Treasure hunt

The mouse saga, last noticed at reference 1, ended with my spring cleaning the back of the garage, which involved turning over lots of treasures from times past.

General view about half way through

The same, with labels.

So A is a sweet tin dating back to my childhood. B is new back door furniture, bought in a moment of panic and never, in the event, fitted - having decided that the door was too soft, tired and battered for disturbance of that sort to be a good idea. C is timber from the partition which turned our dining room into a bedroom and a corridor in the time of the people who had the house before us. D is a couple of small metalwork vices from BH's naval uncle, adapted to be held in my woodwork vice. E is a large piece of yellow plastic, recovered from the Bourne Hall ring road, used as a play accessory. F is a windbreak for use on the beach, of uncertain age, quite possibly more than thirty years old - and not used for more than twenty. But now I come to think of it, another play accessory when normal life resumes. G is a contraption to support a ladder leaning up against an upstairs window. And H is a yellow plastic bicycle cape, the sort of thing that I used to used forty years ago when I used to cycle from Wood Green to the Aldwych every day and which is now quite hard to find in the shops. Don't suppose that this one is forty years old, but I can't remember when or where I bought it.

AbEx

The blue and pink picture at the back is another of my AbEx efforts, which I feel sure I have noticed in the past, notice which I cannot now trace. If only I had thought to write the date on the back; then I might have stood a chance in the photo archive. Something to niggle me as the day goes forward.

One could go on.

Technical interlude

One the bad features of my (second hand) EliteBook from HP is that one sometimes manages to accidently hit keys which turn out to be shortcuts to something or other, something or other which rather disturbs whatever it is that one is actually trying to do. Reasonably frequently it is a pop-up like that snapped above, bottom left on the screen, stuck on top of the window you were working in. Something to do with Microsoft and something which is impossible to move by drag & drop and usually quite hard to get rid of, there being no close button that I can find. On this occasion I had to resort to restarting. All very tiresome.

Debris

The debris at the back looked to be mainly made up of stuff which had fallen out of the bird feeder just outside. Brought inside by the mice for safe keeping.

Airing the vegetable rack

I thought that the rack which housed all sorts of stuff under the left hand side of the crowded worksurface included above needed a brush down and an airing. Made as a vegetable rack for the larder of my childhood house in Cambridge when we returned to it about forty years ago. The perforated hardboard back was probably a relic of the fashion for hook boards in kitchens a few years before that, illustrated in the snap which follows.

An improbably tidy hook board from Google

More treasures

Almost the same, with labels

Almost the same, as Powerpoint declined to load the intended snap without obliterating the top half in blue, despite the thumbnail it showed to the left being fine. So A was once a toy box for children, now a toy box for an adult. That is to say the box in which I keep my club hammers, cold chisels, trowels and such like. B is a collection of wedges, cut for some DIY project or other. C is what remains of my mother's bedroom bookcase, in which she kept, inter alia, her collection of Aldous Huxleys novels and essays. Nicely made thing it was too. D is a spiked steel bar from FIL, maybe twenty inches long, most recently used to make a post hole in the front garden - hammering it into the ground being much more of a proposition than hammering in the post. And E is part of a bit of furniture acquired during a house clearance in north London.

Terminal treasures

The same, with labels

Being the contents of the vegetable rack, snapped above. A, the metal recycling bucket. B, box with hand basin tap. Left over from something or other. C, a carborundum stone, somewhat pitted from careless use on the edge of something. D, under the red lid, a collection of nuts for threaded rods once intended for a climbing frame I once thought to build out of sturdy poles from a Forestry Commission plantation. I think we moved house and the project died. E, some small tiles, now destined as a play accessory. F, possibly a read plastic scraper. G, old cardboard box full of small engineering treasures from the naval uncle. H, cables for my two power tools, both drills from Bosch. One of which I once dismantled for rewiring - and got it back together again. I, large nails from another house clearance. More than I am ever likely to need now.

Altogether an entertaining, if rather dirty, day.

Elderly snap of AbEx

PS 1: the next morning: having decided that AbEx dated from before 2011, perhaps from before our trip to Florence, which I thought was about then. Reference 2 - with its bizarre comment - proved I was wrong about this last, while the search term 'garage' turned up reference 3 which proved that I was also wrong about the date. AbEx dates from about the time we went to Ottawa, not from the time we went to Florence. Was I inspired by all the Native American art we saw there? The snap recovered from reference 3, included above, was probably taken by my first fancy phone, which I think was a Nokia. Now being charged up to see if I can recover the original snap, the PC copy having been on some long retired PC. Do I still have the necessary cable?

PS 2: 0915: charged up, the Nokia phone came back to life, Microsoft life, but the snaps on it were inaccessible, with tapping the 'Photos' tile erroring with a message about no sim card. Plugged the old phone into the rather newer laptop and after a while Windows announced that it was ready to go and I could see the Camera Roll folder on the old phone in File Explorer. A few snaps from 2015, but nearly all March and April 2018. And nothing else. Did I used to clear old snaps off this phone or should I be looking for some earlier phone? Did I keep and records of phone purchases? The photographic trail on the current desktop only goes back to November 2018. Does its predecessor still exist?

November, 2014 snap recovered from the 520

January, 2015 snap recovered from the 630

PS 3: 1145: the Nokia was a Nokia Lumia 630 running Windows Phone 8.1, dated 2014. Its predecessor was a Nokia Lumia 520 running Windows Phone 8, dated 2012. Camera roll had a few snaps from May 2014, but nearly all October and November 2014, including a lot of snaps from North America. My bet is that AbEx came from the 630, so recovery now depends on the relevant desktop PC having been retired to the roof rather than to the dump. Image quality of both the last snap from the 520 and the first snap from the 530 rather better than that of AbEx - so perhaps this last was in bad light or something. The trolley from the 630 was never scored or even noticed, possibly because I had delegated its capture to the 7th Epsom (Methodist) Scout Group, for which I had a contact.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/04/housekeeping.html.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2008/10/florentine-posting.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/12/content-free-4.html.