Kids these days will never know….

Double Gator Dad

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We still have to do that at my son's school. However it's a private school where they still do things that public schools no longer do so who knows. He's in 4th grade and they were only allowed to write in cursive this year. 4th grade boys don't have the neatest cursive handwriting so every time I would ask him what a word was I got questioned on if I even knew how to read cursive.

It’s nice to know that there’s at least one place in America left where a kid can get a proper education.

They should do a documentary or something so the young parents out there can see what it was like back in the day.
 

Double Gator Dad

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Mrs G didn’t have lightning bugs/fire flies in her neighborhood growing up - too close to the Gulf maybe? Anyway, when it gets warm enough where we live in Ga. the woods behind our house fill up with them and she gets excited like a little kid. She used to be that way about snow until a few winters in DC cured her of that.

I hadn’t seen a lightning bug (I have no idea what a firefly is) in nearly thirty years before we moved back to Gainesville in 2018.
Now I see a few of them every year and it’s a wonderful flashback to life in Florida in the sixties and seventies.
 

secgator

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I hadn’t seen a lightning bug (I have no idea what a firefly is) in nearly thirty years before we moved back to Gainesville in 2018.
Now I see a few of them every year and it’s a wonderful flashback to life in Florida in the sixties and seventies.
In a similar vein, when I was a kid playing everywhere--the street, all over the neighborhood, in the woods building forts and such...we used to see horned toads everywhere you looked when out in the woods and often in the yards in the neighborhood. I haven't seen a single horned toad in decades.....anywhere. Granted, it isn't often I get a chance to play in the woods(duh) so that would limit any exposure to seeing them, but I have spent many a day in the past long after giving up "playing" while crossing the dunes at all the beaches to go surf fishing, etc. STILL never saw one. And they used to be all over the beach roaming around the sea oats and grasses on the dunes distanced from the tide lines. Used to be when crossing the dunes to get to the actual beach, you could count on seeing 40-50 during that 10 minute trek as they scurried around everywhere. I have to wonder where they went or what happened. Did they really diminish in numbers or has my lack of being in their environment been the main reason?

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secgator

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Funny story about Y2K. Everyone remembers the horror stories(rumors) floating around leading up to Y2K....planes falling out of the sky, all computers locking up, etc, etc. One night while traveling I was at a Holiday Inn in Opelika, AL and met a guy at the bar who was in town to give a presentation to the engineering dept at Auburn. He and I got to talking and he said the past 2 years at his job in Denver, their entire workload was researching just what would or could go wrong--if anything, at midnight Dec 31, 1999 or 12:00 am Jan 1, 2000--take your pick. He said it was 2 years of exhaustive work because he and his team of 24 other engineers had to look at every known, conceivable possibility....and then consider the unknowns.

Their conclusion finally determined very little issues would happen. Minor things such as internal clocks in some instruments built 20-30 years earlier that didn't consider those instruments would even be around in the year 2000, but easy fixes--just replace them and go on. He did say his team found one problem which would indeed be affected by Y2K. It seemed the Jeep Grand Cherokee built in certain years(like 1992-1995 or something like that) had a censor in the car's computer that could tell when your oil had been changed based on the dipstick. Something really off the wall like that. The problem would be at midnight when the clock rolled over, none of those Jeeps would be able to be started because the computer would be fooled into thinking the oil had not been changed for at least 100 years. The computer would lock out the sequence to allow starting. That's it....a Jeep that wouldn't start. I asked him what they determined the fix was and he said after Jeep was notified of the problem, Jeep was going to send out notices to all owners of that style for those years telling them their car would not start on Jan 1, and all they needed to do was pull out the dipstick....reinsert dipstick....and then turn the key. THAT was the fix for the only known real problem for Y2K. Pull out your dipstick. :lol2:
 

wrpgator

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This sort of pertains.....when I was young, we NEVER had ginger ale in the house. The only times, and I mean only times we ever had it was when someone got sick.
Yes ginger ale when we were sick and one cup of it on New Years eve before our 7:30 bedtime.
 

Spurffelbow833

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firefly.jpg
I hadn't seen those since I left Texas when I was four years old. Then one night in June a few years ago, they were swarming outside the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, where I had stopped during a vacation trip to visit the place where Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson played their last concert.
 

Spurffelbow833

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"Odd Rods" bubble gum stickers! I covered my notebooks with these things.

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As you can see, some of these things might get you expelled from school today.

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secgator

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"Odd Rods" bubble gum stickers! I covered my notebooks with these things.

View attachment 57990

As you can see, some of these things might get you expelled from school today.

View attachment 57989
I cannot believe you found these. I actually had the bottom two--had others but can't recall, but these two here--especially the Witch Doctor brought back IMMEDIATELY the packaging, the smell of the gum, the friggin taste of the gum....everything to do with it. Amazing--have not thought of this in ages at all. You post this and bam. Everything came back as if it were yesterday. :fistbump:
 
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Treebeard

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Third quarter cup fights at the Swamp - before it was the Swamp!

These cups aren't old enough to have participated but the closest I could find to stadium cups.

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