Yesterday was a great day!

Yesterday was my birthday, wow, 61 years. Where has all that time gone? I started thinking of all the "new" stuff I'd seen achieved in my lifetime, some now so commonplace people don't give them a thought, others now confined to the realms of history themselves! Amazing!

I remember the early days of the Space programme, as a child, watching those grainy images on the telly, full of wonderment. 3 decades later, living in Florida, watching Space Shuttle launches from the banks of the Indian River looking across at Kennedy Space Center, I was just as awestruck. To me, it was incredible that I had ended up, on the other side of the world, in a place that had enthralled me all that while ago.

I remember when a "tranny" was a transistor radio, about 8" x 4", with a couple of controls on one side for volume and tuning the stations in. Radio Caroline and Radio Luxembourg played all the newer stuff, although BBC Radio 1 did try to garner younger listeners. 

When I was young, we had "records", what some collectors now just refer to as "vinyl". They played on turntables or record players, and there were 3 speeds 78rpm, for the oldies, and 45rpm for the modern "singles" that were a lighter disc. Long playing records, or albums, which had multiple songs on, played at 33rpm.

Then came cassette tapes for recording voices (and songs off the radio). Oh the joys of them getting caught up on their spools and needing rewinding with the aid of a trusty pencil.

Those in cars had experienced 8-tracks but I only saw one or two of those, they almost passed me by.

The cassette tapes were replaced by CDs, and now those are being replaced by mp3 downloads. WOW!!!!

Same with the telly. Oh dear, twiddling those rabbit ears on top of it to get the best reception, and dad up on the roof trying to point the main aerial in the right direction, to pick up the 2, then 3, channels. Yes, in the beginning there was just the BBC (known colloquially as "The Beeb" and funded from the mandatory TV Licenses) and ITV which was the independent channel and relied on advertising to fund its programming. Then the Beeb came out with BBC 2, which had more documentaries and drama on. And that was it for a few years! It wasn't until 1982 that England got a fourth channel!

The idea of recording what was on the telly ... that wasn't even an idea. Then the 80s came with video players and recorders, a luxury at first and then they were commonplace. Then ... gone. Replaced by DVDs, in a blink of an eye.

When I was a kid, steam was big. Steam trains were awesome, we loved them and to actually go on one to the seaside (we actually called them "seaside trains") was a special treat. I can close my eyes and remember the piercing shriek of the conductor's whistle, the smell of the hot engines and their smoke, the clunk and click sound of the doors shutting, the 
ppssshhhttt-ti-coo ppssshhhttt-ti-coo sound of the engine pulling the carriages. Magical times indeed for inner city kids getting a trip outside of London.

I was 22 and a single parent when my dad told me that computers were the wave of the future, and that was the field where I should look for a job in. Key punch operating didn't appeal to me though and I loathed computers. Found them boring! Ha! Hubby bought our first computer, a Kaypro 16,

in 1987, off neighbours of ours, in Germany. $800! I wanted nothing to do with it. He brought "Jeopardy" and "Wheel of Fortune" games on the 5" floppy disks to entice me to play! I wrote my poetry and writings on a word processing program called Enable. The memory was so small, it took the use of 5 or 6 disks to fully load the info needed to use the word processor.

Over the years, we upgraded. Technology moved so quickly that the latest machines one year were often obsolete the next. Kilobytes were soon replaced by megabytes, and those fell with the arrival of gigabytes.

In 1992, we had AOL 1.0, and the joys of an online community. Emails. Groups where people chatted on different subjects. Mostly just words. Images, memes,"sharing" and "forwarding" were off in the future back then. Yahoo was "just" a search engine ... Facebook, Google and Google+, we had no idea what was coming! It just snowballed!

From being ahead back in the beginnings, I am now way less techy than I might have been had I stayed abreast of all the technology but it overtook me and left me in a cloud of dust!

So many memories abounded yesterday as I contemplated my 61 years on this Earth. Childhood diseases, once rampant, now eradicated or under control. Fashions that come and go ... and come again. I miss the innocence of those years and worry that today's kids are missing out on the simplicity of the games we played in playgrounds, before the advent of game consoles that have them mentally and digitally alert (as in, their fingers) but rooted to the couch.

I had a good birthday, lots of wishes from friends far and wide, some known in the real world but many only in the realms of cyber space. Hubby brought me home Jimmy John's for dinner (he'd wanted to take me out to eat but with my walking so poor now, it hurts and is embarrassing) plus a Cadbury's and a card. He know what makes me happy, the words in the card were beautiful.

My day began well, my friend Dimple visited and cleaned for me, she now comes once a week and the difference is awesome! She is a Godsend! We always have such awesome chats too. It was an excellent start!

The old movie channel was playing "Rhapsody In Blue" so I watched that and reminisced in the music that my mum used to play some of, on the piano

I had 2 online AVON orders totalling $107.63 and a WATKINS one that was $51.21, what an AWESOME blessing for my birthday!!! Both mean so much to me!

So, all in all, yesterday was a pretty good birthday. And despite not liking the "61" part of it, LOL, I am reminded of an old meme to embrace it, as it is a PRIVILEGE denied to so many! Oh so true!

Have an awesome day, my friends!