The Picture
I took this at the end of last month at a car show at my club. I'd finished playing tennis. That's me in shorts, with hat and my tennis bag reflected in a bright red car finish along with a vintage aqua Chevy, I'm not a car person but I love all the beautiful reflective surfaces of paint and chrome.
The Year
I used this random number generator to generate a year of my lifetime. It came up with the year 2000.
Wow. Y2K.I remember being on call for customers of my software firm on New Year's day in case of problems after corrections for the assumption that years were two digits!
I remember buying a house for my parents in Austin and, in May and June, their move down here from Mesquite (near Dallas) where they'd lived for 34 years. They stayed with us for six weeks while their stuff sat in the garage of the new house and we waited for the seller to move into new digs.
Then, in the fall, I had a gaggle of business trips. Las Vegas, Australia, Europe, Wisconsin. In the snow. I remember the fall being so busy with trips all over. But I don't remember too many details. I went to Paris after my Europe duties for fun. I remember doing a few touristy things in Sydney. And drinking lots of Shiraz. And looking down at the tennis courts in Melbourne from an appointment high in an office building. I remember a restaurant in Las Vegas where I went with two work mates. I took a call from my mother there on my cell. My cousin had died of breast cancer. I missed her funeral due to the travel.
The Object
A manual calendar. This is a little wooden advertising specialty. It belonged to my mother. I don't know where she got it or when but in 2000 (that year again) she moved it to Austin. It is made up of the frame, two cubes with numbers and six wooden slats with months front and back. You can assemble it to be today's date. I remember it in the move because some of the parts were initially misplaced. She found this upsetting. Two young girls I'd hired to help her unpack eventually found them. Inside a sugar bowl, I think. When my dad died I put the pieces in a baggy and brought it home. Not right away, of course, but as I slowly disposed of everything in the house it ended up here. (My mom had died eight years before.) I couldn't bring myself to toss it in with the thrift store donations (of which there were many). I occasionally move the pieces around, but not often. Only recently did I find it in a cabinet and put it on the shelf with books and pictures and artifacts. It reminds me of time passing and the meaningless of things.
The Last Few Days
We've been 'coming down' from a trip with friends to New Orleans, replete with eating and drinking and doing road trip things. I've been trying to get myself to catch up on chores with house cleaning and such. I did get through catching up on bills and budgets. I approved my tax return for the CPA to efile and I wrote checks to the IRS.
Saturday (the 12th) we walked to UT's Bates Recital Hall and saw the UT jazz orchestra with guest Joshua Redman. He was amazing. I'm so glad we went. (We chose it over several other social events.) There's nothing FFP and I enjoy more than a jazz concert. I have six of his albums in my iTunes (ripped from our CD collection.) I should listen to him some more.
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