Weekend

Generally productive. As we often do on free weekend days, Saturday we went out on a large spiral of shopping/errands: a stop at Dinette World to confirm that we could get kitchen stools inexpensively, a stop at Jordan's to get really good kitchen stools for not that much more, a stop at Patterson's for dance shoes for jducoeur, a brief stop at the old house to install a new smoke detector in the basement and pick up yet-more-little-oddments from the attic (I found the missing plastic Baby Jesus from the creche set!), stops at the comic pusher and Target for various small things including curtains and potato chips.

Sunday we removed 3 more carloads of stuff from Storage 1. One load of videotapes moved to Storage 3 for consolidation, and 2 loads of MISC to Mill St. (Correspondence of my father's from his college days, jigsaw puzzles, sheet music...) I think we have one more carload for the new house, with the 8mm movie projector, the folding screen, and the last of the games & puzzles. So I can give notice and close out that contract - and set a final get-it-out-by date for the things going to Ruadh and Heather. (ETA: That target date is set for 2/20, two weeks from today.)

Feeling rather blah today: my back hurts, I could nap right this minute, I've got a trace of post-nasal drip that I hope doesn't presage a cold...

An ordinary man

My father was not an extraordinary man in any way -- he wasn't famous, did not invent anything, never held political office, was not a war hero, did not rise far in his company or become wealthy. Nor did he do anything notorious.

I've got a box of letters, mostly those received by him rather than sent by him, which provide an interesting portrait of him in the 1930s and 1940s. Interesting to me, anyway. I opened the topmost dozen or so yesterday, which turn out to be a couple letters from his fraternity brothers chiding him for not writing while recovering from his appendectomy; notes from his girlfriend who would be his first wife, telling him which trains to meet for their weekend visits; a note from his brother at another college, in intentionally fractured "German," and a note from his uncle, recommending particular college courses to prepare for an engineering career.

It seems a shame to toss them, but is it worth it to keep them or organize them? They are interesting to me, because they shed light on what Dad was like as a young man, and also on the times (I know some of the notes date from his Annapolis days right after Pearl, for instance.). Would they be interesting to anyone else? Should I set them up into a book or scrapbook? (Uncle Truman's letters would have to be translated facing-page, his penmanship was so dreadful!) Should I sort out the college memorabilia, and offer it to their Archives? If I had a child to save them for, I would do so, but there's just me.