We had just enough snow a couple of days ago that I was able to enjoy two bowls of ice cream before the sun started melting the snow down. The snow ice cream didn't turn out as well as had the one bowl that I enjoyed the week before; but, poor snow ice cream beats even Häagen-Dazs® in my judgement. It surprised me that this later snow ice cream was NOT the better of the two. The differences were two: this snow was powder snow gathered at 22 degrees Fahrenheit (previous snow was wet, at 32 degrees), and I had to use whole milk (had previously used 1% or 2% fat milk) The photo, below, is from five years ago; but, once you've seen one bowl of snow ice cream, you've seen them all.
This past week I've concentrated on data mining the "diaries" left by my parents. (This is not a short project. During the week I managed to complete data transfer for two years. Of course, I'm still working on Dad and Mom's diaries from the 1930s!) The data are then recorded in my Excel records. I don't know why I do this. When I die no one will look at those Excel files and I can hardly expect to live long enough that the worth of the records is all that great, even to me. (I do refer to those files, on occasion, to see when something occurred or where someone lived at a given time.) I am being reminded/told of stuff that I had forgotten, gotten confused, or never knew. For instance: I asked Elder Brother during his visit a few weeks ago, "Since Mom never had headaches, how was it determined that she was deathly allergic to aspirin?" His answer was that he thought our mother did have headaches and he was unaware of her allergy. Well...I was on firm ground about the allergy. It was on her "Medic Alert" tags and in her records. But, she wrote in her seventies about having bad headaches - sometimes for a few days at a time; so, I was wrong in my "remembering" her telling me that she never had had a headache in her life! Perhaps Mom merely told me that she had never had a migraine. EB agreed that Mom was the only member of our family who did not suffer migraine attacks. Below is a photo of the "diaries" (actually, most of the books are "planners") in one of the boxes - after I had removed a fist full of papers and newspapers.
Below are a couple of photos showing the sorts of notes that my father left in one of the "diaries" (from 1960) that he had used in which to keep miscellaneous notes to himself. On a very few of the pages, Mom had made entries of actual "happenings" of those days.
The page on the left is seen to be the legal description of a piece of property - on which stood the house in which Dad's mother lived in a tiny village in southwestern Missouri. The two pages shown in the photo on the right are notes that Dad took while studying the private pilot licensure kit that I had given him for his birthday in the late 1970s or early 1980s (on the left) and a sketch of the platting of the area in which Dad and Mom lived in Kansas City MO. On other pages are notes that Dad took about using my HP-19C, which I got in the same 1970s-1980s time frame. Since the "diary" is dated for 1960, one can see that Dad used that book for note-taking over a goodly number of years.
As I mentioned in a comment, on the 17th the neighbor set metal posts for the back part of his fencing. This morning, he brought in rolls of chain-link fencing to set on the post (photo, below) - which will probably be done, today, since the weather is supposed to be sunny and in the 50s.
Hmm, didn't realize Grandma was allergic to aspirin. BTW, although when I was younger, aspirin was not an issue for me, I became allergic later; not deathly - just the throw up everything from my socks upwards type until I quit using it at all. It is noted in my medical records.
Posted by: bogie | February 23, 2020 at 05:14 AM
Bogie--Good information to have, even if we are normally well separated, geographically.
Posted by: Cop Car | February 23, 2020 at 11:24 AM