Note: If you want to keep up with this blog (and why wouldn’t you) and get almost daily not-so-exclusive yet interesting content that doesn’t appear here, please check out the blog’s Facebook page. Many photos and links that don’t make it here due to my laziness and procrastination, frequently appear on Facebook, where you can just as easily comment and like what you see.

Now let’s finish up with my vacation report.

After visiting Seattle, taking the Coast Starlight and then driving the most scenic of the American roads, we returned to San Francisco for the last three days of our vacation.

San Francisco is the city where the War on Drugs was lost. Many times throughout the day, in different parts of town, one walks through a cloud of the familiar yet unusual in the streets of Kansas City smell and immediately takes another whiff just to make sure it’s not a mistake. In the middle of the day in the touristiest of the tourist areas, next to expensive stores and restaurants, a nicely dressed woman produced a mini-bong out of her pricey purse and turning her face ,to the wall, proceeded to treat her glaucoma (if you know what I mean). When my kid came out of the store, I started to recount that mind-blowing event, but then realized that she may not know the meaning of the word bong. She knew. Thank you, O-e School District for taking care of that awkward conversation!

San Francisco is beautiful city, with many different faces, amazing food of a mind-blowing variety, endless number of things to do, enough weather changes to keep an army of meteorologists busy, and more homeless people than an average resident of Midwest will encounter in a lifetime. My only advice is that if you are not in the greatest of shapes, visiting the Crookedest Street in the World is better done on a bus. It’s not that exciting and you almost need a  Sherpa to get up on the damn hill. If you have time, check out SF Playhouse, we really enjoyed My Fair Lady, much better choice than a magician we originally set out to see.

And now we move to the visual part of this post.

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In calendar years I am 38 but just like the dog years go by much faster then the human years, I think I am much older then an average American born in 1969. To prove that, I will list a few items that I and my parents used in our everyday life that were not antique, just normal things you could find in an average household, and then we will see what age group will admit to knowing what these are:
1. Calculating aids.

The Slide Rule. In the movie Apollo 13 when the spacecraft was in trouble bunch of geeky-looking engineers whipped out these little secret weapons. Some people can still beat a computer with this thing, if not in speed then in physical strength. I actually learned slide rule use in school and used it for a period of time. We didn’t have calculators, I think I got my first one in the 8th grade.

My Mom was an accountant and she used abacus at work. Some people could do miracles with this things. Try to multiply two numbers using the abacus and you will know what I mean.
Lastly, to finish this high-tech roundup I’d like to mention trigonometric tables. In the absence of calculators to find values of trigonometric functions, squares, square roots, logarithms and other math calculations we had to page through these tables. It wasn’t hard to do but sure makes you appreciate your little scientific calculator.
2.Reel-to-reel tape player. This is the exact model that we owned. My Dad purchased it when I
started talking to record my first words. This player worked fine for the next 22 years and probably long after we left it to somebody. It was very heavy but I remember dragging it around town to record music from friends’ tapes and records. This is how music was downloaded in my time. Get some tape, bring your recorder to a friend’s house, wait for a couple of hours while it’s recording, lug your player back home.

3. Color TV. In 1976 or 77 my Dad bought our first color TV. It was still a rarity. This TV was extremely heavy and had vacuum tubes inside. There was no cable, just 3 over-the-air channels and no one even knew what the remote control looked like. You could always tell that TV was on by glowing tubes inside.

4.Drafting Board. Before the AutoCad drafters stood in front of these and actually drafted. I had a drafting class in the technical school and my uncle let me use his board for some time. For those who don’t know, drafting is hard and tedious and I always sucked at it. That was the main reason why I chose to study electrical engineering – electrical drawings can be done with template. Until you drew a gear in 3-d with a quarter cut out you don’t know what pain is.

5. Kerosene Burner. My Grandma actually used this to cook. She lived in the rural area and when propane wasn’t delivered she fired up one of those. It was smelly but it did what it was supposed to.

6. Transistor radio. This is the exact model we had. The writing on it said “50 years if the Great October Revolution” so it was made in 1967. I mentioned before how we (and the rest of the country) listened to Western Short Wave Stations to get real news and happenings in the world. There were even shows with banned rock-music. The strange ting was that they kept making these radios and then had to scramble radio transmissions.

7. Our first washer.This was just a plastic tub with an electric agitator. The process was simple:heat the water in the bucket on the stove, dump it into the washer, put the clothes in, turn on. When the timer went off you had to manually empty it with the attached hose, repeat the process to rinse, then wring out the laundry and hang it outside to dry. Still, it was a miracle machine.

So how old am I?

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This set of photos is interesting in a sense that when I was growing up® nothing like this was left in existence in the majority of the country. The stores were stocked with a scarce selection of products and no need for visual advertising remained:anything that was slightly above the horrible level of the Soviet consumer products was swept off the shelves without hesitation; many times the lines were so long that people in the end didn’t know what was being sold, they figured anything worth buying will find some use at home or would be appreciated by other family members. Sometimes after hours in line, the supplies ran out and disappointed people were off to try their luck elsewhere.
With empty shelves, long lines and sad-looking products around me, it was hard to believe my parents’ stories about many things being plentiful in the  late 50’s and 60’s. Grocery stores filled with caviar and various delicacies seemed impossible to me. Not that I was deprived of  good food and dressed in garb; we had more or less of everything from good food to decent clothing but most of it wasn’t purchased in the regular retail establishments. From black market to bribery, there were other ways to acquire things.

Note: the prices you see on some storefronts are in pre-1961 rubles, in 1961 they were exchanged 10 to 1.

I guess I got carried away a little. To be continued.

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One sure-fire way not to sell me a food item is to lace it with unwanted vitamins and minerals. I don’t need “fortified” this and “enriched” that. I am not in imminent danger of scurvy, I don’t suffer from bone density problems, and if I am to believe the labels I eat so many times over my “recommended daily dose” of multiple vitamins and minerals that I should be (pardon) crapping straight One-A-Days. Popularity of certain food supplements varies every year and there are plenty of studies on the subject disproving each other’s findings. I eat plenty of fruits, vegetables, fish, eggs, meat, etc. and vitamin deficiency has never been a problem. With that in mind, when I go to the store, I avoid anything with additional supplements just because I didn’t ask to improve my food; there are plenty of unknown weird substances in my food already and don’t feel like I need to add to the list.

Homey don’t eat that crap!

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All the talk about Pi Day made me think that I hadn’t had an apple pie for some time. Couple of hours later the situation had been rectified.
Pie crust by Mrs. Smith recipe by Kraft.
Chimpo, I ate this pie so you don’t have to. Stay on track, fatso!

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