Little Keepsakes

As Charly took out his man toy to snowmoshred with the guys today, I decided to clear out the junk box...er...junk bin we have together. I remember cleaning my room when I was just a wee one and getting in an argument with my mom over it.

"I can't clean it because some stuff doesn't have a place," I whined.

"Then throw it in the junk drawer!" She told me back.

"The junk drawer?"

Thus, the junk drawer was born. The ultimate place for all the little things that you just can't part with, yet have nowhere to go. It seemed magical at the time. It still does. Don't know where to keep this random item that in ten years you'll look at once again and decide it's not worth keeping anymore but just can't let it go right now? The junk drawer. Ours is more like a junk bin that sits on the bottom shelf of a cubby hole. It's yellow and made of fabric and cardboard and holds the same magical powers as Hermione's purse in the last Harry Potter movie. No matter how much you put in it, it can hold more. The purpose of all this, you ask? To commemorate the junk drawer, and give you a peak at what Charly and my past used to look like.



My ultra special scuba diving goggles my father bought me after I passed the test. I remember him keeping them in a special box upstairs so I wouldn't use them for trivial games in the pool that would result in them scratched. Look at how dirty they've gotten now. My sinuses just didn't do well that deep under water, plus I hated the freezing pool we had to take the class in.

Look at that studded belt! This is obviously Charly's stuff. He used to be quite the skater boy from my understanding. He tells me he stories of how he would skate for hours after school and how the first time he got his own skate board he rode it down the street, picked it up and turned it around, and rode it back. The point being that he didn't know how to turn it with his feet.



These are more recent. Snowboarding season passes and Chuck's old BYU-I card. I'm tempted to rethink my education on a weekly basis. On the "is this really worth it?" basis, at least. Don't you just love Chuck's goggle tan?



Cruise line room keys, a ball we got signed by a bunch of old time baseball players on the family cruise- the other cruise would be our honeymoon. An Art of Flight ticket to see the Travis Rice in person and on the big screen.



Does anything really need to be said!? I need to scrapbook these two photos for my future children. And the blue one in the middle? That's Old Blue and I had 'em for way too long in everyone's opinion and not long enough in mine. He was invincible. I use to slam him down on the floor as hard as I could to pop the battery out and would do just fine. Considering that I've broken the otter box of my Iphone three times in the first year, it was truly a miracle phone. Also, the first two phones are the ones we had in 2009 when we first started dating. I should really charge mine up and look at those text messages.

For kicks and giggles i charge the last photo in the picture and looked at some of my old conversations. The screen is cracked so it was a hard read, but here is one of my favorite texts to Charly:

"I guess blazes finger nail is somewhere"

That kid works at our shop and nearly took his finger nail off by getting it caught in a spinning bike wheel. By nearly I don't mean like when something almost hits your head and you say "hey that nearly took my head off!" By nearly I mean it literally sliced his finger apart. I've made it a new goal of mine to find the charger for Old Blue and look at those dating texts. We texted each other good night every night until we got married and I saved almost every single one of them. I remember them getting creative and sweet ("goodnight love" gets pretty repetitive after six months). Like: "I love you a whole elephant ton, goodnight babe."

After looking through all this junk- there's more I just didn't photograph it- I sparked the motivation to go back and look at all my old photo albums (there were copious amounts of photo c.d.s hanging out in that junk box of events like Paris with my father, Charles in Thailand with his friends, and that beloved year I joined the Scorpionettes colorguard team, that got me all nostalgic). Here is a letter I found in the back of one of them:



I especially love the use of words such as "airplane man" and "manly." Also, my ability to misspell my name three times in a row, then get it right at the end...I always come through in the end. It's a talent.