A couple of days ago, I got one of those alerts on my phone that said I was almost out of storage and I needed to take care of it. So that got me going down the rabbit hole of looking at the photos I have on my phone, a phone which I’ve had for at least five years.

My phone is not the only place that I store my photos…they are in the Verizon Cloud, which I download into my computer and then I copy them to an external harddrive. Too much?

And then, I also got a notification from Google that my Google mail would be halted because I was out of storage and I needed to buy more. Scratching my head there because I didn’t even know that my phone was backing up to Google. I don’t use my Gmail except for those websites I don’t want to send me emails to my regular AOL (yes, I know, AOL is a dinosaur and, in fact, I have the same email–the first one I got–twenty years ago.)

Like I said, I went down the rabbit hole on my phone looking (and deleting) photos and screenshots from the past several years. I found some gems…

The backstory on this text screenshot is that my brother Bruce had a very quirky sense of humor, one that I have, too. When I was first diagnosed with Atrial Fibrillation, he teased me, saying that it was Munchausen Syndrome. (Munchausen is when a person makes themselves sick so they can get attention.) From that time on, I called myself “Munchie”. When I texted him to let him know I’d had another episode and was going to the hospital for another cardioversion, this was his response. For the first time since he died, I laughed at a memory of him.

When my other brother was doing immuotherapy for his cancer diagnosis, he had developed debilitating mouth sores to the point that he could only eat soft things. This was two weeks before he died.

Going through some boxes in the basement a couple years ago, I found this letter I had written to my friend, Debbie. I don’t know why I had it…it should have been mailed to her. But, in the letter, I recount an escapade my friend in Texas and I had after an evening of bar hopping. I’m really glad I found this letter, as I had a memory of this, but I sometimes wondered if it was really true. What I do remember about this evening is that this man came up to us and said “How would you ladies like to do something you’ve probably never done before?” He reached into his breast pocket and brought out a photo of a helicopter. “My helicopter is on the roof and I’ll take you for a ride.” We were pretty young and dumb, so we went.

Other than that, nothing much has been going on. The days seem to fly by. The passing of time never bothered me before, but once I turned seventy, I realized I am truly getting old, and the faster time goes, the shorter the road ahead becomes.

And, the first true sign of spring. That makes me a happy camper.