When do you become too old to care about what’s new?

As I was dressing this morning, a difficult-to-admit realization came to me.

I am old-fashioned.

Most of my t-shirts have sewn-in tags at the back of the neck opening. If you have purchased any clothing recently (in the past 5 years or so), you may have noticed that shirts now do not have such tags. The information is now printed on the fabric where the tags used to be located. Most of my clothing predates the changeover to printed labels.

It made me inventory the other facets of my life where I have not yet embraced the modern world. I realized that there are several areas in which I am languishing in the dark ages of past decades.

For instance, we still maintain a landline. One of these actually-GASP!-has a cord which connects the receiver to the main phone body. At least this one is cordless.

Note the cord coming out of the back. It is plugged into a wall receptacle.

Our televisions still have picture tubes. With the exception of one small television which is in our bedroom, the televisions in our home have picture screens in the shape of a square. None of them are attached to the wall.

My books are all still paper. I do not have an e-reader. I can’t imagine not having the weight of a book in my hands, or feeling the turn of a page. My eyes, after cataract surgery, would likely not handle the backlit print very well.

Although we do have cell phones, they are four years old. These are the first we have owned. There is no keyboard. They do not send emails. They cannot surf the web. There is no way to download any “apps”, whatever they are. Oh, and it flips open. That was quite the deal when we bought them.

I actually use this antique phone daily

Our newest vehicle is a 2007 model.  We feel quite modern in that it does not use a key to start it, but the others still have the pesky requirement of turning a key to start and shut off their engines.

The computer I’m using to write this is a PC which has a tower. My husband also uses a PC with a tower. We do not own a laptop.

This is a hand-me-down from my office

We still pay many of our bills with paper checks. We send them by inserting the check into an envelope, placing a stamp in the upper right-hand corner of that envelope and then drop it in a US Mailbox. The postal service presumably delivers them to the appropriate place. So far, our electricity is still on.

Snail mail does still work

On the rare occasions when I wear a skirt or dress, I wear stockings-or hose, I think they call it now. I personally cannot imagine being bare-legged in public. Especially at work.

As a kid, I remember being shocked at how old-fashioned my grandparents were. My grandmother still called the grocery store and the groceries would be delivered to her home. My grandfather wrote all of his correspondence with a fountain pen which had green ink. My grandmother wore a corset, my grandfather had sock garters.  Unbelievable to me-the thoroughly modern child. I felt such disdain for their old-fashioned lifestyle.

And now it is me. I am the one who is behind the times.  For the most part, I am perfectly happy about it (but it might be nice to have a keyboard to text with my phone, and the quick availability of books on an e-reader makes it tempting).

Shake your heads as much as you’d like, you under 30’s folk out there. Someday you too will be in my shoes.  What goes around…………………..

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**BTW, to anyone who has a Blogger site which I follow-Wordpress, in all of their wisdom, has dropped all of the Blogger sites from my subscription list. I am not getting any of your updates. I am trying to figure out what is happening, but I might not be stopping by for a while. Once I find all of you again, I will catch up. I miss all of you!**

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