Artifacts

There are so many things that you can find on the internet. We live in such a vast and amazing internet.

Things keep changing at work. Desks keep moving to other places. Yesterday my desk moved to a different place. I spent some time cleaning it out before it moved. I found a piece of scrap paper that had a crude drawing of a snowflake on one side and some math on the other side.

I am pretty sure that this was a page from my bootleg copy of Goodearl and Warfield that I downloaded from the internet roughly 20 years ago. Long enough ago that one would have downloaded a DVI file and not a PDF.

I had been keeping my used auto-injector in a Nalgene water bottle. The other day I received an official 8 quart sharps container from CVS. This sharps container is large enough to contain the smaller cat; the front of the cat can be very sharp. The noun “sharps” makes me think of Michelle because after that time she spent in the mental hospital, the term “sharps restriction” became part of the shared vocabulary of a subset of her friends.

The other day one of my Facebook friends started his new very-important big deal job at the college that Michelle had attended. That, of course, made me think of Michelle. I realized that the internet has changed so much over the years that I could perhaps find more information. The obituary in the Schenectady Gazette said that she died in Auburn, Cayuga County. My mom found out through the rumor mill that she killed herself in a hotel. The public library in Cayuga County has a very nice digitized archive of local newspapers! I was able to search for the word “police” (because any relevant article was going to have some sort of reference to the police) for the week after she died. Success! She died in Weedsport, not in Auburn.

Also from the internet: I was able to buy a postcard featuring a picture of the motel.