I’m not that old, but it’s amazing to me how much has changed just in my lifetime.  When I got married, gold was the metal of choice for wedding bands.  Now, it seems that gold is no longer “in vogue.” Platinum is popular.  And then there are others I’m not even familiar with, like the tungsten carbide wedding rings from MensTungstenOnline.com.

Telephones are another big (huge!) change.  When I was a kid, cordless phones were pretty new.  (And they had monster antennae!)  Shoot, I even remember telephone dials.  When you were out somewhere, if your car broke down or something, you used a pay phone.  Now it’s almost impossible to find a pay phone, because “everyone” has cell phones.  In the emergency department waiting room at the hospital, pretty much everybody is on the phone.  People talk on the phone while they’re shopping.  Fifteen years ago, that would have been unheard of!

My favorite modern invention, the world wide web, did not exist when I was a child.  I was one of the first internet users, on “bulletin board systems” in the early ’90’s.  We’ve gone through audiocassettes, CD’s, the short-lived “mini-discs” and CD’s; VHS tapes, DVD’s, and BluRay (which I still don’t fully understand); 5-/1/4″ floppy disks, 3-1/2″ floppies, CD-ROM’s, CD-R’s and -RW’s, DVD-ROM’s, DVD-R’s and -RW’s, external HDD’s, and USB “thumb” drives, just in a few short years.

What I think goes even faster is my children’s childhoods!  My eldest daughter turned 9 this year.  But wait, wasn’t she just a newborn?  What happened?  As the saying goes, “the days are long but the years are short.”  Do they know I love them?  And am I writing down what the world was like when I was a child while I’m still young enough to remember? 😉