Today in History: How Far We've Come

Today in 1869, in a remote corner of Utah called Promontory Point, a ceremonial, golden last spike was driven into a rail line to complete the Transcontinental Railroad. For the people of the United States, this service opened, for the first time, access by rail from one coast to the other. People would no longer have to have one or two (or all) of their party die just to get from Ohio to California.

To consider the advancements of technology is mind boggling. Here I sit today in my home office without internet and I wonder how I will get through the day with all I have to do. We ordered a change on our internet service and things didn’t go as planned. So here I sit, with writing obligations and deadlines, and I can’t even access the Web. I had to look inside a real bound book to find out about the golden spike that changed the way people lived 147 years ago. I just had to dig through a drawer to pull out an old calculator to figure out how many years ago that was. (Okay, so I could have used my Accessories in my Programs, but I’m on a kick now to do this the “old fashioned” way. Some might say that "way" would be to use my BRAIN. But that option left me a long time ago.) I had to sort through my dusty CDs to put one in my disc drive (thank God my computer still has one of those) because when I tried to turn on my Pandora station, “this page is not available” reminded me I was offline. And my poor daughter. It’s finals week and she has four more research papers to write. By dinnertime last night, when we realized the UPS man would not be coming with our new modem, we paused for a moment of panic. She will be spending the foreseeable future away from home, someplace with twenty-four hour Wi-Fi.
 
Because I write historical fiction, I always love to consider what life would really be like in a different era. Think for a second of all the technology you’ve used just to get from your bed to where you sit right now today. Compare that with how you’d get by 147 years ago. See if you can do one thing today the “old fashioned” way. Just for the heck of it. For fun, we’ll call today “Old Fashioned Tuesday.” Tell me what you decide to do. And how it goes.
 
Now I have to stop, because I’m going to have to transcribe this all into my phone using my thumbs, and by the end of the last paragraph, they will both probably fall off. Then chopping wood for the dinner fire is going to be really difficult. Happy Old Fashioned Tuesday!