Now look, this typewriter is certainly older than me, I get that.

But still,  not that much older. And we’ve gone from communicating with this clunking, stumping machine that has “Noiseless” in gold letters on it’s front, to gadgets like an iPad, in such a ridiculously short time frame.  Wasn’t it just yesterday that I used to type telexes? For heaven’s sakes. Telexes?!

I use my NOT-At-All-Noiseless Remington to address any envelopes I send out.  Most of them end up looking like they’re some sort of ransom note because it has this odd behaviour of inserting extra spaces between random letters.

If I don’t pay strict attention, the street or name or city will have little stuttering skips in its lettering.  I have to type with my two index fingers. This is not because I’m a lousy typist, but because those keys need to be pounded in order for anything to happen. Those women in the secretarial pools of yore must have had bionic digits.

I sent out one of those ransom-looking envelopes today. It went off to Arizona Tourism and had all my tear sheets from my recent story that ran in the Travel Writers’ Tales syndication. The circulation for all those newspapers is just under 274,000.  This is a good thing.

And I tricked myself into writing in yet another coffee shop today. This too was good.

And I worked on some serious stretching and threw in a few weights for good measure. It’s getting closer to the cycling season and I need to get ready. This July we’re cycling Jasper to Banff on the Icefields Parkway.  But first, there’s the trip on the Sunshine Coast in early June….while I’m still 49. And holding. That’s sort of a pretend-good thing, because we know that 49 is not going to last much longer.

Whatever. Retro-Schmetro. Just hand me the ibuprofen.