my careless contagion

This is one of my favorite things. I enjoy looking back at how awesome and wonderful and sometimes detestable our popular culture was. Care to follow along? Don't care? Okay, square. You can stay home and miss all the fun. Relax with a dizzying dazzle of towels after a hot shower and jump into an even more horrifying bed of patterns guaranteed to make your eyes hurt.  I know this is hard to read, but I have a point to make. Everything in the 70s had a pattern! Even toilet paper! Everything was colorful. And, often, the colors matched everything around it (a design faux pas now). In an era when everything is stainless steel, black, or white, it may seem strange. But it was glorious. For the record, my personal design philosophy (if I'm allowed to have one as a heterosexual male) is minimalistic and clean. Still, there is something endearing in these old designs.  Though the sardines are arranged in a pleasing pattern, this is not endearing. This is horrifying, (oh, but those cu...

My parents in 1984 surveying the house they were having built. I have this memory, but not because I actually remember it. I was too young to remember it, but the story was retold often enough by my mother that it seems like I actually have the memory.  I was very young. It was the mid-1980s. My parents had a house built (which went wildly over budget) in 1984 on Happy Hollow Street in a little town in the Southern Black Hills in South Dakota. Parents raised their kids a little differently then than they do now. There was also the matter of finances, which meant that a babysitter wasn't always possible. My parents had a colleague leave their company and start up a competing business across the street. In order to compete, they were putting in 100 hour weeks, both of them. This continued for years.  My mom didn't want to work, but my dad was the boss and women were working a lot in those days, so he said she should too. She started out as the bookkeeper, setting ty...