When I went away to college at age seventeen, I took my mother’s college trunk with me. She had been given the trunk when she went to college in 1951. When she gave it to me in 1973, it had sat in the unfinished part of the basement in my […]
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The Chemical Reactivity of Metals: A Science Project
I rarely entered science fairs as a student, but when I was in the seventh grade, everyone in the class was required to submit some project to the school science fair as part of our Science grade. I moaned at home about needing a topic, and my father suggested I […]
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Learning to Play Chess
I’ve written before about our family’s competitiveness in playing games (see here and here). One of the early memories I have of living in the new home my parents built in 1963 is of my father teaching my brother and me how to play chess. We moved into the house […]
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What’s In a Name? I Found Out in Fourth Grade
My fourth-grade teacher was a rather strict nun whose name I cannot remember. (I think she’d taken the name of two male saints—Sister James Thomas, or something of the sort.) There were forty-eight students in the class, and one of Sister’s first acts in the school year was to declare […]
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Random Photo: An Old IBM-XT . . . Or Maybe It’s a Clone
This random photo was taken in December 1986, when our family visited my parents for Christmas. I found an envelope of pictures taken during that trip, and, since many of the pictures had Christmas motifs, I will save them for December posts. But this picture is of an early IBM […]
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Reflections on Past and Present (and Future) After a Visit to the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum
One of the places that my husband, mother-in-law, and I visited in California in June was the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, where Nixon was born. None of us had been there before, and we spent a pleasant half-day going through the exhibits. The topics covered […]
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Random Photo of My Dad Fishing
I’ve mentioned before that my father was usually the photographer in our family. That means there aren’t too many pictures of him taken on his camera. Occasionally, someone would snap a photo of him, but many of the pictures we have of him were taken by rank amateurs and are […]
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A Story I Don’t Want To Tell: Piercing My Ears (for National Piercing Day)
I’ve been meaning to write the story of how I came to pierce my ears, though even thinking about it makes me squeamish. I recently learned that May 16 is National Piercing Day, so I have no excuse for further procrastination. It’s time to ’fess up. During the summer I […]
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Milestone: Deleting My Father’s Email
Today, April 25, 2018, would have been my father’s 85th birthday. (He was 52 days younger than my mother, so her 85th birthday passed several weeks ago.) He died on January 5, 2015, and we held his memorial service on April 25, 2015—three years ago today, on what would have […]
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Six Years of Blogging: A Measure of Time and an Assessment of Life
I launched my blog “Story & History: One writer’s journey through life and time” in January 2012, publishing only three short posts that month. It took awhile to find my rhythm (stepped up to publishing twice a week) and my voice. For five years, I published on WordPress.com, and last […]
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