Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Today's fortune: July 12, 2011

Today's fortune: You should have a talk with a friend today.
 The friend was an 11-year old boy named Rayne, my Little Brother. The talk was guided mostly by him. I asked occasional questions, but for the most part, he did the talking. And that's exactly how I wanted it.

Rayne doesn't get a whole lot of male interaction, so when we get together I let him talk about whatever he wants, just in case he has something important to discuss. Nothing big came up today, so I let him talk. He told me about the Yu-Gi-Oh cards he had recently bought, and how he had proudly defeated an opponent playing the card game. The Yu-Gi-Oh talk was mostly over my head, and sometimes I wonder why he spends so much time thinking about it and talking about it, but then I remember I was the same way when I was his age about baseball cards, G.I. Joe, LEGOs and He-Man.

I'm not proud of it.

I brought Rayne to my house today to help me with a little project. Jamie and I are reversing our bedroom and our office. The room we currently call the office is quite a bit bigger than our bedroom, and we're going to flip the two rooms around. The first step of the project is to box up all my books for the move to the new office.

This actually broke off into a secondary project. Since I'm going through all the books anyway, I decided this was the perfect time to catalogue all of them. I created a simple spreadsheet to log them in. Additionally, I'm getting rid of a bunch of books, too, either selling them online or taking them to a used book store. Every time we've moved in the past, we've purged books, and this move - even though it's just down the hall - is no exception.

Rayne was very helpful today. He pulled the books off the shelf and showed them to me one at a time. Then I told him to put them in one of two boxes ("Keep" or "Sell"). The "Keep" books were listed on the spreadsheet. After spending the afternoon working on it, we made a significant dent in my collection. I only have one large bookcase left, probably about a third of my collection.

While we were sorting, Rayne and I continued our conversation. And Rayne successfully made me feel really, really old. At one point he asked about an old baseball bat sitting in the corner of the room.

"This is really cool," I told him. "Check out this handle, compared to the handle of this modern bat. It's really old, probably from the 1930s or '40s."


"Wow," Rayne said. "That's awesome. Where did you get it?"

"At a garage sale."

"How much did it cost you?"

"About a dollar, I think."

"Woah! How long ago did you buy it?"

I thought for quite some time. "Probably about 15 years ago."

His eyes grew wide, and in that instant I realized I had purchased the bat four years before Rayne was born. Damn kids.

Although I now feel ancient, all in all it was a great conversation, and just what the doctor ordered for both of us.

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