An endoscopy. It's just like a colonoscopy, but they start at the other end.Mmmm, too much information, always a treat.
Okay, enough of that. I made my reservations for the train to and from D.C. next week; I'm so excited! I'll be gone from about noon on Friday to about dinnertime on Sunday. I was talking to OldFriend last night and she said "Go to a museum!" but I'm afraid not on this trip. The only reason I'm taking a 2:30 train home on Sunday and not an earlier one is so that I can help K finish cleaning out the old apartment. The two roommates she had there turned out to be miserable roommates, let alone friends. One of them is already gone gone, moved to Germany, and the other "left" but still has some things in the apartment. She's coming to get them over this weekend and claims that she's going to finish her share of the cleaning. But I doubt it. Both of them left piles of stuff they didn't want anymore (which K and one of her new roommates took to Goodwill) and boxes and cans of food in the cabinets. The one coming back quite obviously never cleaned her bathroom once during the year she lived there. (Everybody now: EEEUUUUUWWWWW.) So I'm packing my Playtex gloves and heading south.
I was thinking about this today; I may have written about it before. A few months ago, the Colleage and the SCM and I were having this discussion at work and asked each other: Do you still have anything that you had as a child? She said yes immediately, a few things. He thought for a moment and then said No. As for me, well ...
It's a pack-rat thing, not so much a greedy "Mine!" thing, but I swear, everything I ever owned I just think is mine and therefore it's part of my job to keep it. Definitely a key feature of the can't-throw-anything-out-ever mindset. Just looking over at the nearest set of bookshelves, I see a couple of college textbooks and a neat little wooden box that the Lane hope chest people were giving away as a promotional thing and you had to be in high school to get one. Not to mention part of the set of Dickens novels that were my mother's when she was a kid.
What made me think of it was I came across this today, and so I had to re-arrange knickknacks to make room to put it out somewhere:
It's my 1950s ViewMaster, along with some of the old reels. This was one of my top favorite toys as a kid. I actually only have 8 reels, but I guess back then we would be content to see the same thing over and over. I'm going to take a look at eBay just to see what this stuff is worth; also, I broke the knob off the ViewMaster, circa 1959, and maybe I can get a replacement. Years ago, I would give kids ViewMasters as gifts, distant young cousins for Christmas or even as donations to gift-drives for underpriveleged kids, but now I can't see it being much of a draw, although they still sell them. But not nice old brown ones, like mine.
Here are the reels I have:
- The Wizard of Oz
- Sleeping Beauty
- Hansel and Gretel
- Roy Rogers, King of the Cowboys
- Andy Panda in "Mystery Tracks"
- The Pied Piper
- Woody Woodpecker in "The Bill Collector"
- Little Black Sambo
You read that right. It was not so un-PC then that children couldn't be exposed to the horror that was Little Black Sambo. (Hey, I also own a copy of the book, but my cousin gave me that as an adult, children's librarian to children's librarian.)
Now I'm itching to get to eBay.
