  And he sat at my computer and took a shot at transferring them.  Then we got distracted and left it there.  I had a spare thumb drive packed, and DS and S-2* did a son-to-son transfer of everything that had been gathered.  But the spare was too small to hold it all, so we had to go to Target and buy a new one.  

So I am set up.  Things should settle down from here.  I'm going to get a tour of the Mayo Clinic this weekend.  I got to look at some cytology slides last night.  It was cool.  I got showed the difference between and HPV infection and HPV genetic insertion, which is a pre-cancerous state.  

Onward.  

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* If my youngest son is being called Dear Son, but I'm visiting his older brother, I really should use something more attractive and affirmative than S-2.  I think I'll go with Beloved Son, or BS.  If he reads that, he'll laugh.  

Apologies for the delay.

Sorry for the delay, but first my computer stopped talking to outside devices, like the screen and keyboard, then I had to prepare for a trip and Christmas at the same time. I'm not sure I'm doing either one well, but they'll both be done after a fashion.

We're not sure what's wrong with the computer, but it works as long as there's nothing plugged into its rear USB ports. So my USB hub and external hard drive are both unplugged.

I feel a little guilty about this.  It could definitely have been handled more quickly and with less disruption.  On the other hand, I feel rather pleased that I've gotten into enough of a habit of posting that I really miss it when it's disrupted. 

More Pictures Pruned

I have sorted through another wad of photos and more of them have hit the wastbasket, some of them (gasp!) unscanned. I have to say again, if you love your children, label your pictures.

I didn't throw any away because they were unidentifiable, this time.  I threw away the tilted and slightly out of focus pictures of the animals at the San Diego Zoo.  I'll have to tell my kids (grown, now) about the trips we used to take to see the animals, there.  Although the Los Angeles Zoo would have been closer, we always went to the San Diego Zoo.  I think I was in junior high before I was aware that there was a zoo in Los Angeles.

I threw away the snapshot of the headless woman holding a cake, even though I can recognize that it's my Grandma D.  The legs angling leasurely into the photo are my Grandpa's and 3/4 of my youngest sister can be seen in the playpen to the right.  She's obviously too old for a playpen.  It would have been set up for a younger grandchild that didn't happen to be using it at that moment. 

I threw out this, too.

 

 

I have no idea what that is.  There is a frame.  There are springs.  There are ashes.  It's looking too big for the frame of a rocking horse, but maybe that means it was a big one.  Usually the ones with frames were plastic, though, not wood. 

 

It is a mystery.  A mystery that I will not be passing down to my descendents, unless they should happen to stumble across this blog. 

 

I also decided to let these photos go.  When I first described them, I guessed they were from the early sixties.  The children in them are the stepchildren of an uncle's short marriage.  I have since found his divorce papers in my mother's files.  He married in 1961 and the divorce was final in 1965.  But it took a year to finalize and I think they had to live at least a year apart before she could file.  So early sixties was a good guess.

 

I met them in 1962.  My previous guess of being 'about eight' can be corrected to six years old.  And it's been a solid fifty years since I've seen them.  There was no alimony or child support assigned, so it looks like the break was total.  I think I can let go of the pictures. 

 

I also chucked a handful of files that turned out to be bank statements and paid bills that were more than six years old.  Anything that was referred to in her taxes has been grouped in big manilla envelopes, rather than left in the files.  So I'm pretty sure I'm safe. 

 

A friend came by to visit and I found a home for a tiny tea set, a glass pitcher, and a big, Christmas sleigh shaped glass candy dish.  I feel lighter.

 

I scanned Gerry's Army photo album and chucked most of it.  I have a small box of other Gerry photos that I haven't sorted or tossed.  I added a few good ones from the album to the box.  It's a small box, about the size of a pound of See's candy. 

 

I only mention See's candy because that box is a similar size and the family has a holiday history with See's.  The actual box isn't a See's candy box, it's the box from one of the Memoriam books that I sorted and scanned earlier.

 

Which reminds me, I have to do some Christmas shopping, still.  I did the important and obvious bits yesterday.  It's down to the fiddly bits, now.  If I keep going through the boxes, maybe there will be room for Christmas.



NaNoWriMo Has Left the Building

NaNoWriMo is over and I did not win.  I did not write 50,000 words in 30 days. 

I also haven't really written in the last three days.  There has been a small grumble of guilt in the background trying to make itself heard.  Am I listening?  Do I feel guilty?

Nope.

At least not about that.

An Odd Photo Album

In a recent post I talked about a big quilted and lacey photo album that I'd inherited from my Grandma D.  I said:

Oddly, there are a lot of pictures of Presidents in this album. I would have really been shaking my head over them if one of them didn't have a printed statement on it that it had been presented to Uncle B.

Having dismembered the photo album for scrap, I must say that I was mistaken.  That was Grandpa's name on the picture of Reagan and it was either a donation request or a thank you for a donation.  There were about six pictures of Reagan, total.  Some of them were post cards.

There were also a few pictures of GHW Bush, one of Deukmejian, and two copies of a picture of Howard Jarvis with In Memoriam on the back.  These are interspersed with pictures of grandchildren, old pictures of their children, pictures of friends, and . . . other things.

There is, for example, mounted as if it were a photo, a 3x5 post it note with the words:

     1987
     Hose
     Bras
     Panties.

There was a small stack of envelopes with peoples names on them, but nothing in them.  There were a few of my Uncle B's business cards, an ad for condominiums, and a couple of pictures that turned out to be solicitations for Libery Godparent Homes.

The album was a real time warp.  Not only were different pages filled with pictures from different decades, two or three different decades could be on the same page.  I have a certain sympathy for that.  If fact, I can't swear that I don't have a similar album, somewhere.   

Perhaps I should make a note to myself to put a few random notes and grocery lists into an album some day, just to make my kids shake their heads when I'm gone.  A little mystification is good for the mind.