Barbara J. Hamby

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Today’s Trivia

Today at my writers’ critique group meeting I shared all the pictures from our European cruise and the travelogue about the Rotterdam excursion. I had the photos in an album, but didn’t have the labels on yet. Tonight I finished that task. Since there were only three of us there, we had more time to deal with each piece of writing, as well as my pictures.

I made an appointment today to sign my will next week. My previous will is quite out-of-date, so I took advantage of prepaid legal service to get a new one made. A trip to downtown Portland for the signing is a big deal for me these days. It’s hard to remember that I used to jump on a bus, or jump in my car, and go to downtown Portland to work every day for many years. The gal who scheduled my appointment assured me I can park in a garage in their building and they will validate my ticket for one hour’s time. Or, if it is full, I can park at the new Hilton and they will stamp that ticket.

Recalling my only experience with the parking kiosks for street parkers in Portland, I told her I ended up panhandling because the machine would not take my credit card and I didn’t have enough quarters to feed it. Since I didn’t want to miss the class I’d paid for at Portland State, I was getting frantic. A group of really nice people came along and tried to get my credit card to work. When that proved fruitless, they gathered up enough quarters among them to finance my parking. I thanked them profusely and vowed to avoid downtown Portland, which I have, since then. Driving in traffic and construction is enough of a hassle, without parking being a further problem. I don’t live within walking distance of a bus stop, so have to leave my car in a grocery lot, if I take a bus.

At my age, most of my shopping can be done at Fred Meyer, Home Depot, or smaller nearby stores, like Bi-Mart, Walgreen’s, or Grocery Outlet. Sorry, downtown merchants, but you have to make the jaunt easier for us old folks if you want to lure us to your wares.

This evening I found our pictures of the Alaska cruise. We will try to get them marked tomorrow, if we can remember where we were. There is room in the album I’ve been working on to add them. Alaska and Europe are the two cruises we took this year. It’s possible we can go back and organize photos from previous cruises if we decide to be that ambitious. Of course, we should have done it as we went along, but who wants to talk about shoulds?