Never hear the end of this

A while ago my mother brought a pile of boxes to me claiming that all of the stuff in them was mine. This happens fairly frequently, and I find that my best defense against this is to leave the boxes lying everywhere so that she doesn’t bring any more. Occasionally the boxes contain fond remembrances of times long past, such as the red suspenders presented to me as employee of the week at Hual-Cu-Cuish. More often they contain things like old retainer cases, pins and buttons from various travels, dream catchers made in handicraft, a mardi gras mask, a large rubber eraser shaped like a cat, patches from well loved and unfortunately entirely forgotten participants, and at least one petrified Gatorade packet (yes a great deal of that was an inventory of what was once in a box and is now on my floor). The trouble is that even the stuff I do want to keep I have no real place for, thus the boxes.

My mother also has a certain fondness for baubles and outdated technology. The family owns several dozen VHS tapes and audio cassettes. Our shelves overflow with angels, elves, pixies, authentic Norwegian trolls… all right, that last one is mostly mine, but you get the idea. And every box that I hesitantly look inside has a handful of 3.5 floppies. This time around I got sick of moving these from box to box and started shoving them into my (thank goodness) six year old computer to erase their contents and feed them to mom’s behemoth of a camera.

That’s when I found them: two discs from back when the whole world was a little leery about this whole “digital pictures” thing. Apparently I had taken a bunch of pictures with my good old film camera and brought them into a drugstore or Wal-Mart and received not only the photographs in question, but a disc containing the pictures as well. Ironically, I probably shoved them into a box myself; after all, I had the real photos. What did I need digital copies for? Now I have no idea where the old photos are but I have the digital copies on my computer. And a big serving of humble pie, of course.