My new little turtle

Well, today Bruce went to work only to find out he was on vacation. It's not the first time he's done that and he gets razzed about it every time.
So he came home and we went to the Dorm to have breakfast.
Not his day... he had to settle for a Hillbilly omelet without green peppers but they gave him a 10c discount... Then we went to the jeweler's in Logansport as he had wanted to trade the broken jewelry I had been keeping in my jewelry box along with the gold he came home from Los Angeles with: old teeth with gold fillings and gawdy rings he found at Stanley's, oh and a chain too.
Never dreamed we'd get $100 out of the whole thing...
How wrong I was!
He was given a check for $827!
The real ugly ring was worth about $250 in gold alone, while the chain brought in about $360!
The jeweler had to weigh the teeth separately because two of them barely had gold on them and those 2 still had the roots so weighed more in teeth than in gold...
If you consider maybe $50 for what I brought in broken stuff... I guess the teeth were worth their weight in gold.
We browsed around the store as Bruce had always wanted a nice diamond ring and the prices were always ridiculously high. No different this time... The ring the lady showed him was worth $1499... A little more than we had so he put it back.
The jeweler was taking care of someone else but he asked if Bruce had found something and when he heard the reply he suggested a deal...
SO... For $827, Bruce will be getting that pretty diamond ring (size 11) and I got to have that pretty little crystal turtle I had been eyeing for so long...
When we got home we scavenged some more... The aluminum cans only brought in $12 but Bruce is lining up some more possibilities with other pieces of jewelry... I am sure glad he brought that stuff home, although I can't help wondering too... there was a nice piece of jade in one ring and the other one had a huge topaze and 2 diamonds, so, the jeweler made a deal too.
It's ok. We're happy and he's happy. If he made some bucks, that's what he's in business for and we weren't benefitting from having those items at the house anyway, so, all is well that ends well, for everyone.
On the picture: The turtle is not part of the paperweight... That came from Belgium and belonged to my grandmother and has great sentimental value for me.

Legacy

The past couple of years we have experienced something rather unique.
Bruce’s uncle Stanley died and Bruce has been serving as Administrator of his estate.
We almost didn’t have know there was an estate and that is a whole story by itself but serendipity lined things up so we were able to discover a treasure trove of family documents, photos, letters and artifacts that we are grateful to have been able to recover.
Bruce’s uncle lived in Los Angeles. He was 84y old, never married and was definitely a pack rat.

One treasure I want to share is the near 180 letters he wrote his mother during the time he was in the service between November 1942 and August 1945.

I have made phone calls to several places including to the Legacy Project http://www.warletters.com/mission/index.html
Andy was very nice and suggested reading the whole lot of them and finding one letter that was more outstanding than the rest and posting it to their site.
That is how I learned a little more about the man behind the boxes of things we had brought back from Los Angeles.

I discovered someone who must not have been very happy and had learned to keep to ‘safe’ subjects in his letters although at times the wall does come down but he would not let the guards down long.
Maybe I can start typing the letters here… one at a time… create a webpage for him in his memory before we ship the whole thing to Fort Sam Houston where they will keep his letters in the museum. Odd to think a person’s things could end up in a museum… and the only reason we are opting for Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio, TX rather than Los Angeles is that Stanley was part of that first group of trained technicians that came out of Brooke General Hospital, now the Brooke Army Medical Center.

He later became a landscaper and would have rather been in the Fort’s green houses than doing what they had him trained and training others to do but he was there for more than 18 months and tells his experience through his letters.

I would like to eventually publish the whole thing and so reserve the right to do this.
The timing may not be right and there may be more psychology involved here than little ole me can handle. When the time is right, maybe… we’ll see… right now… the tedious task of transcribing is daunting and I am not looking forward to it…
So here goes nothing…