Things kids used to do by themselves

 Things I did as a kid that kids probably don't do now because they might be dangerous:  

Riding a bike without a helmet and riding for miles. Drinking from the hose. Going sledding down a steep hill that ended onto a busy street. Was tricky to stop in time, but we managed it. Walking home from a friends alone at late at night. Staying outside until dark, playing with the neighborhood kids. Climbing a mountain just outside of town by myself. Mom gave me a paper bag lunch, told me to eat it when the sun was directly overhead and then immediately come back home. I never made it to the top of that mountain, but I met a lot of sheep and picked lots of buttercups to take home to share with my brother and sisters to see if they liked butter. Visiting Farmer Brown's barn when the baby lambs were born and getting to pick them up and hug them. Walking on Railroad tracks to the river and back. (there was only one train using the track and it ran at 5 pm.) Putting pennies on the track so the train would flatten them.

Dear Red States

Found this on Facebook and found it to be funny, but leaning toward truth:

 DEAR RED STATES; WE'RE LEAVING.

We've decided we're leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we're taking the other Blue States with us.
In case you aren't aware, that includes Hawaii, Oregon, California, New Mexico, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and all the Northeast.
We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country that includes Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam and Washington D.C.
We also get the vast majority of the major shipping ports. So good luck with getting goods in or out of the country affordably.
We also get Costco, Starbucks and Boeing. You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states.
We get stem cell research and the best beaches.
We get the Statue of Liberty. You get Branson, Missouri.
We get Intel, Apple and Microsoft. You get WorldCom.
We get 85 percent of America's venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get Mississippi.
We get two-thirds of the tax revenue; you get to make the red states pay their fair share.
Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than the Christian Coalition's, we get a bunch of happier, intact families.
Please be aware that California will be pro-choice and anti-war, and we're going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals. They have kids they're apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose, and they don't care if you don't show pictures of their children's caskets coming home.
With the Blue States unified, we will have firm control of 80 percent of the country's fresh water, more than 90 percent of the pineapple and lettuce, 92 percent of the nation's fresh fruit, 95 percent of America's quality wines (you can serve French wines at your state dinners) 90 percent of all cheese, 90 percent of the high tech industry, most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools -- Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, the Penn, Princeton, and Yale; and Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Smith, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Barnard, and Radcliffe colleges; plus UCLA, UCB, Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT.
With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88 percent of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs), 92 percent of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100 percent of the tornadoes, 90 percent of the hurricanes, 99 percent of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100 percent of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones and Rand Paul.
We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you.
Additionally, 62 percent of you believe life is sacred unless we're discussing the death penalty or gun laws, 44 percent say that evolution is only a theory, 53 percent that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and 61 percent of you crazy bastards believe you are people with higher morals than we lefties. (See that part about divorces. ...)
Oh, and you can have all the new COVID-19 cases since you're too dumb and self-centered to wear masks.
Peace out.
We are the people of the
Blue States
*Cut and pasted.
Copied from a friend, who copied from a friend, who copied from...etc! 
Original author unknown!

Drive in restaurants in the 1950s

 Remember when you could sit in your car and order food and they'd bring it out to the car and attach that tray to your side window?  (There was even a place where the waitress were on roller skates)  Well A& W was one of those places. 

My sister and I used to exercise horses and there was an A&W nearby. So we rode over to get root beer floats. For some reason they didn't want to deliver to us on horseback. They made us hitch the horses to the side of the building and walk to the ordering window. 　

Getting ready for a zoom meeting

 I have a zoom meeting at 2:00.

It's a lecture, so I keep my video and audio turned off. The only thing that shows up to represent me is a black cube.

So why did I take a shower and wash my hair and get dressed?

Reading problems

 The first reader at school was a boring book called Fun with Dick and Jane.  I thought it was such a boring book, so I read it straight through to the back and then when the teacher called on me to read, I didn't know where the student next to me had left off, so she thought I couldn't read.  

Once we had finished that book, she let us choose books from her classroom collection to take home to read. (it was a 2 room school with first, second, and third grade in one room) So, I chose Black Beauty. Because it was about a horse. It took me a month or two to read it at home, with help from my parents with the hard words.  

Meanwhile, because I was dyslexic and transposed letters in writing class, the teacher thought I still couldn't read - because I kept spelling the as teh - even when I could look at the word before writing it.  Despite my spelling problems, I have written 45 books which were published. (wrote more that haven't been published - yet.) Plus I worked for years a library where I had to memorize the Dewey Decimal system because when I read the number on the computer screen, the numbers transposed themselves when I wrote them down to go to the shelf to get the book people wanted.

Because I was often late to school (it was a block away, but I often got involved watching caterpillars or other bits of nature or building materials), she tried to use a paper clock face to show me what time I should leave home in order to get to school on time. She was confused why I couldn't read the clock in the schoolroom. It was because the Grandfather clock in my house used Roman Letters. My mom and the teacher had a good laugh about that. 　

Plague - then and now

 The plague in the middle ages supposedly killed half the population. Well, the world population was much much much smaller then. On the upside, with the smaller working force afterwards, peasants demanded more rights and higher pay (well anything more than no pay would be good) In fact, most historians trace the rise of the middle class from the ravages the plague caused.  

Secondly, I remember world population being 3 billion in the 1950s and people were worried then about running out of food. Intensive strides in forcing more foodstuffs to grow, plus the reduction in deaths due to the fight against disease has now resulted in world population growing to 7.7 billion -- a number that this planet really can't sustain. 

I've been suspecting that another plague would hit -- and now it has. 

(not that I had planned to be around when it did - but here we are.)