Still working in the basement?!!! I saw some earlier pictures that you posted. Making any progress? I guess I'll read part 2 and find out. Is that your hand writing?

Whew! That sounds like one very deep moment! :0

Yep still there. It's going to take a good, long while. The "writing" is the closest font I could find to my own handwriting. It's actually very close.

I'm jealous of your neat, stylish printing. Sorry to hear you're still in the basement. Can't they let you out for good behavior?

I, too, have journals going back to the early 1990s and ever earlier. I wrote most of them by hand, but my hand writing as gotten pretty bad so I type all of them on my computer.

It's funny how we write things and years later have no clue what context they were in or how we felt at the time.

Plus, man, you are so lucky to fit into that dress!

I really enjoyed the cleaning of your basement piece, part I.
I LOVE looking at other people's things.

I hope you'll post future photos as well. They're great!!

My handwriting isn't quite that neat - this I mocked up in photoshop - artistic license? The original page wasn't nearly as interesting, but the words are the same ......

I have found stuff Cherie that I recognize from way back when I actually wrote by hand and have zero recollection. I don't know what that speaks of, but it is a bit creepy to me.
Rated

Are you sure that isn't the poem that was searching boxes in her garage for? :)

Kind of Blue - Yes! - a bit creepy..... this was handwritten in MY handwriting , and in a style I recognize as mine - but 16 years has apparently wiped it from my brain.

Who would have thought I'd have such anticipation for new episodes in The Basement Chronicles? :-) This is a good entry.

Oh, I love finding work I wrote and have forgotten. Very cool.

By the way, just catching up on posts after being gone---LOVED your birthday post. Beautiful photo of you and I am mad about the colors on your wall---and,, last but not least----chocolate and chestnuts may just be my favorite "ingredients" EVER.

Happy belated birthday, you lovely girl.

Is this like the Basement Tapes by Dylan? Only is the Basement Parchment?

argh...my comment should have read " . . . the poem that DORINDA was searching for . . ."

Cherie, I love finding things like this that I have done and can't remember. It reinforces my desire to be a pack-rat as the memory is not always reliable and looking at old things helps the memory a great deal. Beautifully photographed with the dimensional drop shadow!

I love these treasures from the basement.

Thanks for all the visits - you all are adding a measure of fun to a very tedious and unpleasant task!

Rob - I find the interest in my basement junk quite intriguing.... perhaps in this impersonal society we are all hungry for those mundane details that connect us to others ..? Or perhaps we're all just junk voyeurs.

m.a.h. - I'll pass that along to my other half, he introduced me to the taste. The first time I visited him in Austria there was a cake waiting for me along with several dozen red roses :-) It's very tricky to get chestnuts here in the States. The best are the ones in a glass jar. I order them by the case from a French company in NY. The chocolate we use is Trader Joe's dark organic - it's the best dark I've found. I know I go through 3 or 4 bars a week myself.

Silkstone - is it me or is my basement starting to look very Myst-ish - or Steampunk?

Julie - thanks for the clarification, I was convinced I was missing a meaning somewhere.... ha!

d - I used to love being a pack rat, but I think I'm possibly in the process of being cured of that. Still, it is SO interesting to find things like this

Do you remember the mind set you had at the time?

Gary - hmmm.. well lessee - at that time, (in '93) I had recently moved from Puerto Rico to DC. I was in the middle of FINALLY finishing my theatre arts B.A. after trying for a number of years to get back to school. The creative juices were flowing in all directions. I had finally gotten un-stuck from a kind of creative void. Also I was just two years from walking away from a very intense personal relationship that was becoming increasingly stifling. It was a tumultuous time.

Thanks for the question, it gave me food for thought .

This post confirms something I have been thinking about a lot lately... how little I actually remember of the day to day stuff in my life. I was cleaning out old e-mails at work and there were things in there that were super-hot issues at the time but that only came back to mind when I read the e-mail. So, what happened to all that emotion and sense of importance around the issue? Who knows?

The good news is I think I am learning to not let stuff bother me as much now because I know I will forget it soon...

How cool to find an old piece of writing that you don't remember. I keep journals and every once in awhile will go back twenty or thirty years. (Hmmm...I don't reMEMBER drinking half a bottle of vodka. Well, duh.) It's a wildly interesting thing to do, as it's like seeing yourself young, or seeing a part of you that existed but you don't completely remember. It's also very weird. It's like, who was that girl? Are you so much different from her now?

It's fun and intriguing to run across things we've written and we don't remember. I do this everyday! I love what you wrote.

That's a beautiful poem. Very Zen. In fact, to your tag : "oh where oh where has she gone?" I would say, nowhere, she was always there and still is! Hope you keep finding and posting more gems.

from the wonderful woman comes wonderful words ... I love self talk :)

Mc G - healthy point of view

suzie - I actually don't generally keep journals, that's why this is so strange. I do remember an episode with vodka though, one I didn't repeat.....

Mary - It's strange - I can remember my childhood phone number....

SB - Thanks. Poetry and me are bitter friends. As a kid I used to jot down gems all the time, just spontaneous and without any thought. Though it's rather arrogant to say, they were good - not something you would expect of an 11 or 12 year old kid. Then, some boy ( a well known troublemaker) accused me of plagiarism - claimed he'd already heard the poem at his school in North Carolina that I turned in for our assignment. Despite the fact that no one could find the poem I'd supposedly copied, my teacher didn't believe me and neither did my mother. After that, I just lost the motivation to write much of anything.

Memory? The kid's name was Stewart Humphries and the teacher that lectured me at length on the ills of plagiarism was Mrs. Ross. Some things you can't forget.

Thanks 1_I_ Mother :-)

Ooh, that's freaky. Not remembering writing that, I mean. I've begun asking my old college roommate about a few things and she literally doesn't remember major events. There's a few kid-related things I'm not remembering, though. One of my boys will say, "Remember when I had that major illness...?" and I'm thinking, "How can a mother not remember a major illness of one of her offspring?" And this brings back my contempt for my own mom at one point, where she'd look at baby photos and say, "Now I think that's Marie, but it might be Jennifer" about my sisters, and I just couldn't believe she wouldn't remember!

I love finding things I don't remember writing too.