One of the curses of living in your own place is the constant push for you to take all the crap that you own, whether you realize it or not, out of your parents' house and put it in your new place.
Once in a while, you get the phone calls that sound something along the lines of...
"we're doing a 'spring cleaning' this weekend and we were wondering if you wanted to come over and pick up your stuff" or
"guess what we found the other day?"
Sometimes, your parents attempt to veil their intent a bit but you still see right through it.
"I wonder how easy it would be for us to downsize?" or
"We have been thinking about moving... who needs all this space?"
On occasion, they'll visit you and just happen to leave some of your stuff behind when they leave.
Other times, they become truly sneaky. Like Washington policymaker sneaky. You know those politicians who so desperately want to see their bill passed that they attach it to a more popular bill that has no chance of failure thus ensuring the passage of their own bill? Parents do this, too. They tell you that they have something for you that they bought the other day at the store. They have it ready for you in a bag and you take the bag home and take out the goodies only to discover that the bag's bottom is lined with your old stuff. It's a slow process, but highly effective. Tricky little bastages!
Last week, my parents gave us some of my old things that they had found. Included in this amalgam of... I'll be nice... "crap" was a bunch of my old paperwork from my speech therapy sessions in grade school (I had an r/w pronunciation problem, what of it?), my merit badge and rank cards from Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, and these two little gems I thought I'd share...
Thus proving there actually was a time when I, both, was cute and had hair.
I do find it funny how I had absolutely no distinguishing marks in '85 and suddenly had a card chock full of them in '86. I was also two inches taller and 13 pounds lighter in a matter of 11 months. And how... how the hell do you get "blonde hair" from that second picture? Were they blind?
