I expected to have so much more time for doing stuff once I no longer had to spend most of my day at work or school.  What a fantasy!  I actually seem to have less time now than ever before in my life.

What happened to the days?  They’ve gotten so short.  I start out about 8 am and usually stop for dinner around 6 or 7 pm.  That’s about ten hours a day.  I should be accomplishing every task on my list.  There really aren’t that many.

O-o-o-h…shiny…look, squirrel…gets me every day.  I never realized just how short my attention span could be or how easily I could be distracted.   I think the only way I’ll ever be able to build structure into my day is to set reminders to beep me ever hour…”Are you on task?  Get back to the schedule now!”

This problem is a the feature of the modern world.  In the fifties, when I was growing up, we had no cell phones, internet nor video game systems.

Television had three networks, plus a few independent stations. As I remember there were only four or five stations total that were strong enough for us to pick up here.  Two from Evansville and two or three from Nashville, depending on how much traffic the CBs were putting out.  It frequently interfered with one of the Nashville stations.

There were two radio stations in town and we picked up WSM from Nashville. However, listening to the radio didn’t interfere with other tasks.  You could do both at once and we usually did.  I guess that was the beginning of multi-tasking.

We had two theaters with one screen each and two drive-ins, also with one screen each.  That gave us four movies to choose from each weekend, although that might include double features and short subjects like newsreels and cartoons.

We picked up books to read from the library and played board games or cowboys and Indians.  In summer we went to the city park to play and swim or fish in the lakes.   On Sundays, after church, Mama and Daddy would pile us all into the car and just go for a drive, usually out into the country, with no particular destination.   Strangely enough, we didn’t realize there was nothing to do.   We were too busy to notice.

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