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Since it was Christmas season I figured a lot of residents had family visiting,
and broadcast a suggestion that younger family members might be interested in
the Barbie dolls with the knitted clothes.  I got good interest on those; one
person said she'd take *all* of them for an (adult!) stepdaughter who was
really into Barbie back in the day and would love this stuff, and said relation
was going to visit at some future point.  I started packing them into a box
with the idea of gift-wrapping the whole thing as kind of a fun twist.  So
I was in the middle of packing them together, looking like some kind of weird
miniature orgy in very fancy clothes, and the doorbell rang ... someone *else*
also interested in the dolls.  I had just taped the top of the box closed, so
I slit it open again and the second person pulled a few items out, and then I
packed up the rest, wrapped it using the plentiful leftover gift paper I found
in the garage, and planned to deliver the package to the original requester
at some point.

Which, it turned out, was sooner than I thought.  That same person called on
Christmas morning, asserting that nobody should be alone on Christmas, and
invited me to visit her place with another couple of folks for dinner.  That
was really nice!  So now I could take the dolls over at the same time, so
there I was, marching along the campus roads holding this big wrapped package
in front of me, like some kind of "secret Santa".  She gratefully received it
and put it in a closet to await said relative's arrival.

Mom had a lot of notes and archives of things, including many articles about
or by her over the years.  I didn't need to keep that stuff, but I figured
the best way to archive it and show how her mind worked was to digitize at
least part of it as a sample, and then launch the source material.  I started
with the voluminous notes she took about how to do things on the computer,
from when she had a Mac and then transitioned to a Linux machine during the
pandemic.  Here's just part of her notes.  She really made an honest stab at
understanding this stuff.  As time went on, the problem was that she'd forget
which page any of these notes were on, and/or she'd write things down in a way
she couldn't understand later, so the usual solution was to call me to ask
"how do I do X".  While she was basically terrified of computers in general
because her mind just didn't work that way, the day back in 2007 when she
called and said "I want a computer, so I can get email and google stuff" --
was a life-changing phone call for me.  She had never had any interest in
computers or the internet prior, but now I was going to be her system guru,
and would have to make sure she would have a decently secured platform to use.

I was no way going to saddle her with a Windows box, so next time I was in town
we headed up to the Apple store and came back with a cute little white Macbook.
Up front I told her to never do finances on the thing, because she simply
wouldn't know what she was looking at and would get taken in by every phishing
attempt that rolled in.  And that's only gotten worse since -- search Youtube
for "scammer payback" and the like, there are some great takedown videos about
that.  Then as the Mac aged and became less able to deal with the internet, one
of my "pandemic projects" was to build an identical pair of Linux laptops with
the stuff she'd need, shipped her one of them, and more or less transitioned
off my own Mac at the same time.   A bit of instruction over the phone later,
she was off and running, taking more notes of course, and said she actually
liked Thunderbird better than Mac-mail.  We always had fundamentally identical
platforms so when she reported a problem, I could follow along on mine and
guide her on what to do.

In the meantime, I thought to capture a few vignettes of this place and
comment on them.  I've been here so often that I've learned a lot about how
the place operates and where things are and who's in charge of what.  In
walking around with a relatively new resident who had not discovered various
features of the campus, I was pointing out a lot of what I I knew about,
and she commented "you're a great tour guide!".  One thing is true: they go
all-out for Christmas decorations, even on the common mailboxes in the newer
"northside" section.

I've also been mapping this part of the development over the last couple
of years, trying to get all the relevant data nailed down.   The Google
Streetview camera cars can't come in here, as it's all gated off, but "local
knowledge" in OpenStreetmap can count for a lot.  I will probably never have
the opportunity to fill in the rest of the in-process houses down Tantallon
and Torosay, but maybe someone else who actually lives in the complex will
turn out to be a mapping enthusiast.

Someone even decorated a construction port-a-potty.

And on a nearby streetcorner, they have Very Big Balls.

This used to be a wetland near the Maintenance building, but they've had so
little rain hereabouts that everything is very dry.  Not exactly "alligator
habitat" anymore.  The retention ponds scattered around the campus are also
very low.  Mom kept complaining about this in various phone calls.  But most
of the actual grass areas have the campus-wide sprinkler system, that turns
on in a staggered fashion so each plot gets watered at least once a week.

A while back I "won" a small rubber alligator in some kind of game, and thought
that living in Florida, Mom needed a pet 'gator along with her replicas of
other past beloved pets -- the black Belgian Shepherd, and a white cat, both
of which were the Best In The World at the time.  So I brought the alligator
when I came down, and presented it to her at the Hospice place.  She was quite
tickled.  Later it became irrelevant, and as I cleared out her room at the
nursing center I recovered it along with the other stuff.  I dropped it on my
desk atop a mess of loose change I didn't want to have in my wallet, and then
looking at it later, thought it looked like Smaug guarding his hoard from the
"Hobbit" LoTR movie.  Except that I didn't have to hide from this reptile, as
it wasn't able to move.  Just a fun thought that led to grabbing a picture.

But there were other photo projects that would get more serious.  Having
captured and presented the I Ching canvases, I then found a box of Mom's tarot
deck artwork as transparencies, aka large-format slides.  And these hadn't
faded like the old paper prints, so the color was still good.  You can't just
shoot these in daylight, they have to have diffuse light coming *through* them.
Fortunately Mom had what appeared to be the rudiments of a light table, a piece
of glass with a milky-white diffusion membrane taped onto one side.  I used
this to McGuyver up a rig to photograph all the slides, with lights underneath
pointing down at white paper to bounce up and evenly illuminate the diffusion
above it, and the tripod anchored down to prevent it falling over, and it
worked beautifully.  I even managed to tailor the color temperature of one
light that was slightly "warmer" by sliding a light-blue shirt underneath it
to cool down that side's reflected illumination a bit.  It didn't take too
long to capture the images, but it will still take a bit of time to process
all that, 78 cards worth, and put it up on the website.