Musings & Thoughts for Monday, November 15, 2021, or: Stuff I Had as a Kid But Not in the Present

Hi, there, Dear Reader. It’s late morning here in my corner of west-central Florida on Monday, November 15, 2021. It’s chilly – for the Sunshine State. Currently, the temperature is 61˚F (16˚C) under sunny skies. With the wind blowing from the north-northeast at 9 MPH (15 KM/H) and humidity at 65%, the wind-chill factor is 58˚F (15˚C). Today’s forecast calls for sunny skies and a high of 73˚F (23˚C). Tonight, we can expect clear skies and a low of 49˚F (9˚C).

Last night I slept a tad better than usual. At least I think I did. Since I don’t have a clock in my room, I have no idea what time I went to bed. I watched documentaries on Amazon Prime Video until I got drowsy, turned off my TV, and slept until I woke up at 5:51 AM Eastern to go to the bathroom.  Since it was almost 6 AM, I made no effort to fall asleep again. I would have just tossed and turned and made myself unnecessarily tired way too early. So…I got up and stayed up.

Today on Twitter, someone asked her followers to name several items that had in the childhood home that they do not have in their current home. She asked us to name three; here are my three items:

• Rotary dial telephone
• Hi-Fi stereo with turntable (aka record player), AM-FM radio, and eight-track player
• Black-and-white TV

Technically, I lived in Bogota, Colombia, and Miami during my childhood years – I was born in Miami, moved to Bogota with my mom circa 1966, then moved back to Miami in 1972 – and I lived in several apartments and houses in both places, but I refer to the house in Westchester, Florida, where we lived from 1972 to 1977 here.

We had Southern Bell Princess phones with rotary dials throughout the not-quite five years that we lived in the house on SW 102^nd Avenue. By the time we sold that house in the fall of 1977, Southern Bell was installing/selling Touchtone (pushbutton) phones. I don’t recall ever using a rotary-dial phone at any time after 1977.

I don’t remember when Mom purchased the Magnavox stereo system that we had in our last two Miami houses. Between 1974 and 1975, perhaps, although I can’t be sure. Suffice it to say that I remember having to ask permission from my mother to use it when I was 11 and 12 and that it stayed at our last Miami house until my half-sister was asked to move out on her own – for the second time in four years – back in early 1979.  It had, as I said, a record player, an eight-track “deck,” and an AM-FM radio. I was fond of that stereo, and I was pissed when Vicky cajoled my mother into letting her take it to an apartment that she rented for a while.

Although Mom had a Zenith color TV in her bedroom at our Westchester house and during our first few years at our townhouse in East Wind Lake Village, I had to make do with a 12-inch black and white TV until 1983. I owned two such black-and-white sets as a kid and teenager – one was a Zenith, the other a GE. I would not get my first color set until I was 20, and that was my high school graduation present in June of 1983.

I really don’t have much in the way of personal news, other than to say that I did all of my Christmas shopping late last week and that I’m expecting my last Amazon pre-orders  – the Ragtime Blu-ray and Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars: Thrawn Ascendancy (Book III: Lesser Evil) for November. (I also have the 4K UHD Blu-ray of 25^th James Bond film, No Time to Die, on pre-order, but that’s a December 21 release; it was originally scheduled for a January “drop.”)

And on that note, Dear Reader, I’ll close for now. Until next time, stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.