Tag: books (Page 121 of 128)

It’s Sunday afternoon, over a month after getting the keys to the new building, and I’m still moving boxes. It is a humid day and I’m already feeling the need to wring myself out.

Today’s focus is getting the antique Sony Vaio and its younger but equally slow brother connected to the primitive store network. It isn’t so much a network as it is three computers strung together in a desperate attempt to preserve the data that exists separately on each machine. Programs and such.

I did transfer the customer database over to the laptop and have been using it since switching the Open sign on last week. The older machines give me a spot to save a backup copy. No ‘cloud’ storage here yet.

Baby steps.

Moving is a colossal pain, but it presents the opportunity to review the life-long collection of what-nots that are being dragged around over the course of a lifetime. As I tend to save rather than ditch them, I’ve assembled a pretty large collection of precious junk.

There have been times I have wondered whether it would be better to send some of these things off to the dustbin, but then I run across something that is worth a smile and a couple of memories. You can click on the image for a close up look at that Gladstein Plumbers infield. We were a mighty foursome. I’m the third from the left in my pre-beard days, back when caps did not signify receding hairlines.

That was the same year I got selected to play on a McAlester Boys Club all-star team for a game in Fort Smith, and during the opening warm-ups tripped on the raised infield turf and took a throw from the catcher on the forehead.

Knocked me out cold.

It also bumped me right out of the ballgame, thus ending my all-star career without so much as an at-bat.

I did take home a nice trophy, in the form of an egg-sized lump just below my hairline.

Needless to say, that was centuries ago, back when Charles Dickens was covering sports and the typewriter had yet to replace the quill and inkwell. In fact, I believe the sport of baseball had just been invented. Actually, looking at the photo credit, I noticed the name of Steve Lalli, whose younger brother Jim was a classmate of mine at St. John’s school in McAlester and quite the artist. I didn’t recall Steve being so much older that he would have a job at the newspaper, but perhaps he was a prodigy in the field of reporting. I was no prodigy in the infield of baseball, but I loved to play.

Maybe that’s why I have the clipping in a cardboard box. Who knows? It is, no doubt, the perfect time to rid myself of all the other papers and flotsam filling this particular carton.

But of course, I’ve closed the lid back up on it and taken it up to the loft for safe storage – for who knows what reason.

As to the store’s progress: Books are being sold, folks are wandering in everyday, and the kitchen equipment is still being assembled for the rollout of the bistro. Hopefully it will be in the next couple of weeks.

As for me, it’s back to the boxes and reconnecting the computers, feeling just a little older at having seen how long ago my sports prime actually was.