Janet's Blog

I think Mom sort of fell into her collection of candelabras. She certainly didn't plan to amass so many of them, as well as numerous single candlesticks and pairs, but her laundry room cupboard was filled with them long before she moved to her final home at Gardenside. It all started when we moved to the Hotel Mary-Etta in Fairbury. The warren of basement rooms included numerous storerooms, but one, in particular, contained boxes and boxes of household items that had been left at the hotel by previous tenants, including a former manager whose family was Jewish. Mom and Dad worked long hours in that basement room in their attempt to clean out the clutter. They checked each box, ultimately throwing some stuff in the trash, while donating much of it to charity. In true "waste not, want not" fashion, they re-boxed some things they thought might be useful someday, keeping a few of the best items for themselves. That included several candlesticks and one or two beautiful candel...

Are filing cabinets becoming obsolete? I still have one next to my desk, but I wonder if such filing cabinets will be necessary in the digital age to come. I suppose everything we need could be filed away on the cloud, or looked up online, but I will always be most comfortable having hard copies of some things. I guess my age is showing. Sometimes I think my brain resembles an elaborate mega-computer, with a little IT guy inside, working around the clock to make sure everything keeps operating as it should. There are programs that keep my body functioning as it is designed to: my brain keeps my heart beating and my lungs breathing, without pausing, for seven or eight decades, or more. Other programs oversee digestion of the food I eat, and interpretation of my senses of touch and smell. It must take a complex program to decode what my eyes see, turning every moving image right-side-up in a split second and making sense of every bit of data, while my mind determines how my body will rea...