I won’t say that I did any actual work. That was all done by Mom and Berta. But I did go through many, many boxes of saved junk to make sure there wasn’t anything in them I wanted to keep.
I managed to reduce everything I was keeping down into one box. Even some of that stuff can go after I’m finished transposing it to digital format. I was able to toss a lot of stuff that I would normally have kept by just taking some pictures of it. I’ll keep the pictures and still have the memories, and can save that room in the garage.
There are three eras of junk in the garage, really. Before high-school, high-school, and college. It’s pretty easy to classify things into one of these categories. The before high-school stuff mostly consists of science/computer magazines and notebooks full of programming ideas. There were also some baseball trophies and toys. My high-school stuff consists of a ton of notes passed to me in the halls by people I knew back then. And some notes for programming ideas. The college boxes contain baubles from the dorm room, road trip souvenirs, letters from people I knew, and printouts by the ream of realized programming ideas.
One of the things that I’m not keeping (this thing isn’t going in the trash, but probably into the garage sale in late August) is the flask pictured here. I’m fairly sure we had misnamed this flask as an Erlenmeyer, but it is in fact a Florence flask. This particular flask holds quite a few things besides the ping-pong balls you see.
The flask itself was stolen (yeah, yeah) from the Eat n’ Park at the base of the big hill near the UPJ campus. They used to serve hot water in these flasks for brewing hot tea. I don’t think they have these flasks any more, and it’s probably because they were too coveted an item for dorm room decoration.
We used to spend a lot of time at Eat n’ Park in college, especially late at night. There was a waitress there who would bring us all sorts of stupid free things, and we would think we had a good “in” at the restaurant.
I spent an evening at Eat n’ Park with Patty, our weekend-warrior friend. Patty and I would “study” for psychology class together, which usually consisted of her reading the textbook and studiously taking notes, and me lounging in her room effortlessly answering questions that she asked from the chapter review sections. I didn’t do very well in that class, but I did do better than Patty on every test that we both “studied” for.
Patty always walked like she was in a hurry to get somewhere no matter where she was going, and she always had a military air about her. Except perhaps that one night when she stumbled into our dorm room after the frat party. Anyway, just this one time we sat in Eat n’ Park and ate onion rings, and I remember she made a big deal about dipping onion rings in ketchup. I guess this is where I learned this habit.
Also of interest in this picture are the soccerball-patterned ping-pong balls. I played a great deal of ping-pong in college rather than doing anything I was supposed to do. I uncovered a few pictures of Jason Lehman in the boxes in the garage, who was a roommate of mine before he did the dropping-out thing, too. Anyway, he was pretty good at ping-pong before he left, much better than me.
I think these ping-pong balls came in a care package from home, or returned with me from visiting home, and along with them came my good ping-pong paddle, which was not amongst the things I sorted through in the garage, although last I saw it, it wasn’t looking in great shape. I think it might have been a casualty of the great basement flood, and been tossed into the “too much mold on this” pile.
Well, I took quite a few pictures of things I’m not keeping, and quite a few pictures of things I am keeping. Each one has a pretty good story to it, at least enough to mention it here, perhaps. Some things are stories themselves, and worth finishing or reprinting where someone can actually read them without breaking into my garage.
