Thursday Thirteen

1. It almost happened. I almost missed my first Thursday 13 in over 600 weeks. But here I am! And it's still Thursday.

2. My morning started out badly and went rolling on down the hill from there. What happened? Nothing, really - nothing earth-shattering. Just a lot of stress. And I still have a blood clot in my leg, darn it.

3. I was thinking about quality earlier, when I was making the bed. My bedroom furniture is not yet an antique - we've had it about 25 years - but it is well-made. It was made by Virginia House before it became one of the piece mill furniture makers in the area. At the time it made quality furniture. You can see the dovetails in the drawers. No staples.

4. Today, antiques have little value. Nobody wants the old furniture from grandma and grandpa. They want the stuff they have to put together that comes from Walmart.

5. I was thinking about this change of attitude, remembering how when I was a young girl there was a store that had wonderful items, located near where WDBJ7 is now, called Best's or something like that (someone correct me if you remember that store). It had upscale items in it, classy stuff. If you wanted nice things, you went to some place like that or Grand Piano. You went to Woolworth's when you wanted cheaper items.

6. Now everything, though, is of Woolworth quality, although Woolworth's doesn't exist anymore and most of that stuff is now purchased at another company whose name also starts with a "W."

7. My first refrigerator, received in 1983, died around 2007. The refrigerator I replaced it with lasted about 4 years. I'm on my third one now. That first refrigerator was quality. These last two refrigerators? Not so much.

8. My office desk is one of those put-together things, a Sauder (?) brand, I think. It's heavy laminated wood and it weighs several hundred pounds. I could not move it if I had to. It's a corner desk, and my husband put it together for me. One of the drawers is lopsided. It has always been lopsided. It was made that way.

9. I wanted a really nice desk, but we couldn't afford it at the time. This desk may have been cheap, and not well-made, but has held up. I think we bought it around 1998. So it's 21 years old. (Dang, I feel positively ancient!)

10. This is the result of a throw-away society, where things aren't made to last, where nothing is good unless it is new. I wonder, though, if another generation will come to appreciate the ever-lasting nature of some of the old goods. Will they wish, at some point, that they had grandma's feather bed? (But not the feathers, of course.)

11. Economists and others call this "planned obsolescence" and the technology industry has perfected it. Why else must we purchase a new computer every three-five years?

12. Planned obsolescence has been around since the beginning of the 20th century, alas. It started with the light bulb.

13. After all, if my refrigerator from 1983 was still working, I wouldn't have bought two more of them since 2007, now would I?

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Thursday Thirteen is played by lots of people; there is a list here if you want to read other Thursday Thirteens and/or play along. I've been playing for a while and this is my 614th time to do a list of 13 on a Thursday. Or so sayth the Blogger counter, anyway.