Memory Lane

On my last post I told you that "mi chica" and I spend Tuesdays and Wednesdays at my mom's house, that means we wake up on Tuesday morning go out to work and we don't come back home until Thursday night.

My mom and dad did very good for themselves as they were always hard working people but best of all they new how to save money. Recently her 35" TV broke down and it took me a while to take it to my work so they could check if it could be fixed. In the interim my mom went and bought herself a 62" screen TV, not a plasma but an LCD.

Three days later she tells me that the TV looks small in her living room, I told her "What are you talking about, your TV is
huge". See her 35" rested in a wall to wall entertainment center which we moved to the den when she bought the new TV so of course now all she saw was a bare wall with a big TV in the center but needless to say the wall overpowered the TV.

So "mi chica" and I took her to the furniture store where she right away picket up a brand new entertainment center for it. (Must be nice)

So now I have an old school mom with state of the art electronic equipment.

I remember I was still in Mexico when my dad won our very first ever 5" B/W Sony TV. While some of my friends had had theirs for five or six years we started to enjoy our. I remember we could only watch for just an hour or two max a day and then my dad would put it away.

Prior to that we were allowed to go to my best friend's house on Sundays to watch their TV, I remember turning it on and having to wait as much as five minutes for the image to appear as it had to actually warm up. The voices would be talking but the screen was black and then all of a sudden it lit up. As a kid of 9 years old I remember wondering if we turned the TV set upside down if the people inside would fall.

We were all in awe on day when my best friend's uncle brought home a TV with remote control, it was a hand size metal canister with a long (About 20 feet) cable, each time the canister was pressed the dial would jump to the next channel, and you could do this from the comfort of your sofa, imagine that.

Then when told to turn it off we would remain sitting motionless staring at the little dot that took forever to disappear. It's funny how we used to find excitement and fun in event the smallest things. Nothing like the fast pace life our kids live now, in our house the TV seems to be on 24/7 and kids don't even go out to play any more.

The programs now as compared to the ones I used to watch as a kid have no value, even cartoons are nothing but a big commercial to sell action figures. My appreciation for classical music came from watching the loony tunes, find something like that on TV now.

And to all this, guess what my mom has in the guest room were we sleep when we spend the night there, if you guessed a 13" TV in black and white with dials you were absolutely right and nope there's no remote control for it.

How times change, and while at my mom's we seem to enjoy a little of both time zones.