Lorem Ipsum

Poking through boxes in the garage this evening, looking for a box of books that might or might not exist, here are some things I found:

• A plaster life-mask made of me when I was in maybe fourth grade.
• What I think was my father's christening cup.
• Several old family photos that I hadn't seen in years. (Also my soccer and class photos from when I was a kid.)
• Long braided hair (mine) from a 1986 haircut.
• Body glitter.
• An eye-of-Horus wire-and-mirror art piece.
• Two of my father's old graphing calculators. (He loved graphing calculators.)
• My plastic recorder from when I tried to learn to play recorder in about third grade, along with a couple of other small musical instruments, such as an SGI-branded harmonica.
• A bunch of 3.5" floppies that I rescued from my father's house. (I don't think I have a floppy drive any more.) Also some of his Zip disks and my Zip drive, but I don't think I have the right cables to attach the drive to my computer.
• My father's go clock and a full set of tiny plastic go stones.
• The Junior Secret Service Code-o-Graph (copyright 1944) that our parents gave us when I was a kid. (I think it had belonged to one of them as a kid.)
• The Ikoso kit we had when I was a kid. "builds a sphere with a 7 ft perimeter"--I think we built the sphere once, then put all the pieces away in their original cardboard tube. IIrc, it was very difficult to build anything with.
• A linear slide rule and a nifty circular slide rule, both probably originally my father's.
• The punched cards that my father used to bring home with messages from "Big C" to me and my brother and our mother. (The ones to our mother were sometimes X-rated.)
• A hexaflexagon made from 1-inch-wide hole-punched computer tape. Not sure whether I made it or my father did.
• The drawing-compass set that I bought in the USSR in 1985, featuring at least four compass-like items nestled in a plastic box.
• A photo album that I'm pretty sure belonged to Nancy's daughter. I'll try to find her and return it to her. (I took it from Peter's house along with a fair bit of the other stuff on this list; I intended at the time to return it to Helena, but never got around to dealing with it.)
• My copies of Lady Churchill's, Flytrap, and a bunch of chapbooks written by various of y'all.
• A big metal knife switch, provenance unknown. (The whole block is about 14" x 4" x 5")
• A ridiculously bulky and heavy Dell laptop that I'm guessing is from the mid-'90s or so.
• Various awards I won in elementary school.

On the one hand, this list illustrates my packrat tendencies, and I'll probably be disposing of some of the less personal items. On the other hand, I'm really pleased to see most of it. Thank you, Past Jed!

(Sadly, the missing books did not turn up. Wonder what I did with those.)