Pasgeetos and the old days.

The word of the day is Pasgeeto.  That's what my son told my wife caused us to have to come in off the porch last night, the pasgeetos were biting us.  I remember when I was younger people telling me time speeds up when you get older.  It's true. One day I am at Pay and Tote throwing quarters into Pac Man, the next I'm a 40 something man with three kids.  I practically grew up inside Hurley's grocery store where my dad worked for years.  I still dream about that place, I liked it so much better as a grocery store than a funeral home.  I still have the glue taste in my mouth from all the green stamps I licked to put in books.  We had our green stamps saved in cigar boxes, and it was a magical time when we actually got to get something with them.  I also used to make money from Coke.  If I walked the bottles back to the store I got to keep the deposit.  On Saturday mornings when Coke was running contests, I would get up early to be there when the Coke man emptied the bottle caps.  I would then bring my sack full of caps home, wash them, then spend all day peeling off the inside to see what I had won.  I actually made some good money off of that a couple of times.  Saturday morning was cartoon day, and that wasn't all day.  We were expected to go out and play after cartoons went off, and we didn't mind because there wasn't much to do inside anyway.  I don't know if kids today even know how to relax, with video games, cell phones, and nine million channels on TV.  I will always think back to those simpler days, but reality is time marches on.  Here's to making every moment count, and to count each moment as a blessing.