So Easy...

It just keeps getting easier for our kids.

In my dad's day he had to walk to school, up hill...both ways. In the snow. With tattered shoes cause he only had that one pair (that his brother passed down and he already used up all the "good" sole).

I had to walk to school (up hill...just one way).

School has been cancelled for my kids today and tomorrow because it's TOO COLD. Not because of snow or ice (which we haven't had since Christmas Eve) but because it's in the single digits in the morning (this morning at bus stop time it was 12).
All the area schools feel it's too cold for the kids to wait for the bus. Are you kidding me? C'mon. I remember freezing in winter before school...that's part of growing up. Wonder what my friends up North think about that one.
It has been a tough week to get them re-adjusted to our routine after being out for Christmas Break. Now we just have to do it all over again next week.

My friend Nicole sent me this a few days ago and it made me laugh (the Atari part especially)...thought it was pretty relevant today.

*******THE SPOILED UNDER-30 CROWD!!! ********
When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were. When they were growing up; what with walking Twenty-five miles to school every morning, uphill both ways, barefoot, through year 'round blizzards carrying their younger siblings on their backs to their one-room schoolhouse where they maintained a Straight-A average despite their full-time after-school job at the local textile mill where they worked for 35 cents an hour just to help keep their family from starving to death!

Yadda, yadda, yadda

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on my kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it!

But now that... I'm over the ripe old age of thirty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today. You've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia! And I hate to say it, but you kids today, you don't know how good you've got it!

I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have The Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalogue!!

There was no email!! We had to actually write somebody a letter - with a pen!
Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take, like, a week to get there!

Child Protective Services didn't care if our parents beat us. As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to kick our butts! Nowhere was safe!

There were no MP3' s or Napsters! If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the record store and shoplift it yourself! Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up! There were no CD players! We had tape decks in our car. We'd play our favorite tape and "eject" it when finished and the tape would come undone. Cause - that's how we rolled, dig?

We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that's it! And we didn't have fancy Caller ID either!
When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your mom, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, a collections agent, you just didn't know!!! You had to pick it up
and take your chances, mister!

We didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like 'Space Invaders' and 'Asteroids'.
Your guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination!! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen... forever! And you could never win.
The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died!
Just like LIFE!

You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get up and walk over to the TV to change the channel! NO REMOTES!!!
There was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I'm saying!?! We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little rat-bastards!
And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up we had to use the stove! Imagine that!

That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled. You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1980 or before!