Ten-Finger Exercises

the old ones

Bill has spent Memorial Day weekend in his customary and endearing way, thinking of the family members who have died. He always gets out the buckets of water, patrols the yard cutting all the best flowers, loads them along with scrub brush and Windex, me and the dog, and goes to the cemetery to take care of the graves.

Actually that only takes a couple of hours, max. But this year he decided to load his Family Tree program, which was on my old, deceased computer, and to hunt for more branches. Must be because he has a new bud for it, little Zach, that he got interested again.

Plus, after since we visited Howard Castle he's been trying to find a legitimate connection between that family and his. Well, sure, there are a lot of Williams, Elizabeths, Charleses and Johns in both branches of the Howards, but what family with an English surname can't say that?

And what did I think we'd get done this weekend beside geneology? Well, there's the basement to work on, the other half of the fish pond to empty and re-line, and the living room to be painted. I thought maybe we'd get at one of those.

But since that wasn't happening, I washed and photographed clothes and put ads on eBay. Those are the old ones I spent my time with. I didn't have as much fun as he did, and I'm still not done, but it's a start.

Is it worth it? I'm not sure about that one. I need to buy some more silver polish, I guess, since I can't find mine. How in the world can you lose silver polish?
But I thought if anybody ever buys silver any more, June brides and 25th anniversaries ought to be the best time to sell.

There are a lot of Bill's too big pants that were hardly worn. They're tricky to photograph though, too wide to hang neatly on a hanger and I don't have very good light on my wood floor to lay them down on.

A friend suggested I make a cardboard insert to hold them upright and stuff them! And she was serious!

Oh, another old one-- Bill got out most of the stump and root of the big pine tree that fell in January. That's progress, and it didn't take him long either.