• Black and White? You won't understand if you’re under 40.
• You could hardly see the picture for all the “snow.” Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go and then put this aluminum foil on them.
• Pull a chair up to the TV set. “Good Night, David.” “Good Night, Chet.”
• Remote control? Yeah, for my model airplane.
• “The President’s on! We can’t watch “Batman” tonight!”

• My wise old grandmother used to cut chicken, chop eggs, cut the bread, and mix the tuna and mayonnaise on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning.
• My wise old grandmother used to defrost hamburger on the countertop starting at noon.
• My lunch sandwiches for school were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice-pack coolers. I don’t remember getting food poisoning from E. coli.
• All of us would rather have gone swimming in the lake at the caliche pits instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring).
• "Go outside and play" meant "GET OUT OF THE HOUSE!"
• "GET INSIDE RIGHT NOW!" meant "You've got grass stains on your new pants." Uh-oh.
• "Spring cleaning" meant getting out the Clorox and stainless steel wool and cleaning the mold and mildew out of the showers and bathtubs. Now we sue everyone who visited the house during the past year because we have mold and mildew in our showers and bathtubs.
• A trip to the beach meant fighting the jellyfish and occasionally getting stung. “Be a man and quit crying.”
• A cell phone would have meant that my friend’s dad was calling from jail.
• A pager was the school announcement system telling us that we were too slow on the fire drill.
• We took gym, not PE. We even risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because we know our children today are so much safer.
• Flunking gym was not an option even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.
• Speaking of school, we all said the pledge of allegiance and sang the national anthem. There was no option to remain sitting or leaving the room.
• Staying in detention after school was a proud moment for us, until mom and dad found out.
• We obviously had horribly damaged psyches because of our archaic health care system. Yes, we had school nurses, and they even wore a nurse’s hat and a nurse’s uniform. It took more than the sniffles to get sent home sick.
• I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself. Now kids are proud of themselves because their parents have bought them everything under the sun.
• Being sent to my room was disastrous -- no television with 270 television stations, no computer, no Play Station, no Nintendo, no X-box, no iPod, no DVD player. Just a bed, a chest of drawers, a small closet, and a window. Hours spent standing at the window wishing I could go outside and promising myself I would never be bad again.

• And where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that wasp sting or stepped on yet another 3-inch long mesquite thorn? I could have died!
• I played “king of the hill” on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, or down at the railroad yard, and when I got hurt, my wise old grandmother pulled out the 48-cent bottle of mercurochrome, iodine, or hydrogen peroxide. Then I got my butt spanked. Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 30-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics, and then the parents call the attorneys to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat to such a poor, innocent young child.
• I didn't act up at the neighbor's house because if we did, I got our butt spanked there and then I got my butt spanked again when I got home. Darn telephones.
• I remember when I fell through the glass door at my friend Bob’s house. My stupid mother didn’t know that she could have owned their house with a simple call to her attorney. Instead, I got spanked when I got home for damaging their property. I was a child gone wild.
• Not a single friend of mine knew that he was from a dysfunctional family. Nor did I? How could we possibly have known that? We needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes? We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac! How did we ever survive?

• I’m looking forward to the future so that today’s children can tell us what they had to put up with. I'm sure they'll think they were Superman.

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Some of Russel's other blog entries

1. 12 reasons why I won't comment on your blogs
2. How a Seller can cancel the purchase contract during the home inspection
3. What do you do when the listing agent is, uh, blind maybe?
4. What do you do when deceit is obvious? (chapter two)
5. The garage is not a playground.
6. Need to vent? Feel free to vent (your attic) here.
7. That just ain't the way we do it out here, Sonny Boy
8. Not responsible for advice not taken
9. Sometimes it's just a question of semantics and definitions
10. A true real estate nightmare affecting hundreds of people
11. If the shower head isn't working, just turn up the water pressure
12. I purposefully burned a bridge yesterday
13. What part of that don't you understand? (Reading 101, English 101, & Spanish 101)
14. Out of sight, out of mind, skip the work, charge for it
15. "How much will it cost?" "$399 plus a $100 aggravation surcharge."
16. In a home inspection, if the thing works, the thing works
17. What do you do when deceit is obvious?
18. Sometimes it really is that simple (electric again)
19. Sometimes it really is that simple (attic)
20. Did you put that on the disclosure form? "Oh, we forgot."