restaurant depot sysco slop
The first time I ever had industrial frozen food slop was from school lunches in the early '80s. But even back then, the entire idea of the frozen meal had been around for about 30 years. The only difference between the '50s and '80s versions is that frozen TV dinners of the '50s came in an aluminum tray that was heated up in a conventional oven, and '80s versions used plastic or cardboard trays. That, of course, was to accommodate for a specific type of oven, the microwave. And while true microwaves were around since the introduction of the TV dinner, lower cost microwaves anybody could buy weren't available until the very late 1970s. However, truly rock bottom cheap microwaves weren't available until the 1980s. When that decade rolled around, sure, everybody got a microwave. Frozen meal companies adapted, made all their meals safe to heat in a microwave, and it's been that way ever since.
My tongue can very easily identify frozen slop that's been heated in a microwave. That "food", regardless of what it looks like, all tastes the same.
Before getting deeper into that, I'll describe something I've been doing for years.
At any grocery store, you'll find frozen mixed vegetables in a bag. Very common. It's usually green beans, carrots, corn and maybe peas. Every one of these bags has microwave instructions. Ignore that completely. Use a steamer pot set instead to cook that veg with. On the lower pot, put in 2 cups water, bring to boil. Dump the frozen veg in the metal basket. Stack the basket on top of the pot, steam for 10 minutes, done. I absolutely guarantee that veg will taste better. Instead of being wrecked by a microwave that turns the veg into tasteless mush, steaming it actually keeps the flavor and crispness. All you need to do after steaming is add a pat or two of unsalted butter and just a little salt. That's it. And it totally works.
The reason I'm telling you this is because yes, you totally can make frozen food actually taste right and feel good eating it, if prepared properly.
Well, that's not happening at restaurants these days, because all the food is prepared improperly. Everything is microwaved.
I used to think microwaving didn't affect things that much. Oh, how wrong I was, because it totally does. Any food or drink microwaved will be wrecked. For example, when I brew coffee with my coffee maker and make a mug of it, sometimes it will sit in the mug too long and go cold. It happens. When I reheat that in the microwave, yeah, it's hot again, but it does not taste the same. The microwave somehow takes away coffee flavor. I just muddle through and finish the mug whenever this happens. The point is that yes, I can taste the difference in the negative direction.
A similar thing happens for food. Microwaving turns food to mush and strips out the flavor, every time.
The first time my "this is frozen slop" detector went off in my brain was at Italian restaurants in the northeast. Every single one of them always had food that tasted the same. The salad always tasted the same. The meatballs always tasted the same. The sauce always tasted the same. The pasta always tasted the same. Even the frickin' bread always tasted the same.
Why? All of them used the same restaurant slop supplier, and the "cooks" microwaved whatever they could get away with.
The same exact thing happens with Chinese restaurants. It doesn't matter if you get your Chinese slop in Massachusetts, Florida, Texas or anywhere else in the US. That food will always taste exactly the same, because they all use the same restaurant suppliers.
What's different now?
Okay, so the everything-tastes-the-same crap with restaurants has been going on for probably around 30-ish years by this point, so what's different now compared to then?
It really all comes down to two things. Laziness and price.
There's always That Guy who can take a low-cost food and make it into something good. You may know one. It's some dude who can take a bottom tier piece of meat and make it taste like something a gourmet chef would craft. He knows exactly how long to cook the meat for, how long to let it rest, what seasonings to add, and so on. Through his wizardry, he gets a result that is simply amazing. You wouldn't think so from seeing him standing in front of an electric stove wearing no shirt and has on just jorts and flip flops, but he knows how to work with food.
No restaurant these days has That Guy. They're all gone.
Instead, whoever does the cooking is just some dope who goes to the freezer, gets whatever that needs to be made for the customer, EXACTLY follows the directions on the bag, microwaves the slop, and nothing more. No food crafting takes place whatsoever. It is all the same ultra generic slop, "cooked" the same way, every time. Lazy, lazy, lazy.
Then comes price; this is the real reason why people are pissed off about microwaved restaurant food these days.
People are very willing to accept microwaved slop when it's cheap, as there is no expectation whatsoever for the food to be any good at all. The general opinion is, "As long as it's cheap, hot, edible, and doesn't make me retch, I'm good."
People are very unwilling to accept high-priced microwaved slop.
Imagine going to a restaurant where the bare minimum price for one entree is $30. Now imagine that for two people and we're up to $60. Oh, hang on, you forgot the drinks. That's at least $5 per person or $15 minimum per person if it's booze. But we'll say you skipped the booze and got two $5 drinks. Now we're up to $70. Did you want dessert for two people? Add another $30 and now it's $100. Think you're done? Nope, you forgot the "required" 20% tip. You just spent $120...
...for food that was nothing but microwaved slop you could have made at home, and drinks that are available at any gas station.
If that same two-person meal was something more reasonable, like, say, $50 out the door, that wouldn't grate you nearly as much.
Or, if the food was absolutely amazing, spending $120 wouldn't have nearly the same sting, because hey, what you ate was awesome. Except it wasn't. You got microwaved garbage and paid 3 figures for it. Oh, and that dessert wasn't made by the restaurant. Probably something from Costco with a 500% markup.
Are there signs that restaurants will die out completely?
Mostly, and I've already seen their replacements. You have also seen them, and I'll say more about that in a minute.
I don't see a bright future for traditional freestanding sit-down restaurants. All the food is ridiculously overpriced microwaved slop that all tastes the same, people are getting wise to this, and they're simply going to stop buying.
There's a running joke where it's said only restaurants who can work some magic with Sysco foods will be able to thrive. I think that's true. Since all the food is the same, it's the cooks that make the difference. However, if a restaurant doesn't have That Guy like I described a little bit ago, then it's doomed to fail. It doesn't matter how much effort a restaurant puts into design or atmosphere or ambiance or whatever. If the food is nothing but microwaved garbage with no thought put into it whatsoever, that business won't last.
Two things have already happened that are replacing restaurants. Drink businesses and sit-down areas in supermarkets.
For drinks, there are three things going on. Coffees, teas and sodas. You've seen the coffee places, so no explanation needed there. A lot of tea places have sprouted up in the past few years and continue to. The soda shop is a weird one, because it sounds like a business that absolutely should not work, but is actually doing well. An example of that is Swig. It would not surprise me at all if more Swig-like soda shops start happening in the next few years. It is much cheaper to run a drink shop compared to a sit-down restaurant, and it also stands a much better chance of being actually profitable. Also, what's sold doesn't hit the wallets of customers anywhere near as bad as a restaurant does these days. Sounds like a winning combo all around, because it is.
For food, I've been seeing more supermarkets offering two additional things. A place where you can order meals, and a sit-down dining area. Some of these grocery stores will actually bring the food to your table once ready.
How fancy or not-fancy the dining area is directly depends on the supermarket. I've seen some that are just a few small tables and chairs in a semi-open area, others that are sectioned off with half-walls, and one time I saw one that was a straight up full restaurant with live entertainment, all inside the store. Quite impressive. Yeah, it was one of those highfalutin upscale "organic" style grocery stores, but still, real money was spent on that, and it appeared to be doing good business.
If the traditional sit-down restaurants go away, you've got the coffee/tea/soda shops, and more supermarkets are setting up shop for dining with more on the way.
This is not one of those things where when the economy gets better, people will start going out to eat more again, and sit-down restaurants will be saved. How do I know this? People who have money now are oh-so done with the high-priced microwaved slop and are just sick of it. Literally.
But maybe I'm wrong, and the restaurant business has a chance of surviving. Maybe they'll find ways to turn things around. Maybe some will find That Guy and actually start cooking food properly. And maybe the prices for entrees at restaurants will stop being so insane.
Until that happens, which I doubt, I'm a-okay having a sit-down meal at a grocery store, especially considering how good some of them are.
the closest you will ever get to living free
Some US states, but only in certain counties, allow to buy undeveloped land, pitch a tent or park your camper/RV/whatever on it and live there. But there are restrictions and permits involved. Namely, health permits. And most if not all to do with that has to do with septic stuff.
Using Texas as an example, I very highly doubt you could buy land in Dallas County, pitch a tent and live on it. That county probably doesn't even offer the permits to do so. But if you were to go to a more rural area, such as Wrinkler County, they'd probably allow it. Do I know that for sure? No. But given there's a whole lot of nothing for miles around in Wrinkler County, probably.
There are two happenin' towns in Wrinkler County. One is Kermit TX. It has Pilot, a Love's, and a Flying J right off state highway 302. Fancy. Just south of that is an even smaller town, Wink TX. The high school there is a big deal where Wildcat Stadium is. I have never been to either of these towns, but both look like decent places to be. And I'm not saying you can buy land in either of those towns, pitch a tent and go about your business. But you could probably do so outside of those towns within Wrinkler County.
At the same time, however, there are houses in both Kermit and Wink for under $150K. I checked. And these are not wrecked properties, either. I don't know how move-in-ready those houses are, but from what I saw, yeah, not bad at all.
The point I'm making is that in a sea of $500K to $1M+ McMansion HOA hell houses, there are sub-$150K houses with sub-$2K/yr property taxes available right now, IF you are willing to go rural. And not just in Texas, but just about any of the 50 United States.
Here's the pecking order when it comes to the prices of property crap:
Level 1: Not a big deal
Level 2: Annoying
Level 3: Concerning
Level 4: Frustrating
Level 5: Angering
Level 6: Oppressive
I'll be describing this as price/tax. For example, a 2/4 is annoying price and frustrating tax.
Property prices in Kermit and Wink are 1/2. Great price with annoying-but-manageable property taxes. If it were Dallas County, that jumps to 4/5.
Going southeast to Tampa Bay Florida, this is where things get pretty wild where you can have a 1/6. Easy to find properties that are cheap to buy, but with absolutely oppressive property taxes the closer you get to the ocean. Things get somewhat better when you go inland, such as Lakeland, but not by much.
Going northeast to New England, if it were somewhere like Boston Massachusetts, that's a 5/6. But then if you go clear across to the other side of the state, in Adams MA it's 2/3. Why so much cheaper? No close access to any interstate, that's why. Only one "major" route through town, Route 8, and that's it. MA-8 is a slow, winding, twisty/turny road from the north to the south side of MA. The closest free interstate is I-91 to the east, and it will take you over an hour of driving just to access it. Adams is absolutely that picturesque sleepy New England town, no question, but not convenient whatsoever. Yeah, you can find a cheap and pretty property in Adams, but you really have to know what you're getting in to up there.
If you're wondering which areas are the worst at 6/6, it's fairly obvious what those are. San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, maybe Denver, and so on.
In New England specifically, almost the entirety of those 6 states (CT, MA, RI, NH, ME, VT) was a 2/2 for price at worst in the early '90s, even in city suburbs. I'm not saying the prices were awesome compared to the rest of the country since New England has always been expensive, but it truly wasn't oppressively bad. At that time, you could buy a property on a lower middle class income and afford the payments.
Now it's the situation where to get non-oppressive pricing that's affordable and good but in an inconvenient area, going rural is the only answer, such as Adams MA in that part of the United States.
The second option is going non-oppressive, ridiculously affordable, convenient and bad. A really good example of that is Birmingham Alabama. There's a whole swath of dumpy broken down houses for sale there at under $20K (yes, really) with sub-$1K/yr property taxes all day. All. Frickin'. Day. But they're all in bad neighborhoods, along with having to sink a minimum $100K into the property just to fix and replace everything. Technically, yes, that's still a 1/1 all around for price since that can be covered with refurbish/rebuild style loan, but that doesn't get rid of the bad neighborhoods. The only good there is the convenience. Birmingham has a lot of stuff like major hospitals, major banks, and so on. If it weren't for the bad neighborhoods (and by that I mean areas west of I-65 and north of 78 a.k.a. 4), Birmingham would be a top tier place to live.
Inconvenience might be worth dealing with?
Not for bad neighborhoods. No way. But for a rural area, maybe.
I have the benefit of having been raised in a rural area, so if I ever had to live in another, I know what to expect. More importantly, I know what not to expect.
While I'm not retirement age yet, that obviously will happen. When I put myself into Retiree Mode Thinking, the dirtiest word I could hear concerning where to live as a retiree is sprawl.
Parrish Florida is sprawl incarnate. Mow down everything, prop up as many McMansions as fast as possible, HOA the bejeezus out of it all, call everything "luxury" when it's obviously not, price it high for the suckers, lower it when the suckers have all been squeezed, and when those secondary suckers have all been squeezed, Section 8 the rest. That last part hasn't happened yet, but it will.
Texas is also notorious for sprawl, as is Arizona. Build build build and do it fast fast fast, cut corners everywhere, sell sell sell, squeeze squeeze squeeze, then do it again for the next town over. Rinse and repeat.
Side note: It's going to be interesting when all those overpriced McMansions made out of cardboard start falling apart (if you know new construction home building, you know that's not an exaggeration) in fewer than ten years.
The ideal place to retire is a town that has seen no sprawl, and moreover is highly unlikely ever to see any. The house bought should be smaller, as in not more than 1,200 sq ft, and sitting on a couple of acres. Nothing crazy. That to me is manageable, and I'm not just talking about cost but also maintenance.
A house is a money pit, so smaller is better. Usually.
Small house doesn't mean to go without, by the way.
Pool? Don't need it. Hot tub all day.
Garage? Only in a state with snow. Otherwise, carport all day. For the lawnmower and other outdoor tools, small shed.
Whole house fan? Absolutely. Get the airstream going through the house during summer. Uses far less electric than A/C.
Retractable window awnings? Yes. Again, summer and hot weather thing. Shade is an easy way not to run the A/C as much.
In the end, "living free" to me does not mean no cost, because there is always cost.
What it does mean is free of sprawl and hopefully future sprawl, free of traffic for the most part, free of NOISE, things like that.
I started off life in a small town like the one I grew up in, and may end up going there again for retirement when that time comes. No, not to the town I grew up in, but possibly one similar to it.
that time i was into progressive metal
I came across some remixes of KISS songs and gave them a listen. The guy who did them absolutely admits that he purposely replaced a ton of the instruments with samples, and I know exactly why. That band never sounded good, and the only possible way to get a decent sound is to replace the original sounds. The remixed studio version of Rock and Roll All Nite (with solo!) is genuinely good, but the first thing I heard was that snare drum with gated reverb. Nope, wrong. The studio sound in 1975 for rock drums was super dry, and very much on purpose. Other 1975 rock songs like Fox on The Run by Sweet, Sweet Emotion by Aerosmith, Feel Like Makin' Love by Bad Company, Tush by ZZ Top and so on all had dry drums. The reverb wasn't just light, but rather simply engineered right out. Reverb in all forms was very not-cool at that time and wouldn't make a return until the reverb-everything sound of Van Halen in 1978.
So what the hell does this have to do with progressive metal? That snare with gated reverb fired off something in my brain that made me remember Crimson Glory from the late 1980s. And there's a story behind this one.
I found out about Crimson Glory when I was barely a teenager. How? No idea, but I can hazard a guess. Maybe I saw them in a magazine and then went to buy their album on tape (I didn't do vinyl records). Or, I went to look around for some new music at the record or department store, and just bought the tape in the hope it would be good. Getting music like that was not something I did often, but if I had a few bucks on me and was in the store, I wanted to get something so I didn't leave empty-handed.
The album I bought was Transcendence.
While I wasn't in love with the music when I first heard it, I liked it enough to play it quite a bit. It was good.
A friend of mine at the time found out I had that tape, and he wanted it really bad. My tape, specifically. This confused me since he could have easily went and bought a copy himself. But for whatever reason, he didn't. I think I know why, and I'll talk about that in a moment.
This friend asked me at first to give him the tape "if I didn't want it". No, not doing that. Later on, he offered to buy it off me. Um, no dude, not doing that. Then a little while later, he asked to buy it again. Nope. He gave up after that...
...except he didn't. The fate of that tape is that it was stolen from me by that asshole.
A running joke some comedians used to make is that if you lost one of your worthless tapes or records or whatever, somebody must have stolen it. Well, in my case, yeah, that prick actually did steal my tape.
The memory I have of this is faded now, but it was one of two situations that happened. Situation 1, he borrowed the tape and never returned it no matter how many times I asked for it back. Situation 2, he came over to hang out at my house one day, got sticky fingers and just straight up nicked it. I'm thinking it was situation 2 because I had the thought even back then that if he got his hands on it, I'd never see it again. This was especially true given his interest in the tape, and being the only guy I knew who even knew Crimson Glory existed other than myself. So yeah, he stole it.
That theft was something I let go, because whatever, it's just a tape.
Crimson Glory's Transcendence ended up being a here-today-gone-tomorrow thing. I just happened to be at the store when the tape was in stock. However, I don't think it sold well enough for the store to restock it or whatever, so it most likely vanished from the shelves pretty fast. And that's probably why that guy stole the tape from me. He probably tried to buy that tape, couldn't find it anywhere, I was the only guy who had it, he wanted it, he nicked it.
Is owning an original copy of Transcendence from the late '80s a prize now? No. The tape, CD or vinyl record can be acquired easily. If I really wanted that tape back, I could just buy another for about 20 bucks shipped.
So okay, nearly 40 frickin' years have passed since I last heard those songs. I go to listen to them again, online of course, and whammo, instantly familiar. Like, scary familiar. The first track Lady of Winter comes on, and for a brief moment I was in the late '80s again, being a kid sitting in my room and listening to that tape. Kinda intense.
That feeling really speaks to how much of a signature sound that album has. Now while true you can absolutely hear some fake drums, pretty much the exact same thing happened with Dream Theater. When you hear that totally fake, totally electronic snare drum on Pull Me Under, you cannot un-hear it once you know it's there. With Crimson Glory, the fake drums are heard most with the toms. I don't know why I can detect a fake snare or tom considering I don't even play drums, but my ear can pick it up very easily.
At the same time however, that half-real/half-fake drum sound was the only way to get the percussion to sound correct for late-1980s progressive metal. So while I wince a little when I hear the fake stuff, I get over that since that is part of the progressive metal sound of the era.
Progressive metal was something I liked, and then just stopped listening to it. I didn't stop liking it, but it had just run its course with me.
Am I back to liking it now? Not really, but I am amazed at how unbelievably quick I remembered Crimson Glory's music nearly four decades later, and all because of a snare drum sound from a remixed 1975 KISS song.
it's that summer gps navigation time again
If there's one thing I know to be true, it's that putting capacitive screens in cars was a really bad idea, and it's for one main reason. None of them handle heat well, and none ever will.
Every time I see one of those screens, I see something that will fail and be ridiculously expensive to replace. And that's assuming if it can even be replaced at all. Screen size doesn't matter. It could be a little panel screen, a large infotainment screen, whatever. Every screen is a future point of failure.
It's not if that screen will fail but when, and what will kill it will be heat. After a few summers in Arizona, Nevada, California, Texas, Florida, or anywhere else it gets nasty-hot in the summer, oh yes, there will be screen failures aplenty.
The same thing is true for phones if one is used in a car for navigation. On a hot summer day even with A/C running at full blast, if that phone is getting hit by the sun, it will heat up and shut down in about, oh, 15 minutes or fewer.
I've got a bunch of Garmin navigators, and it's my tradition now that every time summer comes around, I switch over to a very specific model, the Drive 52. Why that one? It's the last matte screen model they ever made. It is a touchscreen, but not capacitive, so it emits less heat and can also handle summer heat a whole lot better.
The 52 obviously isn't as advanced as the DriveSmart 66, but it is daylight readable and does its job. Yes, it does require the additional purchase of a 32GB microSD memory card to fit all the modern USA/Canada/Mexico map data, but that's just a one-time thing.
Where I appreciate the 52 most during summer is in two specific instances. Parking in a lot with no shade, and when sitting in traffic.
In a lot, such as a grocery store parking lot, if there is no shade to be found, after I park I can easily take the screen off the mount and put it in on the passenger side floor until I get back. If it's a stupidly hot day where I have to put up my sunshade, same thing. The screen has to come off the glass to put up the shade anyway.
While true I could do the same with a capacitive screen model, I then have to deal with waiting. As in waiting for the interior of the car to cool down before I can put the screen back on its mount. With a matte screen, I don't have to wait. Even if the interior of the car is hot and the dashboard is radiating heat, I can just click back the 52 on the mount, power it up, and off I go.
There have been times in the past when using a capacitive screen model where I've been sitting in slow or stopped traffic, it's summer, really hot, I touch the screen to adjust volume or whatever, and uh-oh, it's hot. This happens even when the A/C is running. Sure, the car interior temperature is fine, but the screen is on the glass and getting beaten by the sun. Now I'm nervous. With the matte screen, yes, it's warm in those instances when I touch it, but not hot to the point of getting nervous.
I lose features (like voice control) by switching over to the 52, but it's one of those things where the navigation matters more than anything else. I just need the thing to work. The 52 may be an older model, but for summer driving, it works.
i let things go since they will be destroyed anyway
When I was a kid, I had a friend who was really into a certain magazine and had three-foot-high stacks of them in his room, situated just to the side of the door and against the wall. Something like two or three of those stacks. And no, that's not an exaggeration. The only reason the stacks weren't higher is because they would start falling over. He was a bit of a hoarder, even as a kid.
I saw that, thumbed through a few of the magazines (it was Mad, by the way), thought they were neat, and started buying copies of my own since they were cheap. After a few months of doing that, I asked dad if he ever bought any Mad magazines when he was younger. He said he did, so I then asked if he ever kept any of them. He said he didn't. I replied to that with something along the lines of, "Aww! They'd be worth a lot of money today!" He just shrugged it off. And he was correct not to keep them, because vintage copies of Mad never truly became anything valuable.
Only one store local to me at the time sold Mad, a card and gift shop. I look online to see if that store is still around. Nope. That didn't surprise me.
But then I did a deeper dive, and found out two things.
First, that store was originally registered in 1967. I thought wow, neat.
Second, that business was dissolved...
...in 1988.
Oh.
Yeah, I didn't even know that until before I wrote this. That one hit me, because it means the store was gone even before I got my first driver's license.
The building still stands, so the place where the card shop used to be wasn't technically destroyed.
But another place I recently found out the fate of is a different story.
As a kid, a special occasion was when the family used to go to a Chinese restaurant that originally opened in 1974. Every time the family went either once or twice a year, we'd always order the exact same thing, the Pu Pu Platter. It was always good.
This Chinese joint legitimately looked like a restaurant you'd find in a theme park, even though it was located in very plain part of town. The most exciting thing near it was a convenience store across the street. That restaurant installed all their pseudo-upscale designs back in the mid-'70s and never changed, which was part of its charm. Inside, the place was divided into themed rooms, and the one the family always picked was the Fountain Room, because it had an actual operating fountain in the middle of it. That was neat.
Other than the restaurant changing its sign once since the old one was so beat up that it needed to be replaced, this Chinese place looked exactly the same for almost 50 years.
Yeah, almost 50 years.
In 2022, that restaurant burned to the ground. Literally.
Arson was how the place got destroyed. Arson by whom? Just some guy that liked to set fire to restaurants in the local area for whatever reason. The guy was found, arrested, and actually admitted that yeah, it was him. And the guy was married with a four-year-old kid. I've no idea why he liked to torch restaurants. Maybe he hated his wife. Maybe his kid ruined his prized Funko Pop collection and the guy took out his frustration by setting fire to buildings. Who knows.
The place where that Chinese restaurant stood was cleaned up, and now it's just an empty parking lot that will most likely stay that way.
Not only can I never go to that restaurant ever again, no building exists where it used to be.
Oh.
That one also hit me, and definitely more so than the card shop closing did. A card shop is a whatever thing, but family memories were made at that tacky Chinese restaurant. It would be one thing if the restaurant owner closed shop and some other business took the building, but that's not what happened. The building burned down. Ugh..
Learning to let go is important
The older I get, the more I understand that nothing is forever.
There are very few things that I know will stick around.
Where places are concerned, state parks pretty much stay the same since they're not places of commerce. Maybe a gate will be fixed/updated. Maybe some trees will be planted along with other beautification. Maybe a small shed or other small building will be constructed or removed. But as far as the park itself is concerned, that stays the same. As for any residential or commercial building, yeah there's no guarantee it will even be there next week.
For possessions, steel non-mechanical things stand the test of time. This could be any number of things like flatware, jewelry, all-steel tools, and so on. Anything plastic on the other hand is doomed from the start. That plastic, at some point, will degrade and break.
Wooden things can last, depending on type of wood and how it was constructed. For example, if cabinets were made from marine grade plywood (the best and heaviest kind), I am fairly certain they would last at least 50 years, with the only thing possibly breaking on them being the hinges and not the wood itself. Then again, industrial grade hinges would make future hinge problems a nonissue right quick.
The possessions I have that I hang on to are small in number, but are manageable. This is not to say I've not lost things, because I have. For what I do have, if there is any way I can get a duplicate, I get it if it's not crazy-expensive. This is why I bought a second 1989 Squier II Stratocaster guitar. I still have my first one, which is my first guitar, and it's the second one that gets played sometimes whenever I want an old-Strat fix. Also in my possession is something I was miraculously able to find a duplicate of on eBay, the exact same keychain I've had since my teens. I still have my original, but the dupe is what I use now just because I like it.
I have a few other things that are totally in the "only valuable to me" category, but again, small and manageable.
There is one thing I do concerning locations that allows me to save them in my own way. I get the GPS coordinates and keep them in a list. This is something I've been doing for years when I started realizing certain destinations can change drastically to the point of being unrecognizable, such as the Chinese place being burned to the ground.
Any time I'm driving and I come to a place where I think that I may visit it again, that gets saved in the Garmin right then and there. Later on, I copy the coordinates from the Garmin and put it into my list.
In my list are locations that aren't necessarily important to anyone else, but interesting to me. For example, I have the location of a former CompUSA saved that's now an EV dealership. I have the location of a former Sam Ash store that's now a Spirit Halloween. I also have the locations saved of places where I used to live, and for houses of where relatives used to live that have been gone for years.
There is one location I've been desperately trying to find for probably about 15 years now. The memory I have of it is very hazy. It was either a class trip or possibly a "kid's adventure" style thing my parents signed me up for before high school. About once a year I spend something like four to six hours going through Google Maps trying to find that location, and have never been able to find it. The only lead I have is from the hazy memory I have of the place. It was some kind of high point with a concrete or marble (or both) structure at the top, very tourist-friendly, with woods around it, with a very clear view of fields far below in the distance. If you think you know where this is, trust me, you don't. I have looked at photos of every mountaintop area in the region where I think it might be (somewhere in New England or possibly New York). I have looked at all the ski mountaintop areas too. I have looked at mountain areas that are now closed. I also expanded outside of mountaintop areas to anywhere with a high point. I even used AI to help try to locate the place. Every time, I end up empty-handed. But I've not given up hope. One day I will find it, AND IF I DO, oh yes, those coordinates will be saved, and you bet your ass I'm going to visit that place again.
I had a similar situation happen in Florida where I went to a very specific spot. At the time I actually did have GPS, and thought, "Yeah, I'd better save this...? Nah, I'll remember it."
I didn't remember it.
A few years later, I was scanning around with Google Maps, and whammo, FOUND IT. Oh, that made me a happy guy. Coordinates were saved, and I went there again. It was still awesome. That was the trigger moment that made me start saving coordinates in a list, and have been doing it ever since.
Now if I can just find that one frickin' spot in the northeast... ugh. Someday. I'm not letting go of that. I've let go of plenty of other things, but not that. The hunt is still on.