Look How Far I've Come

While my computer-genius hubby-to-be and I were dating, he once tried to explain what the Internet was. I really didn't get it.

You can't blame me; almost no one understood it back then, and the only people I knew who owned e-mail addresses were computer software students like my fiance.

Why in the world would I ever need to go online or have an e-mail address?

(That sentence now is pretty laughable. Hahaahaaaa! The internet is almost another appendage for me now.)

Honey sat me down in a BYU computer science lab and found a site across the ocean in Finland (he knew I had ties there, of course), and we looked up something on it. It kind of blew my mind that this computer was talking to one on another continent. (Okay, so that concept still blows my mind.) The process took a lot longer than it would today, since it consisted of that "beep-beep-beep-beep-WAAAAAH!" of dial-up.

"You can find almost anything on the Internet," honey told me. (How much truer that is today!)

"Like what?" I asked.

"Like . . . anything," he said.

"Like what?" I pressed, figuring he meant things that only scientists would understand or care about .

"Give me something to look up."

I still didn't get it, but I tried to do my part. "Okay. How about L. M. Montgomery."

(I know how shocked you all are that she's the first thing that popped into my head.)

What we found exactly, I don't remember, but I do recall seeing it and going, "Oh! I get it! So you can look up stuff! Cool!"

What can I say? I'm a slow learner.

I've since gone on to be very comfortable online. Probably too comfortable, judging by how much time I spend there. I've done research, "met" people via blogging, and found great writing support, among many, many other things. (Like avoiding holiday crowds. Yay for online shopping!)

Once, some time ago, hubby and I instant messaged while he was at work, and he was mighty impressed when I used an acronym like LOL. Yes, his wife had learned a few things. But it didn't stop there. Oh, no.

A few weeks ago I bought a jumbo box of Bagel Bites from Costco. (Okay, so I know they're atrocious health-wise. But it was part of maintaining my summer sanity. Deal with it.) The freezer was a bit too full, so I took the packets out of the box to help squeeze it all in so the door would close.

Usually when I do this, I make sure to rip off the heating instructions from the box or at least make a note with a Sharpie on how hot and how long to bake something. This time I neglected to do either. Whoops.

When I went to cook up a batch some time later, I grimaced. Dang. No instructions. I could probably guess, but I'm not the sharpest knife of the chef's drawer, and I didn't want to mess it up.

The solution came to me almost immediately.

I bet I can find the instructions online.

Seconds later, I was at my computer, searching for "Bagel Bites heating instructions."

Of course I found them.

I'm sure back in the Stone Age when we were dating, they wouldn't have been there. But searching online for such a thing wouldn't have crossed my mind, either.

The Internet and I . . . we've both come a long way, baby.

Scary when I'm relying on it for how long to cook dinner.