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PNGs of random journaling scraps in my room

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just opened up a book i bought a long time ago at a local bookstore that has been closed for years, and i found a folded receipt dated 12/9/78 in the amount of $84.75 after tax (about $400 in today's money) for what a google search reveals is a digital wind speed and direction indicator (now available on ebay for far lower than even the nominal amount from 1978), to be shipped to an address in livermore, california. the recipient's address is an unassuming one-story house in a suburban subdivision but the house next door to it is mysteriously blurred out on google maps. the recipient's name on the receipt shows their full last name but only their first initial; when i searched the last name and an address i found someone on one of those people search websites who has the right first initial and last name and has lived at the livermore address in the past but now lives in a different state (not too far from one of my aunts actually), but she would have been 12 at the time of the purchase, and while it's not impossible she was the one who bought it it's more likely that she was the daughter or maybe younger sister of the purchaser. also the person search website blurs out the house number and portions of the phone numbers and email addresses to make you want to buy an account to find the info you're looking for, but they do it using a css function so you can just go into the page source and get it for free lol

another one of those websites lists someone with an almost identical name (the middle name is slightly different), who it says is significantly older (but not really old enough to be a parent to the first one), as well as a second person with a male name with the same first initial; they both would have been in their early 20s at the time this thing was bought and are much likelier candidates than the one who would have been 12. a website that lists dates of residence gives a much later timespan for the elder woman at that address, but this means nothing: i used to work at a job where one of my duties was to do similar searches but in actual databases for it (rather than the half-interested googling i'm doing tonight) and they mostly come from bank statements and court records and are laughably incomplete; all it means when they say "lived here 1983 - 1996" or whatever is that the earliest dated document they have matching that name to that address is from 1983 and the latest is from 1996. for the male name i found a computer science thesis from the 1980s that doesn't seem to have anything to do with wind speed, although both the purchase of an electronic kit and knowledge of computers would both suggest an interest in tinkering. i don't see any obituaries for any of them so they might all still be alive. looking at images of the device on ebay it has a standard two-prong plug so i imagine it was likelier to be used on a boat than on a plane; it could also of course be used in the home although i have no idea what the utility of that would be. (not that it needs one; gadget people don't always have to have a need for something in order to use it! btw i still need to get my typewriter fixed) there are a couple of small lakes near livermore that could potentially be used for sailing or at least speedboating, and of course they're in reasonable proximity to the san francisco bay although i have no idea what the boating situation is like there

from the images of the device on ebay it looks like there some versions let you switch between knots and mph while others switched between mph and kph. there are also a series of screws on the back that are labeled with color names above them, which i'm assuming means you could mechanically change the color of the display; i would love to see that in action. sadly i can't confirm this because the only scan of the manual i can find has only 9 pages out of the 60+ pages of the actual manual; this is a rare L for the manual scanning community, which is usually so good about it that i've been able to find manuals for my typewriter (which as a reminder i need to get fixed) and my rotary phone, which were both made in the 1930s

the book i found this in is called The Parallel Four Translation New Testament and has side-by-side columns for each passage in four different translations: king james version, new american standard, new international version, and amplified. a note in the front says it was produced for "BACK TO THE BIBLE BROADCAST". this seems to have been a radio broadcast, but it ended in 2020 and now just does youtube videos. their website says "A lot has changed about the world since May 1, 1939--the day the Back to the Bible broadcast was officially launched. But one thing hasn't: God's Word." which to me is a funny thing to say by an organization that literally published four different versions of god's word in one volume. i was stunned to find that the po box listed on their website is the same as the one listed in the book, which was published in 1975 (third printing 1977). i wonder what's the longest any po box in america has had the same occupant. i think i probably had my po box for a good 15 years, maybe more, but i finally closed it recently because i moved too far away. i opened a new one closer to where i'm at now, which all but guarantees i'm going to move away again lol

anyway since i have no intention of actually reaching out to any of these people because (despite how this post may make me seem) i'm not a fucking lunatic, i think that's probably the end of this rabbithole. feel free to hit me up if you have any further questions about this receipt i found though

#receipt #heathkit id-1590 #wind speed and direction indicator #back to the bible #four translation parallel new testament