Monday, March 20, 2006

I Owe, I Owe, It's Off To Work I Go...

We got our new Toyota Sienna last week (finally). It's beautiful and our garage has that new car (i.e., chemical) smell in the morning. It's amazing to see the differences in design eight years have made from our original Sienna. This one handles better, supposedly has better gas mileage despite having a bigger engine and a lot more cupholders and assorted gewgaws thrown in for our convenience. Of course, now we've got to start paying for the remaining two-thirds that the insurance didn't cover.

Youngest Blue is on Spring Break with the family of one of her school friends. She left Friday and won't be back until the end of this week. She's staying at a Marriott time-share community down in Orlando that we had to sit through a ninety minute (and more) sales pitch years ago in order to get free tickets to Universal's theme park. Nice place; we just didn't have the money all those years ago to fund our "vacation lifestyle" in the manner they wanted us to.

Speaking of vacations, we're thinking about going to Montreal this year. I've started looking at websites and books about the cultural center of French-speaking Quebec. When I was very young my parents took my brother and I up there one summer on vacation--there was a family they'd known shortly after their wedding who'd been nice to them, so we went to visit. I vaguely remember some things, mainly the cathedral, wooden slides at a playground and a very cold swimming pool. Maybe this trip, if we go, will be a bit more memorable.

Mrs. Blue and I talked this weekend about what we're going to do with all the pictures and memorabilia we (mostly I) have in the hopefully distant future. It's unlikely our daughters will want to inherit and lug stuff around from place to place in their futures, which begs the question of why take photos of vacations anyway, if they are just going to be tossed someday into the trash heap post-funeral? Some stuff is undeniably historical and will get donated to a deserving museum or university, but most of it is of people and places that my girls have no memory or interest in, except to see their old man when he had hair and their grandparents when they were young. A photograph does freeze a moment in time, but I suppose all moments in time must melt eventually into the liquid of the past.

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