February 19, 2007<\/p>\n
This afternoon, I listened to part of an audio cassette recorded by my paternal grandparents over 30 years ago. Does anybody remember audio cassettes<\/strong><\/a>? On the great technology timeline, they fall between 8-tracks (even I’m too young to really be familiar with those) and CDs.<\/p>\n My immediate family lived in the Puget Sound area of Washington state while my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins lived in other parts of the country. During the 1960s and ’70s, long distance telephone calls were deemed “too expensive” so the family\u2014<\/font>maternal side as well as paternal\u2014<\/font>kept in touch by recording cassettes and mailing them to each other. (Nowadays, those of us who keep in touch do so mainly through e-mail.)<\/p>\n In the early ’70s, blank cassettes cost approximately one dollar and family members could ramble on for 30, 60, or 90 minutes. How do I know how much they cost? I have a small stack of family cassettes, one of which has a price sticker on the case. I don’t know if cassettes actually were less expensive than long distance calls, but they certainly were perceived as being cheaper. I don’t have any of my parents’ old phone bills, so I can’t do a cost comparison. A year or so ago, I could have done one\u2014I shredded tons of old bills and other paperwork that belonged to my parents, and “tons” is probably literal. Some of the bills were dated as far back as the ’60s, though most were from the mid-’80s and later.<\/p>\n But I digress.<\/p>\n The cassette I listened to was recorded in December 1972, with grandma talking about the gifts she and grandpa received that Christmas. Among grandma’s presents was a variety of greeting cards. She commented, “They are so pretty, and have such nice verses. So often, cards don’t have nice verses.”<\/p>\n So that’s <\/em>where I get that!<\/p>\n I often get frustrated when choosing paper greeting cards. I find cards with lovely graphics and sappy sentiments or awful attempts at poetry, or cards with decent verses and not-so-great graphics. Sometimes I buy multiple cards and sort of combine them\u2014I’ll get one with a well-crafted message that I then transfer to a “blank,” well-designed card. (For some reason, e-cards<\/strong><\/a> are less of a problem. Maybe “online” inherently means “easier”?)<\/p>\n Anyway, now I know that this particular nitpicking is inherited.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" February 19, 2007 This afternoon, I listened to part of an audio cassette recorded by my paternal grandparents over 30 years ago. Does anybody remember audio cassettes? On the great technology timeline, they fall between 8-tracks (even I’m too young to really be familiar with those) and CDs. My immediate family lived in the Puget […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steve.isitfridayyet.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steve.isitfridayyet.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steve.isitfridayyet.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steve.isitfridayyet.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steve.isitfridayyet.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=75"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/steve.isitfridayyet.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steve.isitfridayyet.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=75"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steve.isitfridayyet.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=75"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steve.isitfridayyet.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=75"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}