It's Finally Here!

 Closing Week! And there's no hurricane on the horizon and I should be done with That House on Wednesday. 

In also amazingly fun news, that last box of photographs that have been sitting in the heat of the garage in FLORIDA for 20 years, carelessly stored in ziplock plastic bags and shit?  An amazing number of them are in great shape. I have inherited a thousand or so amazing vintage photos from the WWII era and before, and several antique cameras, and now I am inspired to create a display: the cameras and a digital frame slide show of the photos from the first half of the 20th century. There are photos I've never seen before, and bless my mom for carefully writing the names on many of them. 

This stylish, handsome dude is my maternal grandfather, who died when my mother was around 5 years old.

And this is a true prize: my mother at around 2. She was born in 1926, so this would be from 1928-ish? Anybody else getting a vague Paper Moon feel from her outfit and that bonnet? 

Anyway, I have about eleventy billion photos to go through, pictures of actual people, not trees, as well as funeral notices and wedding notices and basically I need to renew my Ancestry subscription to put it to use. The slides were mostly garbage, but this is the freaking motherlode of family history. 

So, when it's too godawaful hot to be outdoors, I'll grab a random plastic bag of old photos and do a first cut, pitching the unidentified and the faded, etc., then figure out how to organize them for scanning. Then, a nice 8x10 digital frame will be big enough to put a little slide show display with the old cameras.  I'll put it on my mother's hope chest which currently just fills an empty wall in my living room. 

 Yep, that's me. I was tortured into those curls for every occasion as a tot, because DAMN YOU SHIRLEY TEMPLE! (Not really, not her fault, she was a lovely human.) I HATED having my hair curled like that. My hair was wavy but disobedient, as it is to this day, and the process of creating those curls hurt like a mofo. I finally rebelled when I was about 5, and my mother stopped the torture. Here I'm 3. That might have been the last year of the Shirley Temple look. 

It's insanely hot. I've been drafted to Uber the flute player to band camp tomorrow and I don't have any meeting conflicts. God willing, the house will close this week.