My mother had this in her kitchen in the seventies and early eighties. I think. You know, now I’m not sure. There was another clock in the kitchen in the eighties, a Spartus, that I remember. And, that was taken out in the eighties or early nineties because that stopped working. Okay, so I’m not really sure when, or if, this one was in the kitchen.

At any rate, this is a General Electric clock from the 1970’s featuring a design by Peter Max. It’s pretty neat.

Thanks to Deborah for inspiring today’s retro post. Otherwise, I’m not sure what today’s post would have been. Oh, I would have come up with something, but what?

And below is a high school art project:

It was a 3d sort of thing, using cut-up egg cartons and styrofoam and stuff to make the different layers. We had to photocopy images from magazines. Just black and white copies. Color copies were expensive in those days. Around $2.00 a copy! I chose a “time” theme, with space too. Space-time! You picked a color and selectively colored things. I picked yellow so it was like gold.

You can almost see the “TIME” spelled out along the bottom. It’s easier to see in person than it is in the photo!

Curious. The background almost matches my current blog space-themed background…

Yellow is typically the first to go. Being so light, it fades quickly, taking down the greens with it. Oranges too. In the absence of yellow, brown reddens.

Fortunately, we live in the digital age, where colors never fade. Of course, with new media comes new problems. CDs will last 100 years, remember? Nope. You see, when you burn a CD you are actually burning a chemical layer on the CD, turning the chemical black. So, you have a binary storage method used on the CD. Unburned sections are zeros and burnt sections are ones. But, what happens when those burnt areas begin to fade? Data loss. What was once read as a one is now read as a zero.

Magnetic media is better, but still subject to decay as well as data loss caused by exposure to magnetic fields.

The truth is that some CDs can begin to lose data after a few years.

How can you preserve your precious memories?

Store your most precious images and data files in multiple forms of media. Storage media is relatively cheap these days. Store a copy of your files on a hard drive and another on CDs or DVDs.

Transfer to new media as it becomes available. Check your data periodically. Burn fresh CDs or DVDs from time to time. Store CDs and DVDs in a dark location.

If you have old photos or videos, get them digitized ASAP. Video tapes, like the old VHS ones, have a lifetime of about twenty years, give or take. So, if you have old home videos from the 1990’s and especially the 1980’s, you need to get those digitized now!

You can use commercial services for the transfer or, if you are tech savvy and have a lot of tapes to convert, do it yourself. But be aware that since everything is moving to digital, it’s going to be harder and harder to find equipment that will be able to transfer your old VHS tapes to your computer or DVD.

When scanning your old photos into your computer, scan it in at the highest optical resolution you can. You want to retain as much data as possible. If you scan in at low resolution, which may be a default setting for some scanners especially if they are geared around scanning images for use on the web, the photo may look fine on your screen but won’t look as good when printed and especially so when making enlargements.

If photos are especially important to you, do not throw them away after scanning them in. In a few years, you may be able to afford a newer and better scanner that can scan the photo at an even higher resolution. But, still scan today so that you at least have a copy should something happen to the original.

If your photo collection is entirely digital, you might also want to print out valued images and keep them in a photo album. That way, should anything ever happen to the digital copy, you will still have something.

I’m pulling double-duty in this post, because, not only is this retro material, but also this is Weird Thing About Me #4. (Which, oddly, relates to Weird Things About Me #3, an old tag from Nina a.k.a. SF Girl).

Many moons ago, back in the tenth grade, for one semester, I wore something orange every day. Seriously. I had an orange jacket, orange shirts and orange socks. I had an orange Coca-Cola shirt I liked too. So, my mom bought me this orange material so I could sew myself something out of it.

I never did come up with an idea for what to make out of it. I still have it.

I still have my jean jacket (with leather collar) too, which is like the coolest thing evah, but I digress…

A vintage waffle iron with a note from the future…

Look kids!

Here we have a waffle iron.

Back in the day, this was how we made waffles. That was before you could buy ‘em at the store and cook them in your toaster. Or, take them out of the freezer and put them in the microwave.

Yes, these were good ol’ fashioned waffles, where you mixed the batter yourself, and you knew it was done when you started to smell something burning, then you scraped it off the waffle iron and you considered yourself lucky if you got one that was crispy but still soft in the middle. Of course, the worse case was when the outside was burnt and the inside raw, but that made breakfast like a surprise game! You never knew what you’d get, but you’d smother it with butter and pour on the syrup and gulp it down!

Of course, after four years of Obama, who could afford electricity to run these things anymore? Or flour for the batter? Or eggs? Or milk?

But, the Kool-Aid was good. For a while.