Readers, we have reached week 27 of this 52 week blog challenge–we are officially on the downhill slide. The prompt this week is to talk about gadgets I can’t live without.

If we are being very literal, then I can’t live without my air conditioning (and central air is even better) and my thyroid pill. But that’s being a bit drastic, so let’s look at gadgets that I think are pretty cool to have around.

There are times I have lived without many of the gadgets people take for granted these days. I grew up on a farm with one black & white television that got ONE channel. Most farm kids got at least 2 channels and sometimes PBS if the wind blew right if their parents didn’t pay for cable TV, but a storm knocked our outside antenna wonky and no one wanted to crawl up that rickety pole to figure it out. When I was newly married and then newly divorced, we were broke and also couldn’t pay for cable, so we settled for the free channels. My kids were raised on PBS (Lawrence Welk and Sesame Street) and a lot of VHS videos. Now we have a smart TV with a voice-activated remote, and I think that is just pretty nifty.

More often than not, I have not had a dishwasher. For awhile, the dishwasher I had needed to be hooked up to the kitchen faucet each time, so I would wheel it out of its corner in the kitchen and hook it up and let it do its thing. It smelled like burning soap every time, but it sure beat doing dishes by hand.

We have also had times without an electric washing machine and dryer and my mom had to pull out the wringer washer. These days she feels pretty confident that she won’t need to resort to such drastic measures, so the wringer washer is cleverly disguised as a flower bed.

But we still have it.

Just in case.

Side note while we are talking about dishwashers and washing machines–I really like the pods phenomenon. Premeasured dishwashing tabs and laundry pods are the bee’s knees, man. They are lightweight and I don’t have to deal with bulky bottles and boxes that spill and make a mess. As a person with rheumatoid arthritis, I give pods 2 thumbs up.

Running water is nice. I have lived without that, too. When the boys and I were post-divorce, the house we rented had the pipes freeze up one winter. All I had was a very small drip from the kitchen sink, so I would boil water on the stove and then add that to a round metal washtub from a pot that filled up one trickle at a time and bathe them. When I was growing up on the farm, we had a well with an electric pump. If there was no water in the cistern, we had to walk about 50-75 feet from the house to a pole by the butchering shack and flip a switch and then go back in the house and wait for the water to fill back up.

Gotta admit I am pretty partial to having a cell phone. First one I used was a bag phone that I borrowed from my parents when I was commuting 90 minutes one way for my first teaching job. I still remember plunking the big magnetic antenna onto the roof of the car and then dialing my parents’ home to tell them they were about to be grandparents for the first time. Cordless phones are also nice. My first son was born via c-section, and leaping up to answer the wall phone was agony, so I used the money from the baby shower to buy a cordless phone to put next to my recliner. Now I keep my smartphone with me at all times to stay connected to the outside world. It is a mini computer in my pocket.

Speaking of computers, I resisted the dark side for many years. My brother had a computer when he was in junior high, but I stuck to my paper books. He moved in with me during college and brought along his computer setup, but I stubbornly kept writing all of my reports on my electric typewriter (and sometimes my mom’s manual one). My senior year he finally convinced me to use his computer to write a research paper–I forgot to save (even though he reminded me religiously) and promptly lost 74 pages of work and had to start over. I was seething, but I persevered and eventually got the hang of using word processors. Had to take out a loan for my first computer for nearly $2,000.00 so I am glad prices have come down. I have owned exactly one laptop so far–bought it in 2011 so I could work on my several works-in-progress. My WIP are still very unfinished and that laptop takes a solid 30-60 minutes to get itself up and running every time I turn it on, so I use a desktop computer for now. I’ve saved my WIP to my Google drive in case I get a hankering to dust them off. One of these days I’ll actually finish a NaNoWriMo challenge.

Y’know what’s a slick gadget in the kitchen?

These suckers are slicker than snot when it comes to getting apples ready for fried apples or apple pies or apple cobbler. Yes, I can do it just fine with a paring knife, but these really speed up the process.

When my kids were babies, I swore by this high chair:

It strapped onto a regular kitchen chair so the kids could eat with the rest of the family at the table, and it also sat on the floor so the kids could crawl into it themselves and be independent. It folded up quite compactly and could be taken along when we visited friends and family so they didn’t have to worry about having a high chair handy. And the best part–it was dishwasher safe!

OK, I have probably rambled on long enough today. Technology and convenience items are amazing these days. 10/10 very much recommend.