Snow in the Mountains

 We've had a snowy day, but got only four or five inches, I'm guessing. I measured 1 3/4 in. at 9 a.m. and it snowed steadily until around 1 o'clock and then we had flurries. However, much of what fell here was wet, almost like rain, so it packed down and was soggy. I haven't looked outside this evening, so I don't know what the weather is. My thermometer is reading a little above freezing, so whatever is falling will probably pack the snow cover further rather than build it up. Not a problem - we will still have some left by morning, I expect. This has not been a typical January, though. Next week we will be edging towards more "normal" January temperatures and will be getting snow flurries, but no big storms forecast.

I have been going through my file drawers here in my office, hoping to make room for some of the files Fred kept in his office. I have a lot of stuff saved over many years that is now really unimportant. All that information, clippings, brochures, notes about how to do something or where to find something, is readily available on line now. It is amazing to think that when I began saving that stuff I hadn't even heard of a computer, let alone owned one. The first computer we owned was a Wang. It was big and clunky and really not much more than a giant word processor. We bought it second hand from a woman in Groton, as I recall. It was an entirely different animal than later computers, and I don't think there was any such thing as connecting to the internet with it.

My files have all sorts of interesting stuff (to me!) and I find myself not wanting to part with some of it. I still have the manual for my Opal GT - I couldn't toss that any more than I could toss the manual for my dependable old Argus C3 camera that served me so well for years when I was doing freelance articles and taking black and white pictures. I still have the black bag used to roll and package film from a really big spool into short strips for about 10 photos each. When I turned in a story and the little spool of photos for it, I would pick up an empty spool and load it with another short strip of film from the bulk roll. I had to do it by feel, of course, in the black bag to protect it from being exposed to light and being spoiled. I think I still have one of those big spools of black and white film - and a few empty cartridges. The black bag is probably in my camera bag, too. I haven't looked at that stuff for years. I've had several cameras since then, and all point and shoot - none of which were as good as the old Argus C3 - but it was certainly a lot easier when I was able to send articles and photos digitally rather than trooping to the newspaper office to deliver a paper copy and film cartridge. 

So today has been nostalgic. I still have another file drawer to go through, and there will be a lot to toss out from that on, I think. More of the pages from magazines I'd saved with patterns, recipes, and crafts I've collected for ages. It's all got to go. Well, most of it has to go. I'm sure there will be a few things I will decide to keep - perhaps to scan and file on my computer. There are advantages to having things like that digitized - if I name the files carefully, I can easily find whatever I'm looking for later on. Typing a word or two into "search" produces the desired results much more quickly than rifling through piles of papers in a file drawer, but somehow digitized images don't have quite the same charm or give me the same satisfaction as holding a worn and yellowing scrap of paper in my hand and reading it and the scribbled notes in the margins.