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We have a couple of long-focal-distance microscopes in our lab that I used on my master’s research; they’re handy for taking hi-mag images and measurements of test specimens that you can’t get up close and personal with using the standard traveling microscopes. The specimens I was testing were being inductively heated with basically a big magnetic coil up to a temperature of 1400F. Not only could you not lean over and stare at them without baking your face nicely, but the rapidly oscillating magnetic field that was heating up the metallic specimen by exciting its electrons would also do the same to, you know, your blood. And that’s just freaky. The tingle means you’re dying!

But that’s not important right now. What is important is that after a few years of sitting idle in dark corners of our lab, someone wants to use them again, and I’m the only person that remembers how to get them working again. I had to go around the corner to a part of the lab we use even less than these microscopes to find the little computer stand that has the control system for the microscopes on it. When I was piling all the cables back onto the various shelves so I could push the little castor-wheeled contraption down the hall, I managed to knock a CD-ROM out of some crevice somewhere.

I opened it up to discover the CD of personal effects I had burned off my old work computer before I left Honeywell in Phoenix, and that I hadn’t seen in about six years.

Among those personal effects are a bunch of photographs that I had made color photocopies of, and then scanned onto the computer prior to cutting the copies up for a scrapbook I made my grandfather one Christmas. You know, old photographs. Some really old photographs, dating back into the 1900s, I think. Yes, the photocopies live on in that scrapbook somewhere, but I had always wanted to compile them digitally someday. Now I have another distraction on my plate.

That’s li’l ol’ me and my Granny back in ‘74. Dig those cabinets. Dig that dress.

There’s Granny and Grandpa in Spain the year before, and I’m pretty sure my cousin Darcy. (If it’s one of my cousins, that’s her, she’s our only girl. And technically, I think that’s either as they were leaving for Spain or just getting back from there; that sure looks an awful lot like their old front door on 53rd Court, which would also explain the presence of my cousin.) Grandpa was always kinda goofy like that, at least, once he was a grandpa. I hear he could be a pretty stern father on occasion, but being a grandpa seems to soften people up a lot, don’t ya think?

I really miss them sometimes. I’m really glad I had to dig through that hole of a lab.