Pondering life and love and 1978


The studio was very full and very active today. No one was absent this afternoon, and only one was missing out of the morning class, so it was surprisingly well attended for a few days before spring break. I know that both Marcus and The Colony HS have teams in the State Basketball tournament and that the students from those two schools have been excused to go to Austin for those big games, so I expect that those games in combination with spring break starting next week will make attendance more sparse tomorrow. Today was Mark's workday on the house, and it was quite quiet over in the Animation studio today in comparison with when Mark is there. The sub is a very nice lady, but it just isn't the same without Mark next door.

It is so difficult to imagine that we are really already to the point that spring break has arrived! I know that Hailey and DJ must just be reeling with anticipation. They will be husband and wife within days! I am getting another girl in the family - hurray! I am genuinely thrilled about the wedding and can hardly wait for it to get here. Not only that, but we get to see relatives that we don't often get to see - so that will be very nice. Mark's sister will be coming from Ohio with her three daughters, my nieces. Mark's aunts are coming - Jo from Ohio and Carol from Colorado. We have everyone in the family coming from around here, plus the friends and some of the work people of both Hailey and DJ, not to mention people from Hailey's family, of which there will be many. Mark was working in the back room that is being remodeled, and I went back there when I got home this evening. On a dusty old top shelf, I noticed our old wedding album all covered in cobwebs. I pulled it down and dusted it off and started looking at those pictures from 1978 of the day in May that we started our married life together. It made me start to REALLY think about how long ago 1978 actually was. Yeah, in actual years it was only about 32 years. That doesn't seem like that long ago in your mind, but look at this picture of what Microsoft Corporation looked like at that time. Wow.

I'm pretty sure that Bill Gates is down there in the lower left corner. The world looked a lot different then. Microsoft was just a bunch of nerdy kids. If circumstances had been different, I might have been one of them - I was certainly the right age, just didn't share their interests. I was not at all what you would call a computer enthusiast back then. It was still the days when Apple Computers were being born in a garage in Cupertino, California and a "PC" was just so ugly that I can barely even look at one.
It makes me feel better for not being interested in them, except that if I had been... multi-millionaire! Zing! Oh well.

This little dandy was what they looked like back then. Just a sight to behold, eh? Hmmm. Wonder why I wasn't interested? So all in all, I much prefer computing these days with beautiful machines to use and in all kinds of convenient and truly portable formats. Even the Apple Computer was not stylish. It was slightly better looking than the PC, but still...ugly. And as I recall, it was a long time until we got really good on the graphics end. I can remember so many clunky, pixel-y looking computer games that were so simple as to provoke groans. Now I play games on my phone all the time that just blow my mind. We all do. Life in these past 32 years has changed so much for the better, at least as far as technology is concerned. I mean right now I am posting this from a convenient little HP netbook that is perched delicately in my lap as I sit in front of my beautiful flat screen 42" television set watching my favorite show. I have an iPhone sitting on the coffee table in front of me that I can pick up if it rings all with no cord to tether me to the wall! (How did we ever exist with those phones that we had to sit in a specific location to use? I can remember that we only had one phone and I had a 30 min. phone call limit. Dad wanted to keep the lines open in case someone wanted to call.)

So even though those old wedding photos are looking VERY 1978 and my dress is out of style and if I were doing it again now, my wedding would have more snap and panache... I am proud of how it was for back then, and I am prouder still of how it is now. The wedding was a good one because it was for keeps and we meant it to last, even though we were really young. We will be together still even when DJ and Hailey's wedding pictures start to look old too, I am sure of that. And that to me is something that I wish for my son as he starts his life with his Hailey. I hope that he looks at his photos 32 years later, wipes the dust off the cover and still loves her as much then as he does right now the week before he gets married. In fact, I hope he loves her even more.



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