"Luxury Living at lowest possible cost in the valley" (LA, 1960)
This was a good day for GTD. My mom had contacted me last night requesting my help getting to/from an appointment. As irony would have it, the appointment was near my home, similar to those at the Stanford Cancer Center. It was a 9 am appointment, and traffic was abysmal. I hit multiple neighbors' jams due to the traffic caused by parents taking their kids to and from schools less than a mile from home. The idea that our society has such a need to shepherd their kids in this manner speaks volumes for the ignorance of the masses, making decisions based on irrational and exaggerated fear. </vent>. In any case, I got her there and back, and once back, I was able to set her up with access to her EBT benefits via Instacart as well as pick up the photos to be scanned. She also sent me home with the folder of original Woodland Hills house documents to send to the current occupants in the Friar St house. I got the photos packed up for scanning, packed up those original documents to mail too, AND made a quick run through the historical family scans of slides from the '60s for images of the house that I posted and shared with Bettina too. She and I also talked a while about her continuing to stay in the home and the probability that she might eventually need to consider assisted living. I'm going to do some further research into that while coordinating some home safety tasks. If she decides to make a move, it would be prudent to engage help immediately in the cleaning, updating, and sale of the property, allowing her to have a say in the process while ensuring she has the necessary resources for her ongoing care. It's a daunting thought. What is effectively the house I grew up in and the home she's had for over 50 years may, within a year, be a part of my history, as is the LA home I revisited last week. This is where embracing impermanence can be tear-inducing. We played cardzmania with the usual crowd, and I came in 3rd by two points. I also resurrected the Kindle for reading. I'm forcing my hand in an awkward direction, giving up something that took a good deal of time to adapt to after decades of neglect—the act of writing by hand. I've been doing it daily for a few years now, using my "reMarkable 2" tablet as both an e-reader and a writing device. I sincerely love using it; it brings back wonderful memories of many years of writing and sending letters by hand. I would even go so far as to impune a greater sense of authenticity and genuine expression within the act of doing so. Yet, I am setting it aside. Why? Because it still ends up requiring conversion to text, editing, spelling and grammar checking, and cleanup. It's simply not a 'functional' option. The time I spend each evening writing by hand has become a comfortable and rewarding routine. It's going to be a challenge to break that habit, yet the fact remains that I'm still forced to break out the laptop or iPhone to include an image and address the aforementioned corrections and refinements. It's also 'one more device' and it's seldom 'enough' for whatever my needs might be at any given moment. I'm tired of carrying three devices when one is sufficient for 80% of my needs. So for the time being, my posts will be "un-reMarkable" ones.