Modern Technology is advancing so quickly these days that I'm afraid I'll be outmoded before I get home  That little saying, "the hurrier I go, the behinder I get" truly describes the aging process once you reacy thirty.

There’s no excuse for not being able to see well anymore, short of a busted eyeball.  Lasik surgeries are performed in the doctor’s office now and you’re only out of commission for a few years that day.

My Better Half had cancer (melanoma) and has to have checkups every six months for the next twenty years.  The checkup involves donation of about an acre of blood and X-rays.  The nurses draw the blood, slap some on a slide and stick it into a computer, which READS THE BLOOD to determine whether or not there are any cancerous cells present.  Even 10 years ago, the tests results would have taken at least two days.  Now we can figure out before we leave the office at which restaurant we want to celebrate the “still cancer free” diagnosis!

Ten years ago, I played phone tag with secretaries.  Now, I play voice mail tag.  Not as personal, but I don’t get caught up in asking how the secretary’s pet is doing or when the next child is going to graduate, ‘cause I usually don’t talk to her.  I’ll have to finish each of those live soap operas in my next life.

In cold weather you layer clothing instead of wearing that huge coat.  Even layering doesn’t work when you live in Montana.  For one of our last trips to the great outdoors, we found a new gimmick on the market, called “hand-warmers.”  They are bags of chemical compounds, which when mixed together (massage the bags to mix the contents together), the contents become “warm” to the touch.  Poke one of these “warmers” into your pockets with your hands and stay warmer than you had been. I placed one in each back pants pocket and presto!  Warm buns!  Same technique that grandma used back in the old days.  She’d heat a brick in the fireplace, wrap it in a towel and place it at the foot of the bed under the cold covers.   When you climbed into bed, toasty tootsies.  The only difference is that you can’t find a grandma around when you need one, so these little bags of chemicals partially take the place.

The greatest insult to my intelligence and wallet comes from X-Box and Playstation in the forms of those video game pieces of junk.  We now have $3 gazillion dollars worth of video equipment that, admittedly, is the latest thing in terms of video game-dom with three-dimensional characters and cars, but includes the premium prices in terms of it’s-new-it-just-came-out-let’s-charge-top-dollar-for-the-novelty-of-the-stuff.  I would have preferred waiting until the prices came down below the platinum-priced ceiling.

Ten years ago a Compaq Presario with 486, 55 MHZ, 8mb RAM, 500 MB Hard Drive, 8X CD-ROM, etc., all the bells and whistles, cost only $1300.  Technological advancements have leap-frogged so quickly over my ailing purse, that this brilliant computer system for which we paid so much and bally-hooed over for so long, is only good as a boat anchor.  Now you can get a bigger, better, more whiz-bang computer system with a Pentium IV processor, 100 Gigabyte Hard Drive, 526mb RAM, 1.0GHz, etc. for $100 less than what we paid for the whizbang stuff.   And that’s for a name brand system, not one put together by Joe Bloe’s Antique Collectibles and Computer Ranch Emporium.  I’m sick.

            Better Half has come up with the exact term to describe how we feel.   He said “Dizzywhompus” just about covers it.

            He’s right.  I feel “dizzywhompus"-ed.