By the computer in our music room, there’s a basket of stuff.  Not just any old stuff, you understand, but treasured stuff. 

Memories.

You know how much I treasure those.

This morning, I finished transferring all the photographs from our most recent adventure to a USB stick, tied it to a few bits and pieces (our suite card from the cruise, an hotel key card, the top from a bottle of Nicaraguan beer and a bag of Guatemalan worry dolls) and took it upstairs to the basket, where I balanced it carefully on the top.

As I did, I thought of the cartoon I shared in the previous blog post, of the last hippo joining a small and already overcrowded boat, because as I picked the basket up, a couple of things fell off the carefully balanced arrangement.

So I tipped out the whole basketful and as I replaced it all, I took another look though.  There are little rings and bundles of all kinds of stuff.  Some, like this one, are crammed full of tickets and cards, happy memories of lovely days in Ireland in this case. 

Some simply have a label and a few ribbons.

This one doesn’t even have a label, but I know immediately where it came from.  The tell tale signs of a Japanese trip are there on the single common feature of every one of those bundles.  A USB stick of photos.  A little stick that fits neatly into the PC right beside it to provide a couple of hours entertainment in the form of a slide show.  If I’m home alone, or at a loose end, it’s fun to pull a random ribbon from the basket, plug it in and to be transported to some fun times again.  It’s a rather more passive way of enjoying the stories than looking through journals and it’s a much more efficient way of storing all those photographs than the boxes (and boxes) of prints we keep meaning to go through and sort out.

It used to be that a 2mB stick would suffice.  Then, I began to find that I needed a bit more capacity and began to buy 8mB sticks for the purpose.  This time, I could only squeeze everything onto a 16mB stick by omitting a few things here and there.  I think I’d better buy 32mB sticks next time.

And a bigger basket.