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. 

Old Style Photos - The Sixties

Does your family have these kind of pictures?

This is just the latest set I've found.  My parents also had each of us photographed when we were one year old.  They also were delivered as a Tube O' Photos. 

You may not know if your family ever purchased a Tube O' Photos, if your family happened to show foresight.  If the photos had been cut apart and put into frames or into a photo album, they would not have become set in their curl over the course of years.

This big long strip of photos is only laying partially flat because it's being stretched between a heavy diet vanilla steamer (not milk) and a box of photos.

Were you to reach into the photo and lift up that cup of milk, that strip would snap back into its tube shape fast enough to startle you.

The tube was taken in the early sixties.  So those unseparated pictures have been rolled up like that for fifty years.

These are my Uncle B's step children.  I don't remember their names.  I only met them once or twice.  I'd have been about eight and it was, as mentioned, about fifty years ago.  The marriage didn't last very long and while Uncle B was in it, they lived in San Jose, which was Somewhere Far Away to my eight year old mind.

I used to think that my parents had handled the Tube O' Photos years wisely.  They had taken each of us to be memorialized for posterity when we were one year old.  I knew that they had received a Tube O' Baby Faces for each of us.

But I had seen a few of the photos in frames, on the wall.  And I had been shown other photos, cut apart (as below) and laid flat in the cedar chest (a place of deep storage).

So, although they talked about the tube, I thought that they had done what was necessary to forestall the effects.  But, no.

Later I was to find that they had cut a few pictures loose, but had left the rest to fossilize in their tubitude.  True, Mom had gone back at one point, and cut one tube into three-picture sets, then laid that out in the cedar chest with things weighing them down. 

But the rest had been left to curl.  I wonder how widespread this is.  True, my parents and my uncle are only two instances, and they're related instances at that.  But I've inherited other tubes. 

I also wonder why photographers in the sixties would deliver photos in a tube like that?  Was it a recent change in technology, so that it looked new and modern?  Was it supposed to be cool, seeing all those faces in a line?  Were these the proof copies, with the tubeness implying that you'd get a nice flat picture if you paid the full price?

I don't know.  I only know that I've cut apart those photos.  And I'm flattening them out.  And I don't even know if I'll be throwing them out when I'm done.  Because I may never know these people's names and after fifty years there really isn't much of a connection. 

I Can See Why She Kept Them

Last night I sorted through two full file boxes of old paperwork and put most of them in the recycling bin.  That makes the stack of boxes sitting in the back yard that came from my mother's place just a little noticably shorter.  Not significantly shorter, just noticably.

I can see why she kept them, though, so I don't feel even a little bit of frustration or annoyance.  Most of them are papers related to Uncle B's estate and to the trust that it set up for Grandma & Grandpa. 

Uncle B was Mom's older brother.  He died of leukemia in middle age.  Mom was his executor and then the executor of the trust for the rest of their parents' lives.  It was a big job and she was diligent at it.  I don't find it odd that she kept the evidence of it packed in boxes for decades. 

She probably could have pruned out G&G's old utility bills, but what the heck.  She probably just put all of the old files in a box at some point without sorting through them at all, just to get them out of the way fast.  And she'd have no reason to go back through them once they were packed away.

Some of the papers were official documents, and I'll be keeping some of those.  I probably have other copies of Uncle B's death certificate, but I know I don't have copies of his birth certificate, honorable discharge, and military reserve papers. 

The big stack of continuing education certificates, on the other hand, I scanned and then recycled.  The older ones were police related and the newer ones were real estate related. 

I'm going to keep what look like public relations photos.  They're professionally done and taken at the police station.  I recognize Uncle B but have no idea who the other folks are.  The shots are obviously posed.  No one is looking at the camera.  Everyone is looking up and away at exactly the same sort of posed angle. 

I'm wondering if that was a standard pose back then.

I also found several more copies of my mother's high school portrait, in nice thick book-style cardboard matts.  Guess what my sister's will be getting for Christmas.  Well, maybe not Christmas.  That might be ghoulish, since Mom died last May.  But I'm starting to get quite a stack of these and it only seems fair to share the wealth.
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Last night was also the night for opening what looked like a Rubbermaid bin full of pictures.  There were pictures in it, and I was surprised at some of them.  But a fair bit of bin space was taken up by six boxed In Memoriam books. 

I made a bet with myself on what I'd find when I opened them, and I won that bet.  The ones from my family were mostly empty.  We've never been good at filling these kinds of things out.  Two of them were for Gerry's first and second wives. 

Gerry was Mom's second husband.  He was a great guy and an appreciated addition to the family.  (Here comes the guilt.) He was also adopted.  He had no children and his parents are dead.  So far as I know, he has no relatives, certainly none that I know about.

I've been collecting his pictures and papers.  For instance, there were a handful of his pictures mixed in with pictures of our older relatives in that bin.  It kind of made it hard to sort relatives that I didn't recognize from Gerry's friends.  Eventually I learned to recognize Gerry when he was young, and that made it easier.

I was able to remove the pertinent pages from the In Memoriam books.  Tossing the bindings and the blank pages will save a lot of space.  I may recycle even the pertinent pages after I've scanned them.  I'll have to look at them again before I decide.

Two surprising things in the bin were military photo albums.  One was Gerry's and one was my Dad's.  Dad had pulled out his military mementoes from time to time to share with us, when we were kids.  It's odd that he never showed us this album.  Stray thought - it might have been something that Grandma L kept tucked away, so that Mom and Dad didn't have it until after she died.  But that's just a stray thought.

Dad was an airplane mechanic during the Berlin Air Lift.  Gerry was in World War II.  His album includes a picture of him in a kilt, but I don't think that had anything to do with his military service.  If I had to guess, I'd guess that there was a photographer near a base who supplied costumes for photos and some of the guys liked the Scottish Costume thing.  It's definitely done by a photographer, rather than snapped by a friend. 

The biggest thing in the bin was a photo album that turned out to be Grandma D's.  It's a huge, square album.  Its cover was made of wood covered with quilting with lace ruffles around the edges to make it look even bigger.  It's heavy. 

The pages are those thick sticky things with transparent covers that can be pulled back.  I know from experience with other albums I've inherited that those things don't age well.  I'll be taking the album apart and just keeping the pictures that I don't already have copies of.  And it looks like I have copies of most of them.

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.  Either Uncle B was more of a go-getter than the family acknowledged or they give those out with donations.  I'm going to have to check on this.
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Let's see how the guilt's doing.  I got rid of some papers that I don't feel guilty about.  I got rid of some book covers that I don't feel guilty about.  I've filed some papers and pictures that I don't feel guilty about.  And I have a plan for some of the rest of it.

I kind of feel guilty about the little voice in my head that just wants to chuck Gerry's things.  I'm feeling a little down about the military albums, because they're bulky if I just keep them and work if I take them apart and sort and scan them.

And at the moment, my desk looks like this:

 

Beside my desk looks like this:

 

 

But I have a plan.  You may not be able to tell, but those stacks on my desk are sorted stacks.  They will not stay there long. 

 

Oh, and those thin cardboard boxes under the ipad in the lower right of that last photo - those are the Fortune Magazines that are going to be Worth Something One Day.  I'll tell you about them another day.  Right now I need to clear that desk.  See you on the other side