Tuesday, December 30, 2008

And We Liked It!

You had rocks in your rock soup? We were lucky to have soup in our rock soup...and we liked it!


Yesterday's post degenerated into one-upsmanship over how tough we all had it when we were kids.

"I had to walk five miles to school, in the snow, barefoot, uphill both ways when I was your age!"

Your challenge today is to prove that today's youth are utter wimps and tell us what agonies you suffered as a child. If you're still a child, you may pretend to be much older.



Our family car was a '57 Studebaker without a motor. Us kids had to push the thing. Dad liked to vacation in the mountains...and we liked it!

18 comments:

mattw said...

When I was a kid video games only came in 8-bit resolution! And we loved it!

Nathan said...

8-bit resolution?!!!!??!

We'd have killed for 8-bit resolution. Our video games were played on a fucking Etch-A-Sketch...with one of the knobs missing!

Random Michelle K said...

When I was a kid we didn't have any HD TV.

NO!

We had a tiny black and white TV and it only got twelve channels! And if you wanted to see a program you had to watch it at the TIME IT CAME ON! And if you wanted to watch a movie, you had to SEE IT IN THE THEATER. We didn't have any of those fancy schmancy DR-Rs or TiVos or even VCRs.

And being from West Virginia, everything is still uphill both ways when I walk somewhere.

Tom said...

When I was a kid, if you wanted to eat something, you had to turn on the oven, heat a pan, and cook it yourself! No microwave, or fast food restaurants, or instant soup. And we liked it!

kimby said...

When I was a kid, when we wanted water we had to pump it from the pump in the back yard, or if it was for something big, dip for water in the tank. IF there wasn't any, we called the water truck to bring us in a load of water. This actually did not change until the 1990's when my Dad finally got piped in water.

3 channels on the rotary antennae, with the numbers marked on the dial...but if it was windy or bad weather, you got almost nothing.

We got our milk from the barn, the eggs from the barn, and our pet pig was Easter dinner....

Fast food, was something that didn't take 3 days to prepare, and in the time I learned how to make butter, bread and all of the things that my children now run to the store for.

They have NO idea of how easy they have it. This past weekend when they visited my Father, they could not get over NO COMPUTERS...Bug had my laptop but could not figure out why she could not connect to anything. he he...they would have never survived in that house 40 years ago....

Jim Wright said...

You had an Etch-A-Sketch?

:::shakes head in disbelief:::

Our video games were drawn on the back of used fanfold printer paper my mom brought home from work - with a stub pencil and no eraser.

Michelle had twelve channels? Ha. We only got three on our little black and white set, ABC, NBC, and CBS - well, supposedly we got UHF too, which was PBS broadcast from Ferris State College, but that only showed weird PBS stuff (and The Electric Company woohoo!) that nobody gave a crap about. So it was really like 3.25 channels. And we only got UHF after the antenna rotor upgrade, which Dad risked his life to install up on the roof. It was cool as shit, you turned a knob on a box on top the TV, and then ran outside to watch the antenna turn - it was like NASA. And there were little stickers you pull on the dial at the proper place for each station - after you 'calibrated' it.

My cousins had an Antari, with PONG. Rich bastards. boop. bip. boop. bip. bip.

But if you really want to do the uphill, both ways, in the snow bit: I grew up in Jenison, Michigan, and we didn't get our first McDonalds until I was in high school - and they didn't even serve breakfast then. That's right, there were only two meals back then, not like the three you have now. Two meals. And when Micky Dee's did start serving breakfast years later, it was just an Egg McMuffin.

Kids nowadays, they don't know how good they've got it. Spoiled little bastages.

Some dude stuck in the Midwest said...

You've had video games? When I was a kid I had to program my own video game and my own etch and sketch on the computer!

Anonymous said...

(Kimby you win, I think.)

When I was a kid, my parents hated television. We had a little 15" black and white set in their bedroom with the abovementioned three channels, and we were permitted to watch it for an hour a week - Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. Poor Jim. (on the show)

We didn't have video games. We did have a little handheld electronic football game, with little led dots representing our players, and we thought that was very, very cool.

When I was a girl living on a military base in Virginia, I was part of busing - and so we military kids were bused an hour one-way to a non-local school so that we could achieve desegregation.

Nathan said...

The problem I've got is that you guys are telling true stories. I was looking for some serious Monty Python one-upsmanship (the rock soup was a clue).

Bah. Damn Truthers!

kimby said...

Jim, my Dad still has the little rotary box on the table beside the tv. The kids can't figure it out...the antennae tower is still beside the house, although the tornado in the 90's took care of the actual antennae.

Random Michelle K said...

Actually Jim, once my parents moved, they didn't get any channels in completely clearly, and many shows were in danger of being completely lost to snow.

They finally got rid of them, but for years my Dad had hours and hours of Star Trek shows taped onto VHS where you could barely see what was happening, and sometimes you'd get, "Captain! Look out! It's (ccrrssshhhhhh! sssshhhhhh! CrshhhhH! Shhhhhh! Shhhhhhhh! Crshhhhhhhh! whhsssssshhh!) move onto the next galaxy! Good job!"

Anonymous said...

Our video games were drawn on the back of used fanfold printer paper my mom brought home from work - with a stub pencil and no eraser.

Jim, please. Printer paper? Stub pencil? That's fancy stuff. We ripped bark off the trees with our teeth and drew stuff using berries with our feet. Why? Because we couldn't afford hands, that's why. I didn't get my first set of hands until I was twelve.

Fancy pants paper and pencil and hands...

Anonymous said...

When I was a kid we hiked dozens of miles, barefoot, along dusty roads to sit at famous philosophers' feet and learn. (Plato had a serious foot odor problem.) We took notes in hieroglyphics on wax tablets. It sucked in the winter, when the wax got too hard for our stylus to write in, we'd end up chipping it.

Those were the days. I loved wearing a toga and running around barefoot. Cargo pants and Doc Martens are so unattractive by comparison.

Nathan said...

Now that's more like it!

Shawn Powers said...

When I was a kid, we were all quite happy occupying a quantum singularity. Then one day, BANG. Now everything's screwed up.

vince said...

How Was My Childhood? Monty Python-ish!

Jim Wright said...

You all had a childhood?

In my day we couldn't afford a childhood. We were all born adults, with jobs and mortgages of crushing debt. Babies came out as old jewish men, oy veh you think you've got it tough? What do you know, eh?

We all talked like that. And we were grateful.

Steve Buchheit said...

Carol Elaine, you had bark and berries as a kid. Ah, the luxuries. We had to make do with a box of broken glass and we were glad to have it!

And just because I can do this whole skit (almost) from memory, and sometimes regale the youngsters.

Eric Idle - "Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half-an-hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, pay the mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing 'Hallelujah.'"

Michael Palin - "But you try and tell the young people today that and they won't believe you."

Nope. Nope, they won't believe you at all.