I went in and fixed it before seeing the next two posts. Oh, well. :)

Today three vehicles converged on the parking lot of the Panda Express at Hwy 114 at I-35W (about 30 minutes drive for all of us from 3 directions) to have lunch (in our cars - no dine in at any of these places, but we walked through to see the buffet and have them fill our take-out containers). When first planned last week there was a forecast of rain and we had initially thought we'd hand gifts over and go home to open, but today in the sunshine we simply opened our gifts in the parking lot (we parked our cars in a row and I stepped back and forth between them handing out stuff). I brought along a couple of trash bags for wrappings in case that was the outcome.

I'd talked to my daughter about giving the old Commodore computer as a gift to her roommate, but she needs to retrieve the data from it before they do more with it (they have "joint custody.") When dad died in 1997 I packed it up and it hasn't been out of the box since. Three of them drove down in a tiny car but putting the unoccupied back seat down allowed them to slide in the main CPU, the huge CRT monitor, large attachments of keyboard and memory, bags of boxes of software, books, floppy disks, a hand-held scanner. Dad was intent on entering music into the computer and outputting music sheets (I think). My daughter didn't mention it to Jeremy so it was a surprise (though she's the one who told me ages ago that he'd love a computer like that) and his response when he unwrapped it was classic: "Wow! That's amazing!" and then "Is what's in this box what the box says is in it?" - disbelief that the computer is still around.

This was a major source of decluttering. It completely emptied the top shelf in the office closet, removed the stuff under my pantry shelves, and a bunch of stuff that was in the front room book shelves. And I may still find things that go with it. When Dad (a college reference librarian) started on a project like that he made sure he had all of the appropriate equipment. And maybe someday I'll get the music he put in it. As a way to keep the music karma flowing I'll start scanning and OCRing the files in a large file box that I also brought back at the same time. Maybe by the time the data is out of it, I'll know what to do with it.