Confessions of an adolescent Ovaltine addict

I took another run at clearing out junk and consolidating boxes of things I consider keepers in the garage yesterday afternoon and rediscovered my Secret Squadron decoder badge from 1955.

Yes, it’s 60 years old and shows its age with much of the gold colored paint flaked away.

Captain Midnight’s Secret Squadron was a very big deal for me when I was a kid. I even wore my decoder badge on sixth grade school picture day. (Boxed in red.)

This was the 1955-56 version of the decoder badge. It was supplanted by a different version in 1957.

The fact that I still have it is testimony to my Cancerian refusal to part with anything I ever considered important. That’s why clearing out the garage is such a monumental challenge.

I did manage to throw away a whole bunch of VHS videotapes, being careful to save anything that might have footage from my, or Maria’s, past.

The weather is unsettled this week with rain off and on every day. But the high temps in the 80s make it warm enough to shift my big jar of coconut oil to the garage to restore it to its liquid state. The melting point of coconut oil is 76° F and it never gets that warm in the kitchen cabinets. I prefer the liquid state because it’s easier to spoon into my morning mocha cappuccino.

I hyperextended my wrist a few weeks ago when Jack caught me off balance in front of the living room couch and I went down on my right knee and left hand. The knee abrasion healed without incident, but the wrist remains achy, as does my right shoulder from a stumbling fall at the post office earlier this year. And, yes, I know falls are a big deal for people my age. It was a broken hip suffered on driveway ice that put my dad on the downward spiral when he was in his 80s.

I’ve been seeing a chiropractor for the wrist and shoulder discomfort, but I think I may be aggravating the wrist when I pull in the clutch on my bikes. So be it. It will take more than that to keep me off the bikes.

I also found a couple of six-frame strips of black & white negatives in the garage, one of which yielded this image of Steve sitting at the kitchen table of our house at 5009 N. College Ave. in Indianapolis, wearing a Broad Ripple High School Thespians sweatshirt while he worked on a pair of shoes for some theatrical production. I can’t tell if he’s wrapping them in aluminum foil or duct tape.

I sent it to him yesterday and he replied: “Omg, I’m wearing a watch!”