That title is used to warn readers that this is more of a diary entry than any comment on policy, politics, science or religion. Remember I use the diary portion of this blog to remind myself and keep evidence of what I have been doing. I began keeping track of myself long ago when I stopped throwing my old annual calendars away. They are tucked away on my growing file of three ring binders, classeurs in French I think, in chronological order. The archival work I’ve been doing lately is why I talked Claudia into letting me turn our attic into my office. But bringing fifty years worth of paper into my attic only barely sorted was just the beginning. Since it was complete I’ve sorted through bits and pieces of my vast collection to make it possible to retrieve things many of which I have never fully investigated. I have a year’s worth of letters home from both my Grandfather in WW1 and my Dad in WW2 I have never read. I sorted my Grandfather’s into order a couple years ago. My Dad’s were turned chronological just a couple weeks ago. And there are perhaps 25 of them he only put the day and the month on so I can’t be sure which of three years 1944, 45 or46 they were written. Future work which will require that I actually read them to accomplish.
There are also some items I’m sure I kept that I’ve looked for in the past that I hope I find like my Grandfather’s letter congratulating my parents after his first grandson’s birth. One of them is the letter a former opponant of mine wrote me before our falling out describing me as one of the smartest people she ever met. The other is the email or letter I wrote Art Johnston after parting company with him in our Let Duluth Vote days. I was madder at him than I have ever been with anybody. I had to bite my lip for a year as he badmouthed me to people in our alliance in order not to fracture it. I told him I hoped he would win his school board seat because I knew it would be the worst thing that ever happened to him. Ah the gift of prophecy. I want the people who vilified me for defending him later when we were school board colleagues to understand that. He wasn’t my buddy. He was a man rightfully elected to public office being drummed out of it by people who were likely as angry with him as I had been years before. But they lied through their teeth to do it.
Who were my adversaries. They tended to be people who supported the Red Plan because they were college educated lovers of education who justified not letting the public vote for it because “they wouldn’t have voted for it.” In other words they threw out democracy to get their way just like the Trump voters and Republicans who find honest elections a threat. Such voters generally detest Trump but in this case they were his mirror image. In other words do what I say not what I do.
I’m glad I got that off my chest.
Last night I began organizing my Reader columns. I’ve cut most of them from the Reader since I resumed writing Not Eudora columns. There are two kinds of files for each column. There is what the Reader published and there are my later corrections to them. I generally print out my corrections but in recent years I’ve not done a weekly sorting of the files on my computer. For instance over the summer and fall I’ve doubled my efforts and submitted a column each week instead of every other week. But I change Titles as I work on them and I have almost as many false starts that simply show up as another file that might or might not have been a column. So, I laid out the clipped stories on the floor last night for the last three or four years. I matched as many of them as I could with printouts from my computer files and I only managed to get the last couple months in order with both sets of columns. It didn’t help that when I was in France I had to finish my editing on my cell phone and that I had trouble overseas because Claudia forbade me to spend money on overseas roaming charges. My regular email address was not recognized and I could not send columns to the Reader from it so I had to use a gmail address instead. Finding all of this six or seven weeks later was a pain.
At this moment I have three separate sorting projects going on simultaneously. I almost certainly won’t finish them before I start my first day of substitute work tomorrow. There will be several other such sortings when I pull out the files. But I am finally doing what I set out to do when we hired the Amazing Gordy Johnson to build me my office and later our kitchen.
And my mention of the happiness of all sorts of people to sabotage democracy when it interferes with them is a great segway to my next post.
