more photos

Frank:

Mysteriousness is a plus with photographs, as far as I'm concerned.  I have Mira's photographs  -- they would have been trashed when Steve was selling the house, if I hadn't been there.  The value of many of Mira's old photos is their mysteriousness.  All sorts of pictures of bygone, forgotten people, probably from the twenties and thirties, in unknown places in Maine mostly, doing mysterious things, some with Mira in them, some not.   So I have a little collection of these photos that I can "market"  (Emma will be interested in these) based on the fact of their mysteriousness.   But I have to give careful thought to how many photos to include in the mysterious section.  Too many will just tip it over into trash.   I also have a mystery section of photos taken by my dad when he was in the navy.  Snapshots from China, showing navy sailors on shipboard and in exotic places towering over Chinamen in pigtails.  There are pictures of dead people, and pictures showing "Japs"  doing this and that... I guess it was shortly after a Japanese invasion of China. I've culled out enough so that the remaining collection is really a fascinating, bizarre grouping that somehow sheds murky light on my dad, while asking dozens of unanswerable questions.  So, as you can see, I'm not actually the destroyer-of-history that I make myself out to be sometimes, but I do think some heavy pruning or editing is necessarily to create an impression that's going to have some attraction to descendants who aren't necessarily super interested in this stuff. 

So now that you've finished The Great Wall of Martinez and are back in Tahoe, are you doing any projects around your house?  I know you like animals and dislike people, but have you met anyone in the area that you interact with?

We have been eating burritoes for about five days, and I'm not tired of them yet.  I took a cheap cut of beef and cooked it in the crock pot for a few hours, in a liquid of beef broth, garlic, crushed tomatoes, sliced up hot peppers, and some other stuff, until it was about the consistency of pulled pork.  That's the main filling for the burritoes, along with a rice and beans mix, a salsa with cilantro, some caramelized  onions, avocados, cheese, and other stuff.  I know the drawback is that we're using store bought flour tortillas as opposed to Mama Rosa's handmade tortillas, or some other equally wonderful product, and I do wish I had some great tortillas, but still, it's pretty good.  I was tempted to whip up some homemade tortillas today, frying them in oil so they'd almost be like fried dough, only thinner, but then I figured, "Nah, too much work." 

Yes, I bet Delta gave Dan and his brother some pointers on how to act and what to say.  This whole twins-in-the-air thing is great for Delta, but only if they dutifully play their part. 

--edward