Wow how things have changed. I guess I am getting old, but I just can't believe some of the changes taking place. Lets start with something very simple, a bathroom scale. I ordered one from Buy.com. It was a simple process, the scale was $20.00 and shipping was $11.00. I checked out using Google to pay and got $10.00 off. Total cost of scale, $21.00. I saw pictures of the scale, but never noticed one important factor. When the scale arrived, I was astounded to see it was glass. It had an electronic indicator on the upper part of the glass that gave your weight in either pounds or kg. My daughter called and I couldn't wait to tell her I had a glass scale. Well didn't I feel foolish when she said, "oh dad, most of them are like that now." Yup old age is creeping in.

Graphic Source: Simply Media

My mother, God bless her, is still alive and kicking and she is even more amazed at things than I am. She is amazed at toasters, refrigerators, televisions, cable, vcrs and many other objects. She will say to me, when looking at the toaster, "I remember when we used to make toast on the gas stove. We used a metal device that held 4 slices of bread and we put it over the burner." Here is the scary part, I I remember that also. She is also fond of reminding me about how we didn't have a refrigerator in the old days, when I was little, but we had an icebox instead. That meant we had to get an ice delivery quite often to put in the thing, otherwise nothing would be kept cold. The poor ice man had to walk up four and five stories lugging a huge chunk of ice on his shoulder. This guy must have been like Hercules. Ice boxes caused a lot of trouble in the old days and sometimes fights between people that lived above and below each other. The usual cause was not emptying the pan underneath the ice box. You see, there was a pan that would catch the water from the melting ice and if that pan overflowed, the people below you would get a leak in their ceiling, Ouch! I am sure glad that those days are gone.

I remember a man that was a friend of our family. He was about 50 years older than my mother. He is dead now of course or he would be almost 140 years old. He thought that that the 1950s were a marvel. I remember him walking over to an old stand up radio we had. It had a glass rectangle near the top and the two knobs protruded, one from each end. When you changed the station, you could see the pointer on the station number you selected. This was nothing unusual. Well he came in to our house one day to see our new tv. He walked over to the radio, looked at it and said, nice television. I guess he thought we had gotten a tv with a 3 1/2 inch screen. He thought that the zipper was a marvelous thing, I guess he was right, but to him it was the height of technology.

I remember when I was a kid, I used to think that clocks were fantastic. Not the electrical kind, but the windup variety. Everyone used to give me their old broken clocks and I would disassemble them, enjoying every second of the work. My problem was that I was never able to put them back together again. I had clock parts everywhere, but I was only eight years old, so that was to be expected. Well I grew up and now I have computer parts everywhere. The only difference is that I am capable of building and fixing computers and have repaired numerous ones and built at least three. The problem today is that computers have become so cheap that sometimes you can buy what you want cheaper than buying the parts and building it. That is how I landed up with my Gateway and Dell dual core desktops. Having spare parts is handy though. I have given many parts to my sons who needed them for repairs. I don't have any clock parts thought, so if there wind up clocks break down, if they even have any, they are out of luck.

Another thing that I think is really cool are the talking greeting cards. Who would have ever thought that you could buy a card for a dollar and have it talk. I like buying them, but I don't like receiving them very much. It reminds me of a musical coffee mug that my kids gave me one time. I brought it to work, I could because I had my own office, and it played for six years. SIX YEARS, how could it continue that long? Other people who came in while I was using it were amazed. They would say things like, "doesn't that battery ever die.?" When they said it, it sounded like wishful thinking on their part. I think they didn't like my mug very much. As the years wore on and it continued to play, people would complain more often and I found myself using it more and more, just to get their goat. I guess I do have an evil side. Finally I dropped the cup and it broke. Who knows how long it would have played? I might have broken the world record for musical mugs and not even have known it.

Graphic Source: MSI Master Clips

One thing that really stands out to me is how much the automobile has progressed. I remember when I bought my first car, it was a Volkswagen Beetle, a 1960 model. To say that this car was sparse is a gross understatement. All it had was a speedometer. There was no gas gage and no practical heater. I say practical, because all you had was a valve that would allow you to let the warm air that circulated over the air cooled engine. There wasn't even a fan in the system to blow it out. Even when I bought my 1972 Plymouth Duster, it only came with power steering, automatic transmission, heater and defroster. Nobody much had air conditioning or power windows. The automatic transmission was a three speed, it was a step up from my 1962 Impala that had only a two speed. The only people that had power windows and air in those days were the owners of Cadillacs, Lincolns and Imperials. Today everything is so different. Even inexpensive cars can be bought with entire power packages, air conditioning is almost standard and you can even get navigation aids. One thing that has never come to fruition is the flying car. That was talked about even before I was born. I guess it would just cause too many problems, such as how do you take off safely with all those other flying cars up there and how do you land with everyone else trying to land?

Graphic Source: Simply Media

Yeah there are a lot of things out there that amaze me but if I talk too much about them I will look foolish again and no one my age wants that to happen. I met a man coming out of a buffet restaurant and he was long in the tooth. He asked me, "how did we get this old?" I laughed and said "how did we all get to this buffet restaurant?" You see it was filled with senior citizens trying to stuff down as much food as they could to get their money's worth so they wouldn't have to eat again that day. I remember a restaurant that was put out of business by seniors. It used to advertise that for a certain price, I think it was $3.99 at the time, this was years ago, you could eat as much as you want. If you went in there you couldn't help but see seniors stuffing food into plastic bags that they carried with them and hiding them in their coats, very large pocketbooks and even shopping bags. Going back even further there was another restaurant in New York City with the unlikely name of Eat em and Beat em. The idea was that you would eat whatever you wanted to and then go to the register where they asked you what you had. Amazingly many people said coffee. This establishment didn't last very long.

So much for my thoughts folks, talk to you again tomorrow.