Friday, May 20, 2011

Cleaning House II

In my ongoing effort to remove things from my parents' house I brought a few more loads back with me to Provo.[1] The first load, which I'll present here, came back with me in March, after we went up to visit for the birthday week.[2] The second load, which we picked up after our visit to Lucin [3], was just a lot of my books that I've been storing in their basement. They're not worth detailing. It took me a while to get around to this post because there were some things that took a little planning (as you'll see) and our recent move [4] kind of disrupted the flow of those events (i.e. I hadn't unpacked them, yet).


As before, I had to get rid of research materials that would probably never be put to good use.


This is a military surplus hat that I bought from Smith & Edwards, where I used to work. I rarely wore it.[5] It went to DI.


In 1993 my AYSO soccer team went undefeated. As a result, we got unofficial trophies.[6]


I had some old Thank You cards and envelops left over from my graduation. I asked Leann if she wanted them and she said, "Of course!"


I brought home various collections (top left: basketball cards and football cards; top right: pogs; bottom left: stamps; bottom right: state quarters). The stamps and quarters I'll be keeping. The cards, along with the baseball cards I mentioned last time [1], will probably go to DI.[7] The pogs will go to DI.[8]


I found the publication my Honors Freshman English class put together. Since the class textbook was called Why Write? we called it Why Not Write? The teacher, Mrs. Jorgensen, understood our choice of title to mean "don't let anything hold you back from writing", but we actually meant it as "examples of bad writing that will hopefully convince you not to write." Ha! I wanted to put in a personal essay that I wrote about death. But only if I could keep the original ending.[9] Mrs. Jorgensen refused. So instead I published an uninteresting research paper I wrote about the education of mentally retarded individuals.


Also like last time, I found some FARMS manuscripts that I rescued from the recycle bin as a student custodian. Three of them (shown above) were course materials for BYU religion classes and ended up in a three-ring binder. The other (not shown) was a proof copy of the 3rd volume of the Critical Text of the Book of Mormon (Helaman through Moroni).[10] It was huge (400+ pages), so I tried to get it hardbound. I tried the Y Mountain Press, at the BYU Bookstore, but they have to do the printing along with the binding. Since I already had the printout, they couldn't help me. I also consulted the University Press Building, but they don't accept orders from the public. Luckily for me, last week Leann discovered a machine in the Family History Center at the Harold B. Lee Library that will take a stack of papers and scan them into a .pdf. So I did that. Even so, it took nearly an hour to scan them all.


Not long after I started collecting Star Wars action figures, I noticed fingerboards (tiny skateboards) for sale at Smith & Edwards. Since I took the action figures out of their packages to play with them, they lost their resale value (not that I ever intend to resell them). My friend Destin, on the other hand, collected as an investment. Inspired by his apparent financial prudence, I decided to buy two fingerboards as an investment. Well, they haven't increased in value at all since I bought them, so I decided to give them to my old roommates, Jamen and Andrew, who are (were) skaters.[11] We had them over this last weekend for dessert. We got to meet Andrew's wife, Bridgette, and his son, Drew, and Jamen's girlfriend, Suzanne. When they were little they asked for skateboards for Christmas. Their brothers all got their own skateboards, but since Andrew and Jamen were twins, they had to share one. So they felt pretty good that I gave them each their own boards—even though they were only 3 inches long.


And finally I'll leave you with some "magnet art" that I made in high school. It's very crude: just a pair of small speaker magnets with some metal coils on them. I made them into an X and a Y in honor of the sex chromosomes. Yeah…they're probably not my best work.


Notes:

[1] See my previous post, Cleaning House I.

[2] My mom and two of my sisters all have their birthdays within a week of each other.

[3] See my post Lucin, Utah.

[4] See my post Out of the Old and Into the New.

[5] At the same time that I bought this hat, I also bought a white sailor hat. One of the old guys that worked at Smith & Edwards taught me how the men in the U.S. Navy would fold their hats. I thought this was pretty neat, so I wore that hat most of the time when I wore any hat at all.

[6] By unofficial, I mean that the AYSO organizers didn't provide them; our coach commissioned them and our parents paid for them.

[7] I actually took them to a card vendor's show. After showing my cards to 5 or 6 vendors I concluded that my entire collection was pretty much worthless. Upon further investigation I learned that in the 1990s there was a speculation bubble in collectible sports cards. All of the sports card companies overproduced and all of the collectors overpurchased. (See http://www.sportscardfun.com/baseball-cards-value.asp.) On top of that, the baseball player strike in 1994–1995 greatly dampened interest in that particular sport. (One can only guess what effect the upcoming football player strike will have.) Guess when my cards are from? 1990 through 1993. Yup. They're likely all worthless.

[8] Lets face it: pogs are a one-time fad that are never coming back. And even if it were to come back, my kids would want new pogs, not some lame-looking, cheap pogs that their old man got from ShopKo. (Who knows if ShopKo will still be around then?)

[9] You can read that essay, with both the original (fictional) ending and the ending I was forced to rewrite, here.

[10] Before proceeding with this, I went by F.A.R.M.S. and checked to be sure that I could keep it.

[11] See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnvyIfeevW4.

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