Let This Be A Record

Today I resorted the things in my room.  The main goal was to consolodate everything that I still need to sort or value and then get rid of into one set of shelves.  Not the pictures still to be sorted.  Those are separate.  This is stuff that I still haven't convinced myself I couldn't get a few dollars for, and letters that I haven't read. 

I may be keeping more than is sensible, but the pile gets smaller every time I sort through it.  Right now I'm sorting through old 45 rpm records. 

Dad's:  Begin the Beguine, The Shifting, Whispering Sands, Deep Purple (Bing Crosby), My Happiness, To Each His Own, What Is A Girl?/What Is A Boy? (Jackie Gleason), Cold, Cold Heart (x3), Daddy's Little Girl, Riders in the Sky (x2), Tennessee Waltz, The Glow Worm, Tumbling Tumbleweeds, Your Cheatin' Heart, You Always Hurt the One You Love, Born to Lose, Mockin' Bird Hill, The Wayward Wind, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, and It's Been a Long, Long Time.

Mine: Rainbow Connection, Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White, and Blowin' In the Wind/Puff the Magic Dragon.

Unknown:  Chasing A Dream, Blueberry Hill, I'll Take Care of Your Cares/Ballerina, Song of the Islands, Over the Rainbow/You Made Me Love You, Till We Meet Again, Anytime, Hopelessly Devoted to You, and a box set of La Traviata, on clear red discs.

Dad had a preference for LPs, so some of these may have been records that I bought cheap to remind me of him, or that I inherited from somewhere else and kept because they were songs he played and songs he sang us to bed with.

I may keep the red ones for awhile, but the others are going.  Also going is a box of LP albums, album sets, and 78 records that were definitely his.  His name was on most of them.  Two were in the cardboard box they had been mailed to him in.  I'm glad I went through the box even though I didn't keep any of the records in the end.  There was also a photo album that he had kept in high school.  There were enough pictures of other kids to show that he had friends.  But most of the pages were filled with pictures of planes.

He was always interested in WWII planes.  Some were post cards.  Some were the size of, and had backs like, playing cards.  Some were smaller photos.  I'm going to mail them to Beloved Son, because he's shown interest in Dad's army time and his army time wouldn't have happened without this prior interest.  If BS wants to throw them out after looking at them, that's fine. 

I did my due dilligence.  I looked online, checking on the 78's.  The best advice there is that if it was a popular song, it isn't worth the bother of trying to sell.  Early jazz and pre-WWII country, western, or hillbilly might be worth something, but Bing Crosby won't be. 

Give me a sec.  There are at least four albums of 78's in the Going Away Shelves.  Some titles I'm not familiar with.  Probably not Dad's.  "That Mink On Her Back (Brought the Wolf to My Door)."  One of them is a picture disc with Cowboys and cows.  I may check on a value for that one.  It has fine scratches, but may not have skips.  Probably a lost cause, but out of nearly two boxes worth, checking on one or two won't hurt me.

So "Out Where the West Winds Blow" is number one of two to be checked.  Number two is "The Voice of . . . Barry Goldwater."  It's his acceptance speech from his nomination for president.  I had no idea that those were pressed into LP's. 

There's about a box full of LP's left, and those were probably mine.  These were the ones I was feeling guilty about, though, so those will be easy to go through.  The culls are by the front door, ready to be taken to the van.  With them are my old speakers and tape/CD player.  Getting those out of my bedroom is freeing up significant floor space.  I'm going to enjoy it.  I'll let you know if I can get big bucks for Barry. 

Oh, my.  I just took it out to see if it had been played much.  It hasn't been.  And it's an eye-catching transparent bright yellow.  A gold LP for Goldwater.  Nice. 

More Pictures Tossed

 I filled the recycling bin again this weekend.  It wasn't all old letters and pictures, though, so I'm not taking a picture.  Also, it just doesn't seem as significant the second time around. 

I don't feel that I've lost anything because the thrill is less intense.  I'm satisfied with a sense of satisfaction, especially if it means that I'm starting to make a habit out of pruning the overstock.

 What sort of thing have I pruned this weekend, you ask?  Well, I got rid of a letter from 1945 that someone kept for the racy innuendo on the joke stationery.

This is proof that sex wasn't invented in the 1960's.

I also scanned and tossed a few of my mother's old report cards from elementary school.  It may be nice to have the image, but I don't need to store the actual card and give my children a chance to throw it out when I'm gone.

I also don't think I need to keep the polaroids of the minor bumper damage that either Mom or Dad sustained in June 1992.  Even if either of them were still alive, they wouldn't have that car and the time for any action regarding those scratches is long gone.


It's been more than twenty years.

Yes, it's a nice flower.  And since it's an amaryllis, it was probably a Christmas present. 

There were a few years where my sister sent them an amaryllis bulb for winter forcing every Christmas.  The first one was bright red, so this isn't the first one.  And it's a nice thing to remember, but I don't need to keep the photo.

My parents really loved their last house.  They put a great deal of time and though into choosing it, and they made thoughtful renovations.  They increased the usefulness and value of the place a lot. 

They also took many pictures of every addition and change.  Mom kept up the process after Dad died and after she remarried.  I've found multiple packets of the same renovation, neatly sorted and wrapped.

 

I've kept a few from each of the major changes, for posterity, assuming that posterity might be interested.  But I've tossed all the copies and chucked most of the year by year documentation.

   Of course, I'm still running into pictures of people that I don't recognize.*  Who knows who these people are?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The shadow knows!

 

 

 

 *(And I have no clue why Blogger isn't letting me put text beside this photo. It lets me post beside all of the rest.  If you know how to fix it, please let me know.)

 

More things tossed at the end of April

I've been tossing more things and taking more things to the thrift shop.  I just hope I'm getting rid of more than is coming in.  I've parted with more than a few books.  That's starting to feel normal.  What doesn't feel normal is that I've collected all of the books that I haven't read, or haven't finished reading, and they make a full shelf.  That's five feet of books, if you were curious about the size of the shelf.

The odd thing is that I used to be a reading maniac.  Very few readable things entered the house without be getting lost in them.  I'd say that means I ought to stop buying them, but if giving myself permission to buy them and set them to the side gives me more time to do other things that need to be done, I'm going to take that extra time. 

It's not my book release that made this family heirloom thrift shop bait.  This one was being used to hold cook books in the kitchen.  My son organized the kitchen counters and declared that we had too many cook books and that we were only going to keep as many as would fit in a much smaller shelf, which he supplied.

To my credit, I only tagged one cook book as a definite keeper and two others as possibles, if other folks found them usefull, too.  I also moved all of my medieval cook books to the shelves in my bedroom.  But my son gets credit for the main cook book reduction and for freeing this old thing.

It's made of cheap wood and was originally stained dark brown.  But the stain eventually faded in places and the finish started to peel off.  So it became part of my furniture painting project. 

You see, at the time most of my furniture was second hand and did not match in any way.  Some of it was things I was only keeping because they had come from relatives.  I painted them all light grey with purple trim.  This piece didn't have any obvious trim, so it ended up completely grey.  The project furniture has been replaced over the years.  This may be the last one. 

No, there's a two drawer nightstand in my bedroom that's still useful.  It's still sturdy, too, so it's probably going to be around for awhile.  If I ever coordinate things in the bedroom, it can be repainted. 

The important thing is that there's more room on the kitchen counter and that I'm not trying to find a way to keep using an inconvenient piece of furniture just because I'd feel a bit guilty letting it go. 

I release you to the world, little grey shelves. 

Is It Unlucky to Toss Luck?

Found among the inherited letters:

I'm going to assume that four-leaf clovers lose their luck as they dry and dessicate.  Either that or we're going to have one lucky, lucky landfill. 

A Closer Look at the Blue Chip Stamps

If you're interested in a better look at the savings stamps I threw away over the weekend, here are a few pictures.

That's two different sized books for the Blue Chip stamps, but each holds the same value.  The smaller one is for the larger TEN stamps. 

 

 

You either went to a redemption center, or sent away to cash in the stamps, where were given away as promotions by grocery stores, gas stations, and other retail and service establishments.  There were rumors, at the height of interest in trading stamps, that you could get them at some funeral parlors and whore houses.  But whether you went in or sent away, you ordered your merchandise out of a catalog like the one above.  Or the one below.

 



I only glanced through the catalogs, before I threw them away, but they were mostly filled with housewares.  Tables, chairs, towels, sheets, and such.  A few toys and pieces of sports equipment.  A few personal articles. 

The Guilt Has Left The Building

I had an extended weekend, this week.  It inspired me to hit the boxes and to sort and weed my files.  The result is below.

Those are receipts and bank statements that are no longer needed.  Those are letters that my Grandmother kept and passed down to my Aunt, who passed them to me.  They will not be passed down to my children.

Yes, I took a few notes, but the notes are on the computer.  That takes up next to no room at all.

I gave myself permission to throw away these.

These are Blue Chip Stamps.  They have been lovingly moistened and pressed into books.  Once upon a time they could be saved up and turned in for nifty things that you'd maybe feel guilty about spending money on, like fondue sets.  Now the company is out of business.  Or, at least, out of the redeemable stamp business.

These are also part of my legacy from Grandma L.  There were S&H Green Stamps, too, but fewer of them.  S&H is still in the participation promotion business, but they've gone digital.  You sign up online and create an account.  Then some stores will add points to your account.  Seven thousand points will get you a five dollar gift card to either Applebee's or Starbucks.  Higher point amounts have more options.

I had three books of S&H Green Stamps, so I checked it out.  Here's what their website said.
--------------------------------------

** NOTE: All Green Stamp submitted for conversion must include a notarized statement that includes a count of the number of stamps being submitted, the name of the store(s) where they were obtained, the location of those stores, your S&H Member Number (you will receive this number when you enroll with S&H greenpoints), as well as your name, address and daytime phone number—in case we have any questions.

Once your Stamps are validated based upon the information provided in your notarized letter, you can expect to receive an update to your greenpoints balance within 2 weeks from the date of our receipt of your Stamp shipment.
----------------------------------------

You have got to be kidding me.  This sounds to me like a company weasling out of a court order saying that they had to accept the stamps by making it too much of a burden to bother.  And it worked.  The stamps are in the trash.  Way to be sleazeballs, guys.  I'm sure that your mothers are proud. 

 

Not that I, personally, lost much by throwing away these stamps.  I had 3 filled books (1,200 stamps each) + a partial book with 208 stamps + 35 stamps in strips + 85 stamps in blocks = 3948 points. That's 56.4% of the way to a $5 gift card.   

They do say, "Can be donated to Food For All, the United Way, or American Forests' Global ReLeaf tree-planting program."  But they don't absolve you of the third degree in order to donate, and it's just not worth it for that little. 

 

I kind of wish that they hadn't added a little grumbling and mean-spiritedness to my weekend, because other than that, I'm feeling lighter.  It's nice to have that much paper off of my back.

 

I still have about four file drawers to sort through.  And there are probably a few more boxes in the garage.  But I made a dent.  I may come back later and post about the things that I tossed after scanning.  Or maybe not.  The point of this blog is to make me feel better about getting things out of my life that don't need to be there, not ot give me something else to feel guilty about.

Help Me! I Opened THAT BOX Again!

I opened that box again.  The one with all of the letters that Grandma L kept all those years.  The one with envelope after envelope of pictures.  The one (shudder) with the eleven diaries. 

I am pomising myself, now, that I will repack the box into a smaller box before I go to bed.  I will not leave this spread all over my desk and stacked on the floor around my chair.

On the up side, I filled a wastebasket with pictures that I won't be keeping.  And I filled the recycling wastebasket with envelopes, clippings, a handful of letters (that I read to make sure there isn't anything in it that I'd want to keep), and a bunck of the smaller boxes that were inside the big box.

I feel pretty good about that.  I still have a stack of photos to sort and scan.  And I still don't have a working scanner.  They can go into the nifty card-sorting boxes that I bought recently.  The rest can go into a smaller box.  That will fit on a shelf in my closet, rather than out in the garage. So I can keep picking at it. 

So.  A little guilt for spreading this stuff around again.  A little pride that I've gotten better at culling photos.  It doesn't hurt that Grandma L had a habit of multiple copies.  A lot of the snapshots that got tossed tonight are copies of views I already have scanned, sorted, and indexed in the box file.  That helped. 

The diaries will be dealt with last.  If I wanted to feel really virtuous, I'd take out the wastebaskets before I went to bed.  We'll see. 

Review and Random Additions

I just did a quick read through the blog, mostly checking out the pictues.  I was noting which pictures have already been used here.  This caused me to feel a bit virtuous, because I was getting more orgainzed.  But I couldn't help reading entries, here and there, and couldn't help noticing misspellings, repeated words, and sentence structure that could use more than a bit of improvement. 

Eh, dump that.  If I went through and organized the pictues, I can go through later and update the writing.  Feeling better.

So here are some things that I threw away without listing here.

These are cards that came with the gifts at my parent's wedding.  They were in a box along with some photos.

The photos weren't of the wedding.  I only have one photo of the wedding that isn't in a newspaper clipping, and it's a snapshot.

The photos in the newspapers sort of imply that there was a photographer at the wedding, but I've never found those photos anywhere.

When I say photos and newspapers, there were at least three different newspapers and three different poses.  Newspapers didn't send photographers to weddings in the mid-fifties, did they? 

This is a picture that I threw away.  I didn't see it when I went through the blog, but I remember writing about it.

I remember saying that I could identify all of the people in the photo.  The headless woman holding the cake is my Grandmother.  The legs are my Grandfather.

The child in the playpen is not the child that the playpen was set up for.  She's also not on time out.  I could tell you which grandchild the playpen was set up for, too.  But it's not a good picture, so it went.

Wait a minute.  There's a second set of legs there in the corner.  Well, that makes me a liar.  I can't tell you with certainty who they belong to. 

The faux leopard skin compact on the left would have been donated if the mirror inside it hadn't been broken.  It's been in storage and out of powder for decades.

I need to remember to tell the kids the story of Grandma L's leopard skin hat.  The moral of the lesson is that, yes, people do pay furriers to put fur items into a refrigerated area for storage, but, no, the crisper in your refrigerator is not a suitable substitute for that.

The next photos are of things that went into a yard sale.  I'm pretty sure the yard sale got mentioned here as being about to happen.  I refuse to feel guilty about posting the pictures late.

I don't seem to be able to place them side-by-side, no matter how small I make them.  Oh, well.  It's a free blog.

These are from Aunt L. 




Let's see where the words go.





That was odd.  I couldn't forward down to the bottom because interface would forward the second photo in the stack along with the cursor.  But once I put in a sentence there, I could forward to the end, no problem.  I'm sure there's a reason. 

 

To loop back to the present, I think I'm going to throw away this snapshot.  (Do people still say snapshot?)  It's a dairy calf that we saw when we went to the Los Angeles County Fair in 1961.

 

 

TOSSING DAD'S STUFF

What do you see below?

They might not look like much to you.  And the title includes the word "Stuff," which is not a word implying great worth.

It's even hard to read the covers unless you get in close.  But Dad saved and treasured these, and after he was dead, Mom treasured them as well.

You could say that they treasured them the way that dragons are said to treasure gold.  That is, they collected them and piled them with other treasured things (although in boxes in closets, rather than in a heap to lie on). 

I am unsure if dragons are supposed to hoard gold for it's symbolic load, rather than their utility.  Dragons don't exist and therefore writers are free to spin reasons that the gold might be useful. 

In my parent's case, the books definitely represented Knowledge, Skill, and Industry.  I don't think they've ever been read.  They were saved so that they could be useful to the children one day, perhaps.  Or the grandchildren. 

They worried about basic building and making skills being lost.  I can sort of see the point.  They bought an empty lot and built their first house, with the help of relatives.  Sometimes, looking back, it feels a bit borderline Urban Amish.  From the Disney movies that they preferred, I'm sure they saw it as maintaining the American Pioneering Spirit. 

I feel guilty tossing the American Pioneering Spirit in the trash.  Even if the covers are all falling off and even intacts sets are going for about five bucks on ebay.  There was no ebay back when these became treasure.

Back then, books were expensive.  Working people didn't finish high school.  If you inherited books, especially useful ones like these, you kept and treasured them. 

I suspect that these had come from Ralph, which would have given them added symbolic weight.  Dad didn't get along with many of the people he worked with.  (Or his relatives or neighbors, but that's a different story.)  Ralph was an older man when he was a younger one, and he respected him.

Ralph had an electrical workshop at home and tinkered with electrical things.  He didn't just put in his time at work, he read up on things and talked about things and figured things out.  He also gave my Dad rides to work for the year that he couldn't drive, himself, for medical reasons. It seemed that gratitude added to respect yields admiration.  Dad admired Ralph.

When Ralph died, his wife asked Dad to take anything he wanted from Ralph's workshop.  She said Ralph would want it that way.  I'm pretty sure that the set of 1923 Hawkin's Electrical Guides came from Ralph.  So did two oscilloscopes, some meters, and various bits and pieces. 

I'd tell you what the bits and pieces were, but, hey - I was a kid when they were collected and stored out in the shed.  I know about the oscilloscopes because I was able to use them, later, to get some extra credit for a high school physics class.  The rest of the things just stayed in jars and boxes and drawers.  I knew that some of the things out in the shed, in the upper garage, in the room off the garage, in the garage . . . (this represents moving to different houses, with different areas that Dad kept toolish things) . . . were Ralph things.  But Dad had collected and bought other things, so I'd have been guessing if I tried to identify which things had been Ralph's.

Except I'm pretty sure that these were.  And I'm throwing out Dad's gratitude and hopes for the future, America the way America used to be, and Knowledge, Skill, and Industry. 

It's going to be a heavy trash bin this week.
___________

To lighten things up, the reason I'm tossing things (including the set of all that is treasured and worthy) is that I got up the energy to do some deep cleaning and organizing.  And you can't do that without tossing things.  Not really.

I have two big boxes for Goodwill.  I threw away other things that didn't twang my guilt strings. 

And I did this:

This is a completly cleaned and organized cupboard.  There was also much other kitchening, but it is not complete and you will therefore see no photos. 

This has room for other things.  There are blanks spaces.  Look at them.

Oh, and this isn't complete . . .

 . . . but it had been bugging the b'geebers out of me, so you can see it, too. 

Some of the things on it will be gone tonight.  It had been covered with assorted things, assorted things with a heavy dust and grime buildup, in the case of the things on the bottom shelves . . . and the very top shelf.  Now you can see horizontal wood.

That didn't sound right.  Let's try again.  You can see usable work space.  Better.

The tubs don't go there, but as I said, the organizing is not complete, yet.  But it's clean and there's space and I threw out a lot of other things, and donated a lot more.  I'm letting that balance out my callous dismissal of Treasured Dreams. 

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.



Recently Thrown Out

I was not the one who started saving this elementary school workbook.  My parents did that.

 

 

It may have been in one of the boxes that my mother brought down a few years before she died "to get things sorted out."  I kept it for years because the comment that my dad had written on it was just so like him.  He took our education seriously and deliberately showed that he was attending to what we learned. 

 

Fun with Dick and Jane would have been about first grade.  I know I was less than excited, at that age, to sit while he reviewed my work.  Fortunately, he did not keep the in depth review process in place for very long.  I don't remember drawing my own comment on it, but I approve of the idea. 



---
I threw this one away awhile ago, but just ran across the picture on my computer.

That's the pictures of my knee before and after the ortho surgeon cleaned it up.  The feathering is typical of osteoarthritis.  In addition, I got a high tibial osteotomy, which I affectionately refer to as a bone wedgie. 

 

 

I suspect that it was G, Mom's second husband that collected the coins from other countries.  I still haven't done anything with them.  They sit on my desk and would get in the way if I didn't have them covered with other stuff that's getting in my way. 

Yes, I feel a bit guilty about that.  Counting by the picture, I've been successful with two out of three items.  I refuse to count by the coin. 

 

Sometimes It's The Little Things

Sometimes it's the little things that are hard to get out of the house.  For instance, this:

is my Mother's bowling league champion patch.  It doesn't take up much space, does it?  What can keeping it hurt? 

Well.  Now the picture is here, as a memorial, and the actual patch has been thrown in the trash.  It may be just one little thing, but there's alway one more little thing, and another after that.  And yes, I need the space. 

This:

 

was, oddly, a little harder to get rid of.  It's one of those sets of sunglasses that your optometrist gives you when you weren't expecting him to dilate your eyes.  It unrolls and clings to the sides of your face.  It will get you home, but that's about it.

It was rolled around the turn signal stem of Mom's van.  In case she ever needed them.  She had a pair of actual sunglasses in her purse, so the odds of her ever having to use these were slim.  But they weren't broken, so there was no reason to throw them out. 

They stayed tucked out of the way, but ready to leap into action for years, maybe decades.  She and I both wore/wear bifocals.  I tested it.  It won't stay on over a pair of glasses.  So she never could have used them. 

They left the house a week or more ago.  I don't remember if I chucked them or sent them to the thrift shop. 

If You Love Your Children . . .

I gave a speech, once, with a recurring motif of "If you love your children: . . . "  (I'm a Toastmaster, I'm allowed to give speeches for no reason in particular.)  There were three sections to the speech.  The first was: Write a Will.  The second was: Prepay Your Funeral.  And the third was:  Have a Living Will or Medical Power of Attorney on File. 

These are important things.  If you do these things, your children will bless you.  Well, unless they're the sort who are always looking for drama, and you shouldn't be encouraging that anyway. 

But if you really love your children, you will LABEL ALL OF YOUR PHOTOS.  This applies particularly to photos that have been in a box under your bed for decades, photos that you never take out and reminisce and share stories over.  I may have to start a blog called:  Who The Hell Are These People?  (Yes, I did notice that I've written about this before.  The photos still aren't sorted and labeled, so the irritation continues.)
I will give Mom credit.  Last year she brought over two boxes of pictures and we labeled all of the photos that she could identify.  Unfortunately, she didn't bring the other four boxes, including the ones that she had inherited from her mother (and that were possibly inherited at least once before that).  Some of these people will never be identified.  Some of them might.  There's a chance that some were identified in other photos.  But a lot of my second cousins look very similar as toddlers.  If the whole family is in the photo, I can go by birth order, but singletons are mysteries.

Now to the guilt.  I felt very guilty when I started throwing away vacation photos.  At first.  As I got further and further into the box, I became almost gleeful.  It was liberating.  If it's just a photo of a mountain or a lake, with no person in it and no date and no clue who took the vacation, it's going.  Sorry.  Bye, bye.  If the people by the lake or the bridge are too small or too blurry to identify, it's going.  Postcards are going.  Joke postcards are being hurled into the waste bin.

I feel just a little guilty about some of these just because they were kept for so many years.  How do I know?  Well, after the fifth picture of Great Grandma B standing next to her car to show that she was on vacation, I started tossing those, too.  So they would have been hers, to start with (or Great Uncle L's - he lived with her for years, and may have taken the photos).  Then they would have been kept by Grandma B, then by my Mother.  I am breaking the chain.  Sorry.  I can get a better picture of that lake on the internet. 

I also feel a little sad about the milestone pictures and the way they accumulate.  There are multiple copies of my Mother's high school graduation picture, for instance.  Some are unsigned and others are dedicated to other relatives from her.  It's obvious that the photos went out, and then, over the decades, the relatives died and the copies slowly collected back.  I've been able to toss multiples of me and of my kids.  I haven't tossed one of Mom's graduation pictures, yet.  I may be able to find homes for them.  We'll see.

I'll write about other things that were collected some other time.  Hint:  you folks who started collecting pre-1964 silver coins from your pocket change when the sandwich coins came out made a good investment.  Buying coins as an investment doesn't work as well; but you folks who didn't pay anything but the time to roll them and the space to keep them came out nicely ahead.  Or rather, your kids will. 

Comments on Blue Belle's

Man, pictures take forever to load. We won't go over my learning curve regarding editing them into a post.

My first thoughts on this little booklet are tri-layered. That usually happens when I think about anything Grandma related. On the ME layer, the booklet was written on school-type paper and then rolled up and kept for, I'm guessing, 82+ years. It is yellowed, friable, and permanently curled into a tube. It is also in the recycling, now that I've typed it up and logged it here, with a copy on my hard drive in the genealogy folder.

I sort of resent the amount of time it took to do that. There was a good bit of wrangling and weighting down involved in just getting each page to lay flat for its turn at immortalization.

On the Grandma layer, it's both touching and sad that she kept it for so long. She really did have an urge to create. She became more than pretty good at drawing and painting, and did handicrafts her whole life. I haven't seen any other stories, or much of her writing, besides letters and wills. (I'll tell you about those some day.)

According to Uncle L, she supported herself and her children, at least for awhile, by making felt "jewelry". It's hard to guess how much time she put into that, though. She also made Barbie (tm) clothes and fancy clothespin dolls.

Like I said, she had an urge to create. Unfortunately, she also had an urge to go drinking with servicemen. (No, I’m not implying that she got drunk.  I have no clue about that.  I’m just saying that she liked to go to bars and that her eyes would light up when recalling men fighting over her.) So she never put in the time to get serious about trying to make a living with her drawings.

The third layer is the voice of my Dad, complaining. At some point he decided that his personal troubles were all her fault. After that, well, let's just say he complained about her a lot. I'm not going to talk about him much until I've got most of Grandma and Aunt D's stuff sorted. He's a whole different kettle of guilt.

---------------

Now let's see if I have anything I want to say about the story, itself. The plot is, of course, a hot mess. That's not a phrase I usually use, but it's a phrase that I don't seem to be able to veer from using in this case. It's a hot mess. I really hope that she was in the low end of her teens when she wrote it. I wrote stuff that was just as bad in my low teens, but I don't think I kept any of the really stinky stuff.

Of course, Grandma had more of a weakness for Romance novels than I ever had, so she would have liked it for that. Grandma kept me supplied with romance novels during junior high and high school, mostly with old style Harlequins and Georgette Heyer. I kept them in Wrigley's Gum boxes (the big packing boxes) under my bed.

At one point, Dad put his foot down, saying that if any more came into the house, an equal number had to leave. I was fine with that. I don't think I ever re-read them. Even so, when I moved away to college, and donated them to the local library, there were more than a thousand of them. (The library was thrilled. They became "honor" checkouts - not tracked - and there were apparently a number of little old ladies who just loved them.)

I read them as a cheap way to travel for a twelve-year-old. The stories were always set in England or Australia or somewhere else I'd never been. And the regencies, especially, were pretty good vocabulary builders. (Lately, I was tickled to see Terry Pratchett add that little bit of information to one of his books. It was Unseen Academicals.)

I never read them as romances, or even novels of manners. I suspect that Grandma did, though. For me, after the first dozen or so, it was too obvious that the characters were acting out a formula. The people and relationships never seemed real.

So - back to the story. The plot was a hot mess. The word cowboy was never stated, but everyone but Belle (or Belle's) talked cowboy. The hero shot the heroine and had to open up her shirt to discover that she had boobs. With eyesight that bad, it was a wonder he hit his target. But everyone else made the same mistake, so maybe in the time of the Flapper (the early 1920s), boobs were passé, even cowgirl boobs..

I will not speculate on how Belle got on a wanted poster, why her father was kidnapped, or why everyone knew the owner of the Circle R Ranch, but no one knew that he had a grown daughter. Wall Rock was the foreman of the Circle R, for Pete's sake. This is a bigger oversight than missing a set of boobs. I will also not ask what self-respecting Spaniard would name a town La Crane.

She must have liked the name Wall Rock, because she started so many sentences with it and never shortened it to Wall unless someone, say, the Sheriff, was talking. And Wall was a special guy: able to hide his horse in a clump of bushes, ambidextrous, and a soft touch for a sob story.

The heroine must have been wildly attractive for a woman with no cleavage. He decides not to turn her in to the Sheriff for the $5000 reward before she even wakes up after he shot her . . . again. Even though she had shot him. Rather than holding that against her, or even saying ouch, he's ready to assume . . . what? I'd say he thinks she's too feminine to be a criminal, but she just shot him. Then got shot without saying ouch herself.  That sounds manly to me.  Or maybe in The West, bullet wounds are just the casual punctuation of conversation. 

I feel so cheap taking pot-shots at this story. It was obviously written by someone very young. At least I earnestly hope that Grandma was close to twelve when she wrote it. She told me once that when she was young, she and her best friend made a pact to run away to The West and marry cowboys. This story would fit right in with that frame of mind.

As that kind of story, I think it's cute. "You'll need a yarn and a pair of lies" isn't a bad line. Neither is "I stopped him, but the pony got away with him." At twelve, there's plenty of time to learn where to put apostrophes.

Am I getting up to date with my Guilt?

November 5, 2011

I'm going through Aunt D’s stuff.  This is the stuff picked up last weekend.  I'm feeling guilt at throwing out the odd stuff that she kept and a sneaking guilt at being curious about her income and other things.  So I’ll take notes on that as I throw things out, to ease the pangs.  This isn't uncaring disposal or nosiness, it's creating family history. 

Tax records from 1981 to 1994 - tossed.  Of course I made notes on the tax records, especially the addresses she had lived at.

A good performance review from ’88 for Clerk II Orange County – tossed. 

A framed certificate of award for a suggestion for improvement of services from LA County, for which she received $40 – tossed the frame, kept the certificate.  I may toss the certificate, too after I've scanned it.

There were many copies of her request for retirement in 1986.  At first it seemed odd that there would be so many copies, but that was possibly related to the envelope I found with the list of LIES! they were telling her. 

The retirement would have been a stressful subject anyway because her views on financial decisions were very different from those of the mother and brother that she often received significant sums of money from.  I'm pretty sure that they had no idea that she was tapping into her retirement with one agency while still working at another.  So when she hit bureaucratic snags to starting it up, she couldn't complain to them about it.

While she was in the hospital and nursing facility, I had discovered that she had saved every bill and semi-official piece of mail she had ever paid or received.  They were arranged chronologically in her drawers.  When I arranged for hospice in her home, I cleared out quite a bit of it.  What I'm going through now had been stored away in boxes.

She saved grades from Harbor Jr College, between 1959 and 1964.  Mom spoke of them being in the same nursing program, but I don’t see any nursing.  Maybe she only saved the A's and B's.  She also took an Office Serv&DP class from Orange Coast College in 1981 (A). 

Happy Valentine’s Day 2010

(Again, this is from an old log.)  (It's being posted in November 2011.)

I’m feeling guilty about not reading this document before adding to it.  That will probably make the prose choppy.  I’m willing to forgive myself for it, though, because rereading would waste time and may distract me from making the next entry.  And I’m feeling guilty enough about the length of time between now and the last entry. 

Not that I haven’t thrown anything out since then, I just haven’t thrown away anything significant – anything old.  It’s been more of an empty the trash kind of thing.  Although I did go through all of the newspapers yesterday and the day before.  I clipped out the crosswords, because they’re the main reason I get the paper.  That and giving the kid taking subscriptions a break.  I used to deliver papers at one point.  Maybe I’ll write about that later.  Not today, though. 

Today I have on my desk an old globe that’s been sitting on my desk for a couple of weeks and that’s been sitting in my closet, in plastic, for years.  It’s one that Mom and Dad used to have.  It was part of their educate the children program.  The may have gotten it from an older relative.  (Yes, this is the globe that I claimed to have thrown out in the last post.  Give me a break, here.)

I haven’t found a date on it.  But it has French West Africa on it.  Germany looks like it’s all one country, which wasn’t the case when I was small.  The USSR is there.  So is a place called Tannu-tuva, between Mongolia and the USSR.  There’s also a place called Sinkiang near that.  Iran is called Persia.  Saluchistan is at the top of India, which has not yet calved off Pakistan.  Thailand is still Siam.  Burma is there.  I don’t remember if Burma is still Burma, but I’m guessing not.  Viet Nam is French Indo-china, and Laos and Cambodia are nowhere to be seen.  So I’m guessing there is no more Burma.  

Is there still a Borneo?  Was that what became Taiwan?  I’ll have to google these.  Line islands? 

The globe says:  “12 inch Standard Globe made by Replogle Globes, Inc Chicago, Ill.  Clear, Accurate, Up-to-date.  Up-to-date is a stupid thing to put on a globe.  Maybe on the packaging, or on a removable sticker, but unless the globe is frozen in time, it’s not going to stay up-to-date.

Nepal, now.  Is there still a Nepal? 

Time to toss the globe. 

Gone.  I have a corner of my desk back.  (See.  It had gotten as far as my desk, with the intent of throwing it out.  If it took another month and another entry to actually toss it, I'm cool with that.)

From Google: “On August 14, 1921 the Bolsheviks (supported by Russia) established a Tuvan People's Republic, popularly called Tannu-Tuva. In 1926, the capital (Belotsarsk; Khem-Beldyr since 1918) was renamed Kyzyl, meaning "Red"). Tuva was de jure an independent state between the World Wars.”

I think there was a Kyzyl there.  Should I go pull it out and check?  No, it didn’t.  That means the globe was published between 1921 and 1926.  Or that they left the capital off. 

Also, according to Google: “French West Africa (French: Afrique occidentale française, AOF) was a federation of eight French colonial territories in Africa: Mauritania, Senegal, French Sudan (now Mali), French Guinea (now Guinea), Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), Dahomey (now Benin) and Niger.”

As regards Sinkiang, it looks like it was a province of China, in several forms: “In 1912, the Qing Dynasty was replaced by the Republic of China. Yuan Dahua, the last Qing governor of Xinjiang, fled. One of his subordinates Yang Zengxin (杨增新), took control of the province and acceded in name to the Republic of China in March of the same year. Through Machiavellian politics and clever balancing of mixed ethnic constituencies, Yang maintained control over Xinjiang until his assassination in 1928.^[26]”

So the globe shouldn’t have listed it separately from China.  We’ll see if Saluchistan is a similar case.  Nope.  It looks like it got split up into bits of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran.  During British Rule it was split into three governing areas. 

Burma is officially the Union of Myanmar since 1989.  And Borneo is still the third largest island in the world.  So the Kinky Friedman song is still accurate, and the globe may or may not be accurate for that island. 

(OK, it took slightly more than another simple entry to get me to let go of the globe.  And, yes, I do get distracted that easily.  In fact, for me, that spate of Googling was remarkably on point.)