Not that long ago

Whenever I surf the web, I'm amazed at how far it's all come in such a short amount of time.

I was one of the very first ones in my group of friends who "got online." In fact, in high school, Ken and I used to agree to meet on a certain BBS at a certain time on a certain evening....to "chat." Sure...we only lived ten minutes apart and could've just picked up the telephone and talked to the other person live...but typing messages and receiving messages back via a slow-as-Christmas black and amber screen was way cooler.

I had a computer with a monitor that was on the blink....or almost. Every few minutes, all of the pixels would gather into the center, making one long, vertical line. I'd literally whack the side of the unit with my open palm, scaring my family and pets every time, just to make the letters reappear. Yet somehow, I rarely lost my patience. I felt still that, despite my faulty tools, I was above the majority of America in my technological savviness, and I reveled in the fact that I could use such terms as "the world wide web" and "dataport" in everyday conversation. (Boy....what nerds we were.)

I remember my very first webpage....a three-fold space, a freely given page off of Geocities. I checked out HTML books from the library and programmed my page from behind. It took me the entire summer to finish, between my sophomore and junior years of high school. Tedious, yes. But it was always worth it when I got one of those little animated gif rabbits to wiggle his nose by the bulleted points of my page. Got excited over little things....

Today, I realize I'm light years behind as far as what I know about anything "web." I'm good at checking my online banking status, scouring ebay, posting to this blog, and keeping up with my gmail. That's about it. It came time to decide, once out of college, what things were really interesting to me, and which things were really worth my time learning about. Computers were not one of them. I'm so happy my husband wears the technology pants in this family.

It's amazing to think how much further things will evolve in the ten years, seeing as how much happened in the last ten.

This, plus my impending 10-year high school reunion, further ingrains in my mind how fast time really does travel. Makes me want to soak up every precious minute of every single day.

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