camera work

Rather than cluttering up tonight's blog with pictures of my grandchildren, taken this afternoon at the birthday party, I thought I would clutter it up with some things I came across as I was making a feeble attempt to clean up. When I moved the bookcase from the hall to the studio and displaced 50000 quilting books and other stuff to the dining table, I created a monster. I displaced not only the books, but the stuff on top of the bookcase. Here are some of the wondrous artifacts I came across just a little while ago, in an old cigar box on top of my studio ironing surface. 1. A relic from WWII - 1942, signed by my mother and with a description of my father, who was then 26, 5'10" and weighed 10 lbs less than I now weigh. I am neither 26 nor anywhere close to 5'10". Quite a few of the stamps are still intact.

2. I was in high school when this one was printed and disseminated...although this seems to be a 1961 reprint. There are instructions inside for building a fallout shelter. And get the grammar in this first sentence: "Fallout is tiny pieces of dust and debris, which are made radioactive by nuclear explosions." They left out a word or two, didn't they? My editorial finger is twitching. The last page should get the award for understatement of the year:

" Fallout is dangerous."

3. Jumping back to a more pleasant topic: I found the brochure that came with our family's first dishwasher, somewhere in the early 1950's. My mother swears that we all stopped getting colds as soon as the thing was installed in the remodeled kitchen. The countertops were salmon with little boomerangs on them. So much for today's trip down memory lane. Back to my feeble attempt to straighten up...