Saturday, 4/12/2019
Today I continued to decimate the long merged to-do list I put together a couple days back. One item was just “clean camera”. I had noticed that the Nikon was really grubby and in fact, I’m shamed to admit, it still had traces of an unfortunate event back in spring 2017 when, in Italy, I had a small incident with a cappuccino and some foam got on the camera. So I cleaned it up and put a bit of armor-all on the rubber bits and looks good again. “Photo stuff” was another checklist item, and that was easy to deal with. One old camera was already in the sale box. The Nikon manual, battery charger, and extra battery, and the tripod, were the only remaining items, so I put those in an appropriate “keep” location.
Eventually I went off to the CHM to lead a tour. On the way back I stopped first at Summerwinds Nursery on Middlefield. On this first warm weekend of spring it was bustling with people buying plants and fertilizer etc. Marian would have been there I’m sure, picking out bedding plants for the “porch pots”, three large bowl-shaped pots that stood on our front porch. She would plant them with blooming things every spring. I retired those pots to the garage last fall when the then-current crop of bedding plants were dying down. I thought very briefly of bringing them back and planting them, but… no.
I was only at the nursery to buy plant supports for the two big dragon-wing begonias that live in pots on the porch. I do intend to keep them for my deck at C.H., and for that they have to have saucers, so water doesn’t drip down to the next floor’s deck. I thought they’d be better off with casters as well, so I got little wheeled supports for them that incorporate saucers. That was another to-do item.
From the nursery it was just a few blocks to FOPAL where the monthly sale was going on. I went in to see how the Computer shelf was doing. Quite a few gaps in the shelving showed that some books had been bought. I was disappointed though, because I had set up a short section labeled “classics and nostalgia” and stocked it with blasts from the past, like “Using your TRS-80 in the home” and a book by Larry Yourdon on “Structured COBOL”. Maybe people had gotten a kick out of it, but nobody had bought anything. I also took a look around the Bargain Room, which is quite remarkable, really three large rooms where all books are $1 and the high stacks are just stuffed with thousands of volumes.
At home I sat down to do something about the file of “letters to us” that Marian had carefully collated, and which had sat in the closet unexamined for over thirty years. Going through it I found that almost all the letters were from the period 1975-1979, around the time we were living in London. We wrote regular letters describing our adventures, duplicated them and sent them to half a dozen friends and relations. Said friends and relations often replied, and these replies are the bulk of the file. It’s nice to know that we had people who were complimenting us on our travel narratives.
One particularly good correspondent was Marian’s sister Jean. I set the thick packet of letters from her aside and emailed her to see if she wants them. The rest I put in the recycle.
One last item: two dresser drawers of Christmas wrapping material. Rolls of paper, boxes of tags, a shoebox of ribbon spools. Bagged the complete rolls in a big white garbage bag to be sold (maybe). Plain paper and plain boxes into the recycle. Scraps of foil and shiny stuff into the trash. Two more empty drawers!
And that is bloody well that for the weekend. Sunday is a day of rest from downsizing.
Codgerville 