Remember When...??

First of all, I have an announcement...

Good news!! With the new year, comes a new format for doing promotions. Check out my For Authors page, and read up on the author promotions. (Yes, there is a lot to read. I want to be thorough and clear, because I really want to do a good job for the phenomenal authors out there.) Then, when you're done, click on the Contact Me tab and drop me a line, if you're interested!!


Okay, now that THAT's out there, here's something else for you.

So, do y'all remember what we all did before video games, way too many kids TV shows, iPods, smartphones, tablets and eReaders, and Facebook? I miss the good old days.



Remember Oregon Trail? That amazingly awesome game we played in grade school with the kick ass graphics. You'd name all your characters in your troupe after all your best friends and try like hell to get everyone safe and sound to Oregon. Oh, how I miss it!! I used to all look forward to computer day when we got to play it, and all it's advanced technology at the time made it one helluva fun time. Even if I did kill off all my friends with Typhoid Fever and Dysentery...



OH. And we can't forget grabbing a pen and playing MASH. Omigosh. Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House. You'd list four guys as potential husbands, always including your crush and one guy that it would just never happen with, then four cars-mine always included a Limo, cause I just knew one day I'd be rich and famous. Of course, your friends always had a say in who your prospective husbands and cars would be. Next, you would pick four different numbers that represent how many children you'd end up having. Some more creative groups (like my friends and me) added lists to the game, including jobs, what city you'd live in, the color of your wedding dress,  Lastly, one of your friends would start drawing ticks or a swirling circle type thing, and when you said stop, they would count how many ticks or swirls there were, and that would be how many times to count before crossing something off the list. Gosh, by this game, I was supposed to be married to Jonathan Taylor Thomas, living in a house, driving a Lamborghini, in Hawaii, with a magenta wedding dress and a penguin for a pet, and we were supposed to have six kids. Hmph. Well, they got the house part right...



Let's not forget the Fortune Telling Origami. You know what I'm talking about, with the folded paper that you put your fingers in? You'd ask a yes or no question, and you had to pick a color, and whoever was manning the almighty fortune-telling device would spell out the name of the color and move the paper with their fingers (yeah, this is starting to sound naughty, but I swear it's not!!). Then you'd have four more options that were typically numbers, and you had to count and move your fingers again. You'd then be presented with four more options, and which ever you picked the fortune-teller would lift the paper and read you the answer. Holy crap, we'd waste DAYS with this one. I can't even fold it anymore. :(



Red Rover, Red Rover, we dare __________ over!! Yeah, we didn't need video games or even paper to amuse ourselves. We had Red Rover, where one person would be "dared" over to the other side, and you would run as hard as you can and fling your body in between two people holding hands. If you broke the chain, you "busted through" and got to steal someone from their side to take back over with you, but if you didn't break through, you had to stay on their side. It was a neverending struggle for power and supremacy. Then there was the hours of Hide-N-Seek, well into the dark night, until our parents called us inside for the night. A game best played at dusk with all the neighborhood kids. We also had Freeze Tag, where if you got tagged, you had to freeze until someone unfroze you, by crawling between your legs. Not quite as easy for me as a fat kid, but I managed. Then there were the hours we'd spend playing on the swingset. Did you know that if you sat in one swing, put your feet in the swing next to you, then someone else sits in that swing and puts their feet on either side of you in your swing, that's called a milkshake? I have NO idea who decided the name of it, but it was wicked fun to see how long it took before the pain of the swings digging into your flesh cause you to beg for mercy.



As children, we 80's and early 90's babies had a frickin imagination. We had class. When I was 11, I didn't have an iPod, iPad, iPhone, I had a brain. Seriously, today's youth is spoiled and far too reliant upon technology. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if all those scary sci-fi predictions of the machines rising up against us and the Matrix and all that other stuff actually comes true. Even as I type this up on my laptop, listening to the big screen TV playing an old movie in the background, literally having the world at my fingertips, I fear the worst will happen during my lifetime. I just hope it happens when I'm in a deep sleep so I don't feel it coming for me.