yesterday.

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This summer my mom and I have valiantly undertaken the task of dusting, sorting, organizing, consolidating, labeling, boxing, and preserving all of the material remnants of me and Faraz's childhood. You name it, we've tackled it -- old pictures, baby clothes, arts and crafts from grades K-12, Baha'i school projects, home videos, dusty science fair posters, book reports, boxes upon boxes of Disneyland memorabilia, Halloween costumes, journals, paintings, picture frames (harboring enough glued-on macaroni to feed the Mediterranean), old baseball gloves, soccer jerseys, Tae Kwan Do belts, trophies, piano books, Brilliant Star magazines that pile up to the heavens, high school ceramic projects, homemade jewelry, homemade sock puppets, puff paint t-shirts, homemade gifts, old scrapbooks, shoe boxes upon shoe boxes filled with all sorts of nick nack patty wacks...

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...do you really want me to keep going? I didn't think so.

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So, in an effort to preserve these memories, I took pictures of just about everything. I could probably create an entirely new blog based on the colossal collection, but for the sake of simplicity (and also, not exploiting all of Faraz's nude baby photos), I'll stick to sharing just a few items.

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The following is a card that I made for Father's Day circa 1997 while [apparently] on a tight budget.

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Despite my initial satisfaction with the final product, I'm beginning to seriously question how touched my dad was upon receiving this.

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I would like to close by saying that very few memories and personal artifacts in this world bring me as much sorrow and remorse as the flowery faded maroon outfit featured above.

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note: just to shed some light on how much time has passed since the days of my childhood (or simply note the poor quality of the card stock I used), the original color of the background paper for this card was a deep blue. If you notice now in the first picture and also on the edges of the subsequent pages, the color has blanched into a weird yellow/green/olive color. Luckily, the same has not happened to me over the years.

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