It is Sunday morning, our last Sunday as residents of 1482 East Ave.  Carol is in the kitchen baking!  I have been clearing things up and cleaning in preparation for an open house this afternoon.  Maybe the buyer, who must be out there, will come through today.  We have so much going on it is hard to fathom.

Carol has put together a show for October, all the parts are at Lumiere.  In September she will begin the final assembly of frames.  We are moving out of this wonderful townhouse after 21 years on Thursday to a glorious apartment on St Paul St, two blocks north of Main in the Warner Building.  This building is a cast iron and brick building put up in 1869.  For more about the history click here.  We hope to get settled fairly quickly as we are leaving for Tanzania, traveling with Overseas Adventure Travel (OAT) on August 15, returning August 31.

The trip includes Kilimanjaro, Ngorogoro Crater, and Serengeti.  Hopefully it will include many large mammals and birds we have never seen before outside of Discovery Channel and books that date to my childhood which we have unearthed in the preparation for moving.

We will stay put for at least 18 days on our return, through Rosh HaShana and then leave for a local Tiffin Rally in Bath NY.  We don’t know where we will find ourselves for Yom Kippur yet.  Could be back in Rochester (the drive is only 90 minutes) or . . .

Things we have found in the preparation for packing:  Letters from my maternal grandfather, Abe Levey to Mildred during courting and later as he made his rounds as a traveling salesman.  The originals of the v mail my father sent Mom from England, apparently they returned the uncensored letters after photographing them for transport.  Every letter I sent Carol from 1962 to 1964, mostly from Brown.  Just think what we have lost.  Email, Skype, phone are wonderful tools for keeping in touch, but they don’t leave of record that you can hold in your hand and laugh and shed tears over 48 years later.  The record of our history comes to a halt when we stop writing on paper.  I know emails can be saved, as long as you retain backups, and FaceBook posting will haunt you 3 years later, but will FaceBook, and its timeline, exist and the means to access it 30 years from now.  How many memories have I recorded on reel to reel and then transcribed to cassette only to find that my last cassette player is being left behind and the tapes are oxidizing and virtually unplayable?  Where are the photos I saved to floppy disk and to Iomega and to – I can’t even remember the names of the ever larger memory devices that became obsolete as soon as I adopted them?  Carol’s bread cookbook, published on 5 1/4 floppies for IBM (!) and Apple //e is coming with us, but there is no equipment to read the disks and the format was proprietary and the publishing company was gone after the second royalty check.  She never made a complete print copy, just proofs.  She does have the recipes and photos in a box.

I could become maudlin (have become so?) We are giving up four stories of home with a five step entrance, not because it is a problem for us, but it has become problematic for some friends to even gain entrance to our living room coming up those five steps.  Who is to say we will always be able to negotiate them?  In the mean time we choose demanding trips and are clear that our cross country motorhome travel will continue in G Whiz so long as we can  mount the stairs and find the life a pleasure.

I had thought to post some pictures I took of the apartment, but decided not to.  The place is empty and the wall plates are off and it was being prepared for paint.  Later when we have moved in and put up some art.

Now to post and be off so the Realtor can show the house.