Oxlin’s suggestion, from an idea she found on another website, from which she copied the following rules.
1. Each person tells a true story from their own experience. (Obviously, we can’t tell if you’ve made things up. That is between you and your conscience.)
2. Keep it brief; we’re looking for vignettes and koans, not epics
3. Each story has to be linked to a previous anecdote by some shared concept, some common theme or element.
4. Cite the element you’ve used as a link. Try to go for solid links: physical objects, specific words (punning encouraged).
5. This is a multi-stranded string of pearls. A single story can spawn more than one successor, and an anecdote can combine more than one antecedent.
6. Poetry is, of course, encouraged
7. Do I need to mention that this is a non-political thread? If your story is political, try not to make it partisan.
I’ll start.
When my family would go over to our family friend’s house, my brother and I and the kids of the other family would play hide and go seek. Their house had many great nooks and crannies and little spots to hide in. I started taking a flashlight with me so that I could see while getting myself in to the back corner of some of the darker spaces but hide there with the lights all out. Eventually I began to take a book as well as a flashlight so I could read while waiting for them to find me.
This sounds fun! I don’t have a story though, so someone else can start.
1-
Link: Hide-and-go-seek:
A few years ago my dad took me up to some kayak gathering to make tuiliks. There were the D—– kids, another girl, and myself, and we played a really in-depth game of hide-and-go-seek which involved running around the house and changing spots and stuff. At one point I hid with the eldest D—– girl in her closet, which was full of really cool homemade dresses and stuff. The whole trip was really cool because I was able to find something in common with pretty much every one of the kids from eight to fifteen.
I did no actual tuilik making at all. My dad still has the neoprene I was going to use.
Hm, flashlights and reading.
One year, I got a small, two-person tent for my birthday. So I set it up on top of my bed, filled it with pillows and blankets, and slept in it with a flashlight and, of course, books. This went on for over a month, until my parents made me put it away. And it was so cozy, too!
4) link: small, two-person tent
On the way to the wedding of my mothers cousin, we stayed over at the summer house of some friends of my parents. Since they didn’t have room inside the house, we (horsegirl and me) stayed in a tent in the yard. Since we had a big flashlight, we could read until we fell asleep. the next morning, we got up early and played badmiton and watched the squirrels (I’m city kid, and gray squirrels are pretty cool the first few times you see them). We had to leave after that, but that was my first time in a tent outside.
3) Link: home made dresses
When I was in the third grade, our school performed a musical called “Who Killed Humpty?”. It was a cute little play made into a mystery with suspects of who pushed Humpty, made even cuter by the obviously adorable actors. I participated in this play as the minor roll of the King’s Messenger. I was quite embarrassed, however, with the state of my costume, which my mother sowed herself from some old brown cloth. It was, in fact, too large, so it had to be pinned to my person with a belt and several bobby pins.
6- Link: plays and drama.
When I was about six, I joined the Girl Scouts. I generally didn’t like it, as all the other girls were older than me and teased me a lot. Anyhow, one day, we had a troop outing to a performance of A Christmas Carol. This performance had really good special effects and when Jacob Marley’s ghost came on stage, I freaked out and ran into the lobby. I stayed there for the whole rest of the performance.
5) Link: Gray Squirrels
I live in a house with a vast backyard, very near a small forest. We have many animals around (bears, raccoons, squirrels, cats, etc.), most of whom passionately love to eat our compost heap. (Slightly off-topic) Anyway, one day a squirrel came up to our window, which is not entirely unusual. After an hour, it left. A few days later, it was back, looking through the mesh screen of our window. This continued for several weeks. One day, upon arriving home, my mom discovered the screen chewed through and the squirrel inside the house! She chased it out, and got a new screen. We saw the squirrel several more times, but it never reentered the house. (Yet.) Fin.
6) Link: a play
I was in a production of Godspell recently, and most days (Thursdays, Fridays) I didn’t get home until 11 pm.
BUT: On the last Saturday, I stayed up till about 2 in the morning.
On the Sunday the day after, cast/crew went out to a victory dinner, and there I stayed up till about 3 AM…
I have become a night owl…*hopeless*
9) Link- an owl…
When I was five years old, my family and I took a trip up to Michigan’s UP with my cousins. For about three days, we camped out in a small forest setting, and every night the owls would come out and softly hoot us to sleep along with the sounds of a rushing river. This is one of my earliest memories.
Link: staying up till 2 am
I was at a friend’s house for a slumber party. We did a lot of things, among them staying up late. I, the plotter that I am, suggested we play a trick on whoever fell asleep first. I managed to stay awake until 2 am, then conked out. My friends, the good, honest people they are, in some sort of reverence, left me to sleep while they did God knows what into the early hours in the morning. I feel blessed to have such good friends, but really, what did they think I was going to do if they played a trick on me just because it was my idea? I fell asleep first!
*sighs*
9 – Link: theater
Last summer, I went to a theater summer camp. We put on a musical called “The Audition”, in which a bunch of kids try out for Broadway musicals. Some make it, some don’t. I wanted a big part, but there were eighty kids in it, so there weren’t really any big parts. You either had a line or you didn’t. I didn’t. The biggest part I had was coming to the front of the stage briefly during a dance number. Other than that, I was just one of several random background people that were only there to give the impression of people waiting around.
Link: Summertime ordeals
The summer BEFORE last summer, My grandma and I were returning from our relative’s house in Norway. We gave our tearfull, dramatic goodbyes and were maybe a mile away when Grandmommy (Yeah, we all call her that) realized that she forgot her sweater. I found it very amusing, but the best part was yet to come. A few miles later we encountered a cow in the middle of the road, and it JUST WOULD NOT MOVE. After yelling, beeping the horn and generally making noise, Gramma had to push the cow out of the road. I later recorded the incident in both an English and a Japanese assignment.
12: Link- Theater summer camp.
Last summer, I went to Camp Scherman’s (Camp Scherman is GSOC’s summer camp-don’t snip!) older girl drama unit, “Theater in the Woods.” We had to write our own play, dig out the right costumes for it, make the sets, and perform. Really fun. I was the whiner brat who was amazingly spoiled and wore these awesome white cowgirl boots, a gauzy purple poncho, a skirt that looked like Fiddler’s at her last Kokon, and a pastel pink long sleeved blouse. My hair was in two pigtails. The play was about a rapper, a valley girl, a brat (me!), and an opera singer foiling the director’s plot to kick them out of the production. At one point, my character found out she was going to be in a theater play, and I yelled out at the audience: “I’m going a fairy princess ballerina veternarian teacher when i grow up! I don’t NEED any experience in showbiz!” After the show, the valley girl came up to me and said, “Hey Zinc, a girl just came up to me and said that when you said that line-” “‘I’m going a fairy princess ballerina veternarian teacher when i grow up! I don’t NEED any experience in showbiz!’?” I suplied. “Yes, that one,” she said, nodding. “The girl said that when you were saying that line, it was a great idea for me to hide my face in my hands and look ashamed.” “Yeah, but that was an ad lib!” I remarked, confused. “The girl didn’t think so. You said it so well that she thought it wasn’t! And the hiding my face in my hands part- I was cracking up!”
That was great.
12 – Link: theatre
My fourth grade music class put on a play back in 2004, on the bicentennial of the beginning of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The play was, obviously, about that topic. I played Charbonneau, “ze clumsy guide and interpreter”. I was the comic relief, and a pretty big hit. Since then, however, I have participated in exactly zero plays or musicals.
11-
Link: Slumber party:
When I was eleven, I had a Best Friend. We hung out all the time, and in fact it was she who cured me of fear of sleeping over at someone else’s house. We had slumber parties all the time, at which we would don long, old-fashioned nightgowns and drink tea and wander around the house making up heavily Secret-Garden/A-Series-of-Unfortunate-Events stories. Then she moved to a different town and started middle school and wore makeup and liked guys and went to football games, and then she moved to Oregon to live with her dad, and the last I heard of her she’d been making “bad choices” and got put in foster care.
7, 13 – Link: Girl Scouts and summertime ordeals
I went to Camp L——- a few years ago for Girl Scouts, and it was simply awful. A horrid first-time sleep-away camp experience: the toilet overflowed, out counselor went to check it out, slipped, and hurt her beck so we had to get a new counselor. Then, on the last night, there was a HUGE storm, and we slept in the bathrooms. That put me off sleep-away camps for a while.
7) Link-ghosts
When I was little, I kept imagining that there was a ghost in my attic. It’s very cold up there, and stuffed with old things that nobody uses anymore. Half of it is storage, and the other half is a TV-room. Whenever I was up there, i would keep all of te lights on and either hum, whistle, or sing, because I was sure that making music kept bad ghosts away from you. Sometimes I still do that when I’m up there watching TV.
17 – Link: Toilets overflowing
When I was about 7, there was a pancake fundraiser at the tiny local airport. I went, had my fill of pancakes, and then had to go to the bathroom. Unfortunately for me, the last person who was in there had made it overflow, and water and excrement were everywhere. I was probably scarred for life, but I wouldn’t know.
18) link: ghosts in the attic
My grandma’s house has a big house with huge but dusty, moldy and otherwise undesirable closets. The smallest of them had a twisted, sloppily made face sculpted in clay and glazed a strange shade of blue. I was so scared of it, I was sure that there was a skeleton in that closet. For a while I was scared as can be to even be in Grandmommy’s yard at night! I was also afraid of the spirits that lived in the big plastic jugs in the biggest closet, and the dodo bird in the closet of my mom’s old room- It’s a wonder I wasn’t just afraid of her house!
20) Attics
My house has a rather nice attic. If you aren’t used to hit though you might be startled by the milk jug skeleton that my brother made. He hangs on the wall and is startling to people who aren’t prepared for him. We hang him up outside our house every halloween.
((Can we tell stories we’ve heard from others, but they haven’t actually happened to us?))
7–Link: Girl Scouts
About nine years ago (this is reaching waaay back!) I went to a camp with my troop where you slept in Conestoga wagons instead of tents. The fabric of the wagons was very thin, so you could hear everything that was going on in the next wagon. By midnight, our leader had finally gotten all of us to stop yelling back and forth between the wagons, and it was finally quiet. All of a sudden, though, just as we were about to fall asleep, someone in the next wagon yelled very loudly and argumentatively: “THE BOOGEY MAN DOESN’T FLY!!!”
Needless to say, hysteria reigned for the next hour or so. The next morning it turned out that our assistant leader had gone to the bathroom, and upon her return, told the girls in her wagon that the boogeyman had been up in the corner of the bathroom, watching her. This had prompted the assertion of the Boogeyman’s powers, etc. including his ability to fly or lack thereof. Definitely one of my fondest memories of GS.
Link: Girl Scouts
My girl scout troop is made up of 63 girls from the town and outlying areas. About 30 go camping every year. This year we had so many that the older (8th grade) girls had to sleep in the bunk room down by the mess hall instead of in the infirmary with the 6th and 7th grades. Now becuase the 8th grades were typicaly 8th grades and stayed up too late and tried to sleep in hilarity reigned. I get up early and am energized by lathargic people. The 8th graders trying to sleep in were quickly woken by 7’s on their door, loud “Good Mo-nings!” and ligths being turned on. They ended up throwing icecubes at me, I got a black eye because of one, and hating me forever. But the 6th and 7th graders are cooler anywho.
Link: Throwing ice cubes.
At my friend Hope’s party, she had a tray of ice cubes under some sort of cold dish, and once the dish was eaten, her mom took the dish away. Being sixth graders at the time, somebody found the ice cubes and decided to start the game of putting ice cubes down people’s shirts. This turned into a generally bothering people with ice cubes game, and then a throwing ice cubes game. Someone threw an ice cube at a cake eater, and they threw cake, so naturally it turned into a cake throwing party. No one was left uncovered by cake, and her mom had a heck of a time cleaning up the basement when we all left.
9- Link: crew.
I was working during some sort of gospel choir show, and there wasn’t much to do, so my friend and I went to watch from the light deck.
We picked out interesting people in the audience (a girl wearing cat ears) and choir (a lady wearing what appeared to be a velvet bag), and tried to sing along to a song.
“If you’re happy and you know it…”
Us: “CLAP YOUR HANDS!”
Them: “Say, ‘amen!'”
20: Link- ghosts in the attic.
Every year, I visit my aunt for Christmas in her 110-year-old-house. A few years ago, somebody gave me a Gothic mystery novel as an early gift. I was sitting in the den reading it, all alone when I remembered how my cousins had kidded me about the house being haunted years before. I had also been given a flashlight, so I decided to play “Ghostbuster”. I walked up the stairs to the first landing, then the second floor, then the third landing. The wind was blowing hard outside. I cautiously opened the attic door and looked around. The wind made a scary sound. I freaked out and ran back downstairs.
1- Link: Hide and go seek
We used to have people over at our farm for New Years. One year us kids decided to play hide and go seek. Which is a bit hard in my farmhouse because it doesn’t have a lot of hiding places. I don’t know how old I was, but I would guess about 8. There was a big blue container in the kitchen, that we used to pack clothes and things from the city. None of the adults thought I would fit. I did. needless to say I won the hideand go seek game.
7- Link: girl guides.
Yeah. We got girl guides up here. i was in “Brownines” for a year. It was a waste of my time. All I remember from it? dancing around a plaster toadstool singing the song for the “sprites” group. (spritely sprites we’re on our way, play and laugh and help all day)
25- link: stage crew
In high school my school’s auditorium had a really twisty spiral staircase leading to the light booth. Once you were at the light booth you could either stop and go out into the light booth or continue up the stairs to the cat walk. There was a ladder in the cat walk that led to the roof. It was really lovely to stand out on the roof and look out over the surrounding area. You could see downtown from the roof and quite a lot of the surrounding places. Just sitting up there looking at the night sky is one of my best memories of high school.
Link: Stage Crew
we’re doing this poetry-style.
I watched you from backstage through
the black scrim hiding
me dark and quiet whereas you
out there loud and and bright
and centered as you always are.
I mopped the stage after the show
noticing the scuff marks of your shoes
and smiled as I washed each one away, the way
I wash you from my mind each time part.
27- Link: New Year:
A few years ago, I went and stayed with a long-time friend for the New Year. It was lots of fun; we drank several bottles of sparkling cider and ate Tofurkey and jumped on a trampoline and yelled and shouted and stuff. We also got into the habit of trading books, since we both liked the same kind, and in fact I still have some books from her which I really need to return.
Ghosts and light booths:
When the light is on in the light booth, you can stand on a certain area of the stage and look through the light booth window. Someone at some point realized that there was the silhouette of a person up there. And yet, when one went up into the light booth, you couldn’t see anything! We decided it was a ghost, because our auditorium didn’t have a ghost light, and for a while I was mortally afraid of the light booth. I later realized it was just a splotch of paint and a shadow, but I still believe that the light booth is haunted.
Hmm, the last line of my post should be “each time we part.
((A lot of us here -myself included- do Stage Crew, don’t we?))
29- Link stage crew poems
I wrote this for a college I was applying to they had a page to talk about yourself.
facets of my life
stories written along one side,
mine and those of others’
a book-covered wall
word-worlds to dive into and explore
some comfort me when I feel lost
others have provided many years of entertainment, their pages well worn
writings of mine sit nearby
poems, flown from my pen-nest out into the flat plains of my notebooks
some stories live there too
theatre, backstage, hidden in the shadows of the curtains
occasionally acting, not afraid of the stage lights
but enjoying the shadows and helping with stage crew
finding satisfaction
in the quick creative solutions to all of the rather odd problems that come up backstage.
and in being a loyal one
showing up when asked and being reliable
and trusted with headsets
cross country my thoughts running along beside me
companions
I do not run alone – I run with my thoughts
A relaxed time of thought in practice
But in races I clear my mind and focus on the finish
Singing a song in Spanish to myself, in my head, as I run
link light booths
At the end of my senior year of high school we had painted the walls of the light booth black so it wouldn’t stand out as much during shows. On one of the last days of school we all went up there with the theatre teachers, painted our hands and put our hand prints and initials on the wall.
I’ve written things all over my auditorium. I wrote one of my poems on the wall of the dressing room and on another one of the walls there my friend and I wrote a message to the future theatre kids to keep the dressing room clean.
26) link: freaking out
I remember that almost all the times I’ve ever freaked out were usually when my family was on vacation. Perhaps it’s just the unfamiliar setting, or simply the unexpected. 2 years ago, when we were in Italy, we visited Madrid. In Madrid there are huge crowds, and lot of pick pockets. One day we were touring Madrid’s Duomo. We had just left it and stepped into the ridiculously thick crowd when we walked past a pick pocket. It was one of those pickpockets that attempted to bribe tourists with “free” baubles and then they would steal your stuff. This pickpocket singled me out, most likely because I made the mistake of making eye contact. My family had gotten in single file to easily slip through the crowd and I just happened to be the last in line, so it was easy for the man to cut me off.
“Free! Free!” he insisted, prodding me with worthless ties.
“No!” I said as forcefully as I could muster. “No!”
The crowd was thick around me and I felt trapped between feeling panicked and utterly hopeless as I watched my family walk on without me, not even noticing my absence. I don’t know what I would have done if my dad hadn’t turned his head at that exact moment and shouted at the man. I was very thankful that I’d had the sense to keep my hands tightly on my purse, not that it had anything valuable in it. It shook me, none the less.
link (34) writing on walls
once for church we went skiing at w—- v—— and we stayed in these cabins that had old army bunks or something (they were metal bunk beds with 3 layers) and the walls were unpainted plywood and these cabins were really old (someone had written “class of 1989” on one wall) and so lots of vandalism had accumulated over the years. i spent 25 minutes after lunch one day crossing our dirty words.
16~ Link sleeping over at people’s houses (and the fear of doing so)
). However, I did occasionally spend the night at my Grandma’s house, mostly to get her to stop saying that I never came over, and because I’d never admit that I was afraid of sleeping in a strange house!
when I was younger I used to be afraid of sleeping at other people’s houses too. Partly because I always have a hard time falling asleep, and partly because I used to have to wear pull-ups (because I used to wet the bed
One time I remember in particular because my Cousin Coale was there; he’s the cousin closest in age to me, and we were both outcasts and so banded together. This particular evening we had made plans to wake up in the middle of the night and raid the cookie jar, just to see if we could.
I was sleeping upstairs in a closet (sounds weird, but it was really big and I liked the cozy space) and he was in g’ma’s room, which made it a little more difficult, as well as the fact that my aunt was in the room that my closet was in!
Nonetheless, sometime in the middle of the night I crept down the stairs, tiptoed into g’ma’s room and tried to wake up my cousin, to no avail. He mumbled a bit (g’ma’s a light sleeper) and I fled, tried again, and then decided that I’d not bother raiding the cookie jar by myself, since it wouldn’t be nearly as exciting and I’d feel guilty about not brushing my teeth afterwards, so I went back to bed.
The next day I told Coale that I’d come and tried to wake him up, but he didn’t believe me.
(36) Writing on walls of cabins
One of the times we hiked the Grand Canyon we stayed in the cabins at Phantom Ranch (normally we just stay in the bungalow dorms or camp). I had the bottom bunk. I was lying down with my head at the foot of the bed and someone had written in flourished handwriting something like “When you are stepping out into the void of the unknown faith is knowing you will either be given something firm to stand on or sprout wings and learn to fly” and I remember thinking it was sort of silly.
37- link: sleeping in closets
I once slept in the closet of my great grandaunt’s house. I was a baby though so I don’t really remember it. When I was twelve I had my birthday party at her house. (This was after she’d died and before we’d sold the house.) She lives two hours from my house so me and three friends, my mom, my brother and my brother’s friend drove down to stay overnight there. We played hide and go seek and had an indoor picnic in the dining room (the table had been sold). It was one of my better birthday parties. At another birthday party of mine we painted canvasses and then bound books using the canvasses. I still have mine.
39- Link: sleeping (or trying to) in strange places.
When I was about four, my mother decided to clean all her Tupperware at once, so the cabinet she usually kept it in was empty. I climbed inside the cabinet and shut the door. I pretended I was belowdecks in a sailing ship. My parents didn’t know where I was, so they searched all over the house. When my dad found me, he stuck his head in and asked “Are you going to sleep in there?”
“Nah, it’s not very comfortable.” I said.
Link: Camp
At the end of fifth grade my classmates and I had a graduation trip to a little camp an hour or two away. Good stories include pinecone wars, mad libs and pushing eachother around in handcarts. There were watercolor paints in the cafeteria, so all the girls in my cabin painted pictures and hung them on the walls using whatever method possible (we didn’t have tape) The camp was called ‘warm beach’ but my friend renamed it ‘cold mudflat’
40 – link: ship
When I was at camp two years ago, I got to go canoeing down a river. It was the first time I’d been in any sort of boat. The sun reflecting off the water made it warm and my hands and arms got tired from paddling and we got stuck at one point and had to have someone pull the canoe around, but for some reason it was immensely enjoyable. The water lapping was relaxing and afterward I felt all tired and relaxed and happy. And thirsty. Very thirsty. Then, last summer, at a different camp, we went on a cruise around the lake on which the camp was located, and I felt sea-sick the entire time.
Link: boats and camp
I was at a camp once and one of the activities was sailing. We took our sailboat out and it managed to tip over completely. That was a wet experience.
Since then I took a sailing camp and learned more about sailing.
43- Link: sailing camp
I took a sailing camp two years in a row. The last year, I almost constantly had a song stuck in my head. We were sailing across the lake one day, and I was singing “The House Carpenter,” except that the only line I could remember was “They had been sailing but a short, short while/About two weeks, three or four/When the ship sprang a leak and they were doomed/And they were far away from the shore.” Eventually the girl who I was sailing with asked me to stop.
44- Link: singing sailing
I teach at a sailing club, and one of the things the kids like to do while sail is sing, which leads to all manner of interesting discoveries. 100 bottles is a popular tune, but the funniest one I heard was after the head instructor fell off her bike, because she was riding without using her handlebars. Handlebars, by the Flobots.
This post makes no sense now. Uhm, it’s one of those things that needs background to make it interesting. So I’ll just post it now and hope someone can use it to continue the string.
41- Link: Pinecone Wars.
At my church, there is a large evergreen tree next to the stairs that lead down to the basement. The stairs are very wide. I had a game a few years back with my brothers and our friends where we would make teams on either side of the stairs and hurl pinecones at each other across the gap. Needless to say, we stopped the war whenever somebody was on the stairs.
Sorry, sorta not a string. 38- How many times have you hiked down the Canyon?
Link: Sailing
My favorite memory with anyone at my grandparents lake house is the time E took me sailing. I can’t sail at all but E is amazing at it! But way out in the middle of the lake there is this rock. He found a way to sail up close to it and tie us up. He got in the back to fold up the rudder (that’s the steering wheel thing right?) and suddenly the wind took him. I was supossed to be holding the sail but that was some strong wind. We jumped off the rock a few times and afterwards he realized just how horrible it would have been if I was folding up the rudder( ?) I mean, I don’t even know what it’s really called.
Link: pinecones
In elementary school, I did a science project on birds, trying to tell what time of day birds were most active. I took several pinecones and coated them in peanut butter and bird seed, then hung them outside and watched from inside our house. Unfortunately, my project partly failed, due to the number of squirrels that outnumbered the birds in takers for my sticky creation.
Link: 99 bottles of beer on the wall
And the next fall my sixth grade class had a ‘getting to know you’ camping trip. It was really awfull, but confusingly contained one of the best moments of my life. Anyways, the most memorable story of the trip was when some boys in the back of the return bus started singing ’99 bottles of beer on the wall’ and by 20 everybody on the bus was singing along.
34- link: writing on walls
The bathrooms at my school are shared with K-12th graders and teachers. So I don’t know what possessed someone to scratch the F-word on the wall of one of the stalls.
There are also posters inside the stalls saying “Please place all sanitary napkins in the boxes so we can avoid another back-up. Thanks!” On one of those posters, someone took what looks like a Sharpie and wrote… something that I forget… something like “ILYSFM” or something dumb like that (who would want to be loved so ****ing much?) on all four corners of it. It’s so weird.
Another link to writing on walls:
Someone scratched the alphabet on my music stand in Band. There were also several magnetized pins on it from the Upper School Musical.
Link: school bathrooms
I went back to my elementary school and had to use the bathroom there. Only figures I was in the kindergarden wing. Those bathrooms don’t even have stalls! That was the most embarrasing thing in my life even without people walking in.
Link: Embarrassing school bathroom moments
One of my grade schools was set up so that there would be two classrooms, with two bathrooms in a hallway between them. So you could go through a door, and ahead was the door to the other classroom, and to the left was the girls’ room, the boys’ to the right, or vice-versa, depending on your point of origin.
Anyway, I used to sing in the bathroom, all the time, no matter what. Long story short, I got bored in class one day, went to the bathroom, and came out to find that the entire class heard me. My reaction was something between mortification and “oh yeah I am awesome!”
52- Link: Embarrassing Bathroom Moments.
My elementary school was a very old building where the only way to open the top windows was with these big old poles that hung by the window on hooks. One day in first grade, I noticed that there was a pole for the window in the bathroom, so I took it off the hook, just to see how it felt. The pole was really heavy, so I dropped it with a really loud crashing sound. My teacher understood that I’d only been curious and didn’t get mad at me, but I never went near those poles again.
Link: Embarrassing Bathroom Moments
One time my family was at a museum and both my mom and I had to use the bathroom. I went into a stall and shut the door. It closed kinda funny, so I tried to open it again just to make sure. It was stuck. I told my mom, but she said not to worry about it, she’d help me open it once I was done.
There wasn’t any toilet paper.
So my mom yanked the stall open, and I had to go out of the stall and into another one. It was so embarrassing, even though we were the only ones there, because all the walls were mirrored!
52- Link: grade schools, esp. bathrooms
On the Xploregon trip, we went rafting in Maupin and that night we stayed in the old grade school. There was a biggish room that served as a gym with a stage at one end, which was where we were sleeping. There were also some showers. The girls showered first, then the guys, which meant that the girls got to use the boys’ locker room and vice versa. There were rumors of ghosts and hostile presences and long story short, we decided to hold a seance. Well, about seven of the nine girls were sitting in a circle on the stage, eyes closed, when there was this scream, and we all jumped up and off the stage and to the other end of the gym. Someone had heard something under the stage or something, and in the end we all slept on the floor. I was afraid to go on the stage, where my water bottle was, and I was also too scared to sleep on top of the sleeping bag, so I was horribly hot and thirsty all night.
link: ghosts, grade school bathrooms
It’s a popular legend at my old elementary school that the ghost of (the guy our school is named after) Lives in the attic/girls bathroom. I personaly beleived that he lived in the attic with a friend’s stillborn baby, but gladly attended seance thingy-dingys with my friend Amelia, where we would camp out by the locked up room the plumbing was kept in and offer him stickers and popsicle stick boxes full of fake blood and cobwebs. Yes, this is considered normal at my old school. At the end of 5th grade I was considering painting a spooky message in lemon juice above the bathroom heater just to freak out the junior mediums of the future.
Link: Weird things at elementary school.
At my elementary school, the ventilation was very strange and you could hear people in the cafeteria when you were in the gym.
Link: bathrooms
When I went to Mexico with my church (we were building a house near Tijuana), our campsite had pit toilets, which were basically concrete slabs with a hole in them and a toilet over the said hole. Someone had set Porta Potty-type enclosures over each one, so that you had at least a little privacy. Anyways, one night I had to get up and go to the bathroom. I went in the first “stall”, and while I was sitting there, I realized that there was quite I breeze in the stall. I looked up…and realized that there was no roof! I could see all the stars and constellations with perfect clarity (there was little to no light pollution there). I actually sat there for a good ten minutes, just looking at all the stars. Another one of the many interesting random experiences I had on that trip.
link: constellations
Ever since I was little, my parents always tried to teach me about random things, like constellations. I know the names of most of them and have seen many of them, but my favorite by far is Orion. I absolutely love to look up into the night sky and look for his distinctive belt. In fact, it can be extremely comforting to know that as long as a stay on my hemisphere, I’ll almost always be able to look up in the sky and see that constellation.
Link: bathrooms/locker rooms
When I was 11 I was really into baseball (really!) and I went to Baseball camp at the YMCA. One day we were going to go swimming, so the boys all went to the boy’s locker room with the coach and the male helpers in charge of the huge group of guys. The three girls went to the girl’s locker room with the female helpers. Now, at the YMCA this took place in there are four locker rooms, women’s, men’s, boy’s and girl’s (I don’t know why they thought they had to separate the “kid” and “adult” locker rooms, but whatever). Anyway, the girls were all getting dressed and not talking much, but we could hear the boys on the other side of the wall yelling and lockers banging, it was pretty much chaos over there, and one of the counselors on our side had just said “I wonder where John [the coach] is? Those boys are making a ton of noise!” when we could hear him screaming at the boys “Be quiet, you’re acting like a bunch of animals!!!” It didn’t work though, they were still really loud.
Link: Ghosts
For my birthday I wanted to go spend the night at a French and Indian War period fort the weekend my birthday was on, because they were having a small muster there and some friends would be there. So we made arrangements to stay in the laundry room (my mom and I often portray the fort’s laundresses), but when we got there someone else as there, so we had to spend the night in the other barracks, in the attic in a mostly bare room that had some bed frames stacked in one corner. Mom got that, and I slept in a sleeping bag on the floor (with no cushion under me, either, just a folded up blanket. It wasn’t fun trying to move the next day…)
Mom and I were playing music that night, and naturally the porch outside our room got filled up with people who were attracted by the music, came to see what was going on, met a friend and just stayed there visiting and listening to us play. when the crowd had mostly dispersed except for the people we knew and we were done playing, Tom was about to leave, and then turned back, “Well, goodnight, see you all tomorrow I guess. Sleep tight, just beware of the Hessian, he shouldn’t bother you too much but if you smell cherry smoke he’s just smoking his pipe.” Of course, the reply that he expected was received, “What? Who’s that?”
“Oh, just the ghost that haunts this side of the barracks. he doesn’t bother anyone, but sometimes you can smell his pipe and hear him walking around. Goodnight!” And he left.
Now, I’ve never really believed in ghosts, but the combination of a hard floor, an unusual place, odd sounds and a faint smell of pipe smoke afforded me little sleep that night. I awoke the morning of my sixteenth birthday stiff, cold, hungry and a little more tired than I’d gone to bed.
Link: Orion’s belt
A couple years ago, Saturn was supposed to be especially clear (supposedly you could see the rings through a low-powered telescope) so my friend and I went in her backyard with her fancy-schmancy electric binoculars (they were basically like a double-lensed telescope). We never did find Saturn, but we ended up training them on Orion’s belt, and eventually his sword. It was my turn to look through the binoculars, and all of a sudden, I caught a glimpse of a stunning cluster of pink and blue, in the middle of Orion’s sword. Turns out there’s a star cluster there, known as the Orion nebula, or Star Factory. I just remember being stunned by the beauty of the formation, even through those little binoculars.
Link- Porta Pottie like things
I’ve always been afraid of Porta Potties having snakes and stuff in them. I scares the living begezies out of me.
Link: Ghosts
Okay this requires background knowladge: So at my summer camp it was camp for familys in the depression to live while looking of work. The people in charge of the camp were the Slones- a mother, father, and baby. Every few weeks a job would come up and Mr. Slone would ask one of the men to come with him to where ever it was and Mr. Slone would get him settled. . And one day the heath inspector came to check out the camp on a rutine visit. While at the Slone house he smelled something really bad so he broght in the workers and pulled down a wall and there was a body. turns out the bodies had been used for soup. theySlones were to be arested so they ran away at midnight and left their baby under the house. But before thye could get anywehre they were shot and killed.
Onto my story: This is supposed to be a myth. Even though at the camp they give tours of the place and tehre is actual blood on the walls( I think) and then One night at aobut 11:55 I woke up spontaniously. Then I heard people screaming, a baby cring, and three shots rang out. Everything quieted but the baby which kept on for three or four more hours. I will NEVER forget that.
Link: Orion.
Orion was the first constellation I learned how to find, even before the Big Dipper. It’s my favorite constellation, too, so when I got some glow-in-the-dark stars for my room, I put a few on my wall in the shape of Orion.
Link: elementary school bathrooms
When I was in fifth grade, there was a school fair. It was in the fall, so school had just begun. My mother had been in charge of the fair, so after almost everyone else left, my sister and I were still there hanging around waiting for her. We went into the bathroom, I think to hide from someone, and were playing with one of her prizes, a sticky eyeball-shaped thing, and throwing it at the walls and such. I must have thrown too hard once, because it went up to the ceiling and stuck there. It stayed for two years. I checked every day, then had my sister check once I was at the middle school.
Link: stars
We were staying in some national parks last spring break and we would go and star gaze at night. My favorite constellation is also Orion and as I watched it I saw many shooting stars.
My dad built a telescope and we used it to look at the moon and planets. It was really fun to look through because you could see the craters on the moon and you could see Saturn’s rings. Everything was really detailed. It was really cool.
64~ Link sticky fake eyeballs
We collapsed into giggles and vowed never to forget it.
One time, it was awhile ago, my friend and I somehow got our hands on some gooey, sticky fake eyeballs and were playing with them in the car. We were in the back seat and there was someone following us, so she put both the eyeballs under her glasses and turned around in her seat so the people following us would see a kid with huge eyeballs. It was really funny, I’ll never forget the look on their face.
Link: Orion
Orion is one of my favorite constellations, I often take walks at night and he seems almost like a friend when I look up and see his belt on nights that it’s clear. Sometimes when I’m headed out for a walk I’ll just tell my parents that I’m out to have a conversation with my pal Orion and they understand what I mean.
Link: Porta potties
Okay, I’m ready to take my new nickname as “She Who Twirls in Porta Potties” oh please no!
I have lots and lots of porta pottie stories, but I won’t bore you with them.
A few years ago at Military Through the Ages weekend at Jamestown it was really rainy and miserable the whole week and the new bathrooms hadn’t been completed yet so everyone had to use porta potties. Well, one day was so miserable and cold and wet that when I got a break I ran straight to them, went into the big handicapped one (they’re hard to use when you’re wearing lots of bulky historical clothes, and even worse when it’s wet) and just stood there for a minute enjoying not being rained on. I was so happy I even twirled, since there was enough space.
Link: Bulky Colonial clothes (although not as cool as I assume yours were because you were at Jamestown and participating in a weekend event)
I was in an outdoor play and it had to do with ghosts that suposedly haunt my hometown and/or could if they wished to becuase they died here after all. And so we were in time period clothing. I will never forget the look on the entire resturants faces when I walked in there petticoat and all.
link: porta potties and outhouses
We have an outhouse (like a porta pottie only better because they’re made of wood and smell better) at our cabin (which really isn’t all that fancy. It is on a river, not a lake and its plumbing isn’t drinkable and it doesn’t have insulation. I like it because it is cozy and a great place to read or write. Particularly write. There is a porch surrounding it and a room inside that is heated by a wood burning stove.) It isn’t the most pleasant place but I much prefer it to outhouses because it has a candle in it and matches and little windows and a picture on the door of an old drawing of where my great grandmother and great grandaunt used to live. My family has had the property since 1900 or so and they used to go camping on it. Most of the stuff at the cabin is really old. We have a toaster that doesn’t have slots, instead it has flaps on either side and it is sort of a-shaped. The outlets are really old looking too. It is really neat. You sit there and can hear boats on the river as well as trains across the river. Sometimes we take a boat across the river to the town on the other side which is a nice small town with some good galleries and restaurants.
Link: boats
Last summer, we stayed at KOA’s on our vacation and several of the sites had boating. One day, my sister and I took out a canoe and paddled around the lake. Unfortunately, my sister had control of the boat mostly, being in the front seat and she didn’t exactly know what she was doing. She forced me into the bushes on the side of the lake on accident with the canoe. She thought it was funny, but I was NOT amused. The lake also had big fishies and mini gators.
Link:boats
My church went on a mission trip to Minnesota this year, on an Indian Reservation. However at the end, we went a lakehouse that one of the kid’s parents owned. The kid took us out in his boats (he had several) throughout the day, and I’ve never experienced anything else like it. Sitting at the prow of a sleek gray speedboat, slicing through the water like a shark, with my hair undone and the cool wind in my face, I felt like something out of a Bond movie. I’ll never forget that feeling.
Link: Speedboats.
Once, I went to a beach party with my friends. The beach was sort of rocky, but I didn’t have any water shoes, so I went in barefoot, stepped on a razor clam and started bleeding like crazy. Not fun.
But I cheered up because later, we got to go inner tubing behind a speedboat, which was awesome!
link- rivers, tubing
when i was in tennesee a couple years ago for DI we went tubing down a river in the smoky mountains and my freind k—– was afraid but we finally convinced her that there were no snakes so she went and put on her suit but while we were waiting for her, we saw a snake that had wount it’s tail into the tocks at the bottom of the river and had it’s head sticking out the top. we dodn’t tell her about it. then later, we saw a snake crawling on one of the little islands in the river. then, when we were about 3/4ths of the way through, a snake jmped off a rock into her tube and then swam away. she was really freaked out. and when we were walking to get on the bus to take us to the begninning, we saw a huge dead copperhead. i wihh i had a snake.
Link: Tubing
Last year, the entire 8th grade at my middle school went tubing. My friends and I were in the first group to set off down the river; some other friends were the second group. They caught up to us, and we all sang loudly for the entire trip. Only two girls really knew most of the words and could sing, though, so it ended up being The H and P Show with Back-Up Singers. It was so much fun!
Link: Tubing:
One of my childhood memories is of an event in Northern California. I don’t know which even it was–there were so many–but it must have been near a river, because I remember some people we knew–musicians, in a band the name of which changed at least once–were tubing. We picked them up and they all sat in the back of our huge teal van surrounded by inner tubes. I have a great many memories in rivers–clinging to my dad’s back as he swam across one, playing in the shallows and building dams in a different one, hiding from a deerfly, a cold field trip in the rainy season, where I stood around feeling cold with water running down the sleeves of my raincoat… Northern California rivers are very different from the rivers here, which are cold and deep and opaque. You could always see through the ones in my memories, and they were usually warm and shallow and splashed over rocks. There are precious few rocks here, mostly sandstone, which doesn’t really count. I miss it sometimes, it’s funny.
Link: snake
2 years ago, I use netting to cover my garden. I remember one morning a came to water it and I almost stepped on a black snake who had gotten tangled in the netting. It had slithered through one of the hole and had gotten stuck in it. It had started to thrash and had only gotten more tangled. I remember how aweful it was because it had struggled to the point that the netting was cutting into it’s skin. I ran back up to our house and brought my dad and sister out. Dad grabbed it’s head and I grabbed the main part of it’s body, while my sister took some scissors and cut the netting away, string my string. It was difficult at first, but got easier once the snake stopped struggling. It had realized that there was no escape. It took 2 trys to get it totally out because the first time we let it go, it went the wrong way and got tangled again. The second time, I remember my sister quickly grabbing the tail while my Dad and I held it down and she flung it away into the bushes.
Link: snakes.
Back when I was eight or thereabouts, my dad took theology classes at this place in Pennsilvania. There was a camp near there that I visited with my brothers. I opened a screen door and a garden snake fell out, at my feet. I screamed and feel backwards onto the concrete path and skinned my hands.
Link: Snakes
Snakes and bears have it out for me. but this is about snakes. There is a total of five different occurances where snakes have jumped up in front of me just as I was getting comferatble in my surroundings. The top of the list is the time that I had just gotten used to off road biking and suddenly BAM there’s a snake under my tires. My legs splay out, I svream really loud and thank goodness we were at a straight and flat part or I woulda fell.
Link: Biking/Crashing.
When I was first learning to ride a bike, I couldn’t do it. I think I suffered more scrapes and cuts in those few weeks than I have in the rest of my life. My ever-patient mother encouraged me constantly, took my whining in stride, and sometimes had to physically force me not to jump off my bike and go home. Eventually I learned, of course, and a few years ago I returned to the parking lot where I crashed so many times. My mother was with me. I mounted my bike and did a quick sail up a hill and back down again, reminiscing about old times. When I returned, my mom told me that a woman had come up to her and said, “Is that your daughter, who was learning to ride her bike a long time ago? She’s really improved!”
Link: learning to ride a bike
I remember that my grandfather helped me to learn to ride my bike. He would take me out riding. I would pedal and he would hold onto my back to keep myself steady. We did that for days and days until I got used to it. One day, grandpa went biking with me. I thought he was behind me, holding the bike like he always did. I had ridden for several yards when I heard him laughing and I turned around to see him standing back where we had started. He hadn’t helped me! And that was how I learned. It was kind of amazing!
Link: Cabins/boats
Last summer I was at a cabin that my dad’s family owns on a lake. It’s always fun to go there, because it’s in the woods and really quiet and pretty and, of course, on a lake. This time we had gone up and brought our sailboat, which we hadn’t yet gotten in the water. Anyway, the first day we were there we were trying tofigure out how we would get the boat into the water because the hill at our cabin is very steep and covered in trees, not to mention the fact that our tiny little truck would be dragged into the lake with the weight of the trailer if we attempted to get it in there.
We ended up going over to a public boat ramp and got everything set up without too much trouble. Dad was going to drive the truck back to the cabin and meet mom and I when we sailed the boat back to the cabin so we said bye for the moment, dad pushed us into the water and mom and I waved as we sailed along.
Then we got near the bridge. From the top it was very high and it appeared there would be no trouble getting under, but it was really deep and our boat is weird in that it has a very skinny and tall sail, so the mast wouldn’t fit under the bridge. By the time we were realizing this fact, dad had driven up, stopped and was planning on waving at us as we sailed triumphantly under…..not so. we ended coming about, and being flapped to death while we called up at him that we wouldn’t fit! He was wearing a swimsuit, so he ended up swimming out to us on the boat, helping take town the mast and then paddle our way under the bridge.
It was all horribly exciting for a few minutes while we struggled to get the mast down without capsizing but we eventually got it and the rest of the week went somewhat more smoothly.
Link: Bikes
I don’t really remember when I learned to ride a bike, but I do remember when I got my training wheels off. I hated them because they kept making me tip, so finally dad just took them of for me. I was so excited that I didn’t have them on, because I could go faster without them!
Then later I got a small motorcycle (still have it, in fact) and I remember learning o ride that. I was too small to be able to sit on it with my feet touching the ground, so when I started out I had to rev the engine and run alongside until I could fling myself up onto the seat and ride away. Stopping was a little awkward too, I had to stop and then throw my toothpick of a leg out to keep the ground from coming up and eating me, when I was sitting there balancing the motorcycle under me it was tipped way far over and I couldn’t do it for long because it was too heavy. I think I was about 7 or 8 years old at that point.
Link: Singing during a trip
We always sing during field trips, at least those of us in the back of the bus.
On the trip to Cornell we took earlier this year, we were singing the Pussycat Dolls’ When I Grow Up, and instead of singing “I wanna have boobies” we sang “I wanna have groupies.” Well, Maria was annoyed by this, so she yelled in the middle of the singing, “That’s not what it is, it’s BOOBIES!” Of course, the bus went quiet right then, and Maria was extremely embarrassed.
Link: Bike crashes
When I was younger, 8 or so, and still learning to ride a bike (OK, so I still can’t), I rode right into a chain link fence and my bike smashed into it. So I slid over onto the handlebars, HARD, and fell off the bike. I haven’t ridden a bike since.
Link- Bus singing.
So we all know the “I know a song that…” well, that song. In I think 5th grade we were coming back from a two day camp trip thing and somone started to sing that. Well me and my friend Ted started to uh…protest.
I know a song that gets on everbodies nerves
“SHADUP!”
everybodies nevers
“SHADUP!”
everbodies nerves
“SHADUP!”
you get the picture. ever since when somone sings that song I yell “SHADUP!”
Link: Bus singing
The funnest song that I have ever sang on a long bus trip would be the famous camp song, “An Austrian went Yodeling……” So funny! And we would make up our own verses and everything!
81- Wait, wasn’t the line “I wanna be in movies”?
So where’ everybody? This thread just dropped off the face of the planet!
Link: Snakes.
There have been at least four times when we’ve found a snake or evidence of a snake in our yard (not all at the same house), but the most interesting one is the third. We had a line of big tomato plants along the fence, and one day we found one that had two holes in it, precisely where a snake’s fangs would go. I actually took a photo of it so we could send it to my aunt (the photo, not the snake tomato).
Link: tomatoes
Last summer, our family grew tomatoes. At some points, we had more tomatoes then we know what to do with! However, our Dad is an awesome cook! He can cook anything he puts his mind to! Whenever we had too many tomatoes and they threatened to overwhelm us, he would astound us with different types of tomato sauces, fried tomatoes, tomato casseroles, stuffed tomatoes, etc. It was truly wonderful! His cooking sort of goes in waves. When he hears about something and decides that he wants to make it, he makes it over and over to perfect it. Then, he sort of slows down and doesn’t cook it as often. Right now, he’s experimenting with making his own home-made loaf bread, french style. Oh my. They’re so wonderful. Other waves would include soup (both broth and cream), stew, cornbread, biscuits, scones *YUM*, some sort of baked egg dish (can’t remember what it’s called but certainly yummy), sauces (tomato and cream), chicken on the grill (gosh, he just HAD to create the perfect sauce, I’m not complaining :wink:), pickled eggs, macaroni casseroles, turkey, and custard/pudding, to name several of them.
87- Link: Dads who are good cooks.
My dad loves to cook, and he makes very good steak. When I was younger and Mom was at work, he would cook me dinner and sometimes I would watch Star Trek with him.
Link: dad’s who cook (although not always very well)
My dad’s idea of cooking includes toast, canned beans, spagetti and frozen lima beans. When I was younger we’d be in the barn and get hungry so we’d heat up a can of beans on the KeroSun (it’s a type of heater) in the winter and eat it with plastic utensils we found in the cabinets. They weren’t always the cleanest one could hope for, and we had to watch out for ragged edges on the can because he’d open it with his jacknife. I always though tit was fun because I could imagine myself as a hobo or something like in the books I loved to read then. (I was big on that sort of thing those days. You could barely get me out of my engineer striped overalls and gum soled boots.)
I also remember that a few times when we went to take care of the lake cabin (the one I mentioned previously) that he got those biscuits that come in a can and pop when you break the seal.
I remember more than one meal spent there eating those along with creamed corn and Bush’s beans and maybe some lima beans too.
link- beans
when I was 9 I got a bag of jelly beans for Easter. my mom told me to not eat them all at once so i put them in the cupboard. the next day i went to my friend’s house so i didn’t eat any of them that day. or the next or the next or the next. now here we are almost three years later and guess what i just found in the cupboard…
link: candy that you forget about
When I was younger, my mother would give me a lifesaver sweet storybook. However, I would always forget about them. And suddenly remember them the next summer or something like that. But I would always forget again. To this day, I have rolls of lifesavers that are about 4 years old in my room.
91- Link: Food that is way to old to eat.
My mom was cleaning out the pantry a few months ago and she found some Power Rangers soup that expired in 2004. Yuck!
92- link: food that probably isn’t good for you(okay, that’s not a great connection)
My mom found a staple in the salad. She thought someone was trying to murder her..
92~ link: Expired food
If, you know, you were interested or something.
My room is part pantry for canned foods, both commercial and homemade. sometimes when we’ll be looking for one thing we’ll find a can or jar of something from 10 years ago. The only thing is, of the seal isn’t broken and it’s not discolored it sometimes ends up as dinner.
It is true though that those dates can be exceeded for up to several years with the food remaining perfectly edible. Just make sure there’s no rust on the can or discoloration/weird smells in the food and you’re most likely good to go. So, your soup from 2004 was probably still okay.
Link: expired food.
Sometime after my grandmother died in 1992, we cleaned out a lot of old food from her house. In the freezer we found a package of pecans labeled with a date from the 1950s. Yes, they were older than I was.
95~ I trust you didn’t eat them?
Link: food that’s older than you
At the American History museum (Smithsonian) in the “American’s at War” exhibit you can see George Washington’s camp cookbox (for lack of a better word) with pots, dishes, glasses, etc. including a salt shaker with salt in it. I think a friend of ours actually got to try some of that salt. I think that’s pretty cool, it wouldn’t be spoiled, and it would be neat to try the same salt that George Washington ate, or to see if it was different tasting than the modern brands (even the natural ones).
Of course, I may have also just grossed you all out, in which case my profound apologies.
links theatre ((sorry if this is too far back, just coming in))
2 years ago I was in my high – school’s musical, The Sound of Music, and what was cool was that I was only in fifth grade. I was the naughty, book worm 3rd youngest kid. I can’t spell her name
Link: food expiration date
One time we had a brick of mozzarella cheese that was dated February 29, 2009.
97- Link: High School Musical.
The Middle School in my district did that as a winter play last year and I did spotlights for Stage Crew. Between reading the script and hearing the people sing at three performances and two practices, I learned the songs very well.
Link: High School Musical.
Once upon a time, there was a movie called High School Musical. It had a lot of commercials for it and was popular way beyond its level of goodness. Then a magic fairy came and made a second movie, called High School Musical 2. It had the same plot even though it took place over the summer and was just as hyped. Then the fairy created a third movie, but I didn’t go see it because it was in theaters and I didn’t want to waste eight bucks to see the same story again. Then the Disney stars made a trillion dollars each and lived happily ever after. The end.
96: link: old food.
In my elementary school, we had these frozen strawberry cups in our cafeteria, and we loved em. One day, someone looked at the expiration date and went, “Holy cake! These expired years ago!” I told a teacher, and she said to eat them anyway because they were frozen. So I was the only fifth grader to eat them. (And those strawberries were good.)
101- link: old cafeteria food
At my elementary school, there were packages of carrots that were years old…
102: Yikes.
102 (again): Link: Little packages of carrots.
Yesterday we were eating in front of the bandroom during lunch, and someone spilled some chocolate milk. Then someone poured a bit of lzze in, and we used a package of carrots to direct it into a planter. Twas fun.
102~ Old food (not preserved)
One time I found several bags of cranberries that weren’t refrigerated and had dried up nearly completely. I mean, for perishable foods like that they were ancient, maybe half a year or so. I just threw them away without telling anyone because I know better than to tell mom when food’s gone bad unless I have to. She either has a conniption fit or she fixes it for dinner claiming that “It was in the fridge, it’s fine!”
link: mothers and old food
A can of spagetti sauce went grew mold, and was unedible. Then my mom got mad at everyone for not finishing it.
105~ Wait…….do I have a sibling on MuseBlog that I don’t know about?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?! (I’m an only child, but that’s happened a million times at my house
)
106- That’s… interesting.
link:spaghetti sauce
A jar with about a milliliter of sauce in it stood in our fridge for weeks. And it never went bad. Then we threw it out.
Link: Old stuff in refrigerators.
My scuba instructor Christine used to have a pet lionfish that she named Worf after the Star Trek character. Her husband never liked Worf, possibly because lionfish have poisonous spines.
One winter, Worf died, and Christine wanted to bury him, but she couldn’t because the ground was frozen. So she put Worf in the freezer for a few weeks, but her husband got mad because now he had to see Worf whenever he opened the freezer. So he forced her to throw Worf in the garbage can.
Christine’s husband, however, forgot that Worf was in the trash can after a few days and pressed some old newspapers down into the can while throwing them out. He got pricked on one of Worf’s spines and screamed bloody murder because he was afraid of the poison. (It turned out Worf had been dead so long there wasn’t any poison left.)
109~ That’s hilarious!
Link: Burying pet fish
I had a favorite goldfish named Violet one time, who had beautiful long fins. Then she died and I had to bury her, but I think a raccoon or something dug her up and ate her. I was really sad, because I’d made a little gravestone and all out of a stone and drew a picture of her with a sharpie. (Well, as good of a picture an 8 year old can do.)
Link: Dead fish
I’ve had two fish ever. The first one was named charlie, and he lived for about 2 years. The next fish was lily. We all knew that nothing could compare to our finger-following Charlie, but we liked her. About a year after we got her, we got a dog.(NAMED DUKE) :grin:. Lily was rarely noticed from there on. Then one day(about a year and a half later) I noticed that Lily was gone. I asked my mom where she was. She laughed and said,”Lily died 6 months ago! I was waiting for you to notice!!!”
I felt soooo bad. While Lily wasn’t a Charlie, I liked her. And I felt bad about not going to her funeral…..
Link: dead fish
I’ve had a lot of fish when I was little, but there’s one I remember the most. It was a Japanese fighting fish, and it died in a very odd way… namely, it jumped out of its tank when we forgot to put the lid on and landed in a feather duster.
*giggles madly*
I know its sad, but for some reason it’s also funny… poor fishy.
Link: Pet fish.
For my tenth birthday, I received a Siamese fighting fish which I named Aquamarine. She was blue with black fins and very smart. Her tank was really cool, with fake mountains and a little toy diver that you could move around with a crank on the surface. Aquamarine actually lived until I was 13.
((COME ON!!!! DON”T DIE THREAD!!!!!!!!))
((Sorry, I dn’t have another story……..))
114- you don’t have to ((double parentheses)) things on this thread- it’s not an RPG.
I’ll contribute one. Link: Aquamarine.
I learned the name for the color aquamarine from a set of Crayola crayons I owned as a kid. Crayons were more informative in those days (as you can see from the list at en . wikipedia . org/wiki/List_of_Crayola_crayon_colors).
Link: Crayons.
Once, my cousin Tommy was visiting from NC, and he was coloring on my bedroom floor. He ended up coloring the floor instead of the paper.
Link: Crayons
One time our piano tuner (who is also a good friend) gave me one of those huge boxes of crayons. I think it had 4 rows or something, but it was awesome, lots and lots of colors. I remember opening it up and smelling that crayon smell and seeing all these bright colors that looked like a very pretty sort of explosion.
I now feel a similar way about my big box of nice colored pencils that sits on my bookshelf.
Link: Bedrooms
When I was seven and I moved yet again into a new house, my bedroom was the most hideous shade of brown with little faded yellow flowers all over it. I luckily repainted it pink, but there’s still a patch of brown and yellow in there behind the dresser. I’m thinking of repainting it again to be blue, so it matches the bedspread. I love interior design… My aunt works as an interior designer in Chicago, and she’s actually had a couple of famous clients.
Link: Bedroom Decoration/Painting
Years ago I had a really good friend who I met because her family moved into my grandparent’s old house. It’s kind of odd, because even though I spent a lot of time there when they were living there when I think about it I don’t really remember how it looked then, except for certain parts, I remember it as my grandparents lived in it. Odd. Anyway, my friend’s bedroom when she was living there was a spare bedroom when my grandparent’s lived there, I remember staying there with my cousins.
When my friend’s family moved from my grandparent’s old house into a new one (confused yet?) my friends painted her new room purple. I remember thinking how cool it looked, two walls were light purple and the other two walls were a slightly darker periwinkle shade.
We lost contact for awhile, but her family has opened a bakery nearby, so we stopped in to visit before they were open, and her mom was telling us about the plans to paint the bathrooms (of the bakery) with a mural based on some French artist, and it reminded me of when they painted Anissa’s room.
I hope that wasn’t too confusing…..
Link: Making art on the floor.
Once, when I was much younger, before we lived where we do now, my parents were busy doing something and I had these big squeeze bottles of paint, so I went down to our basement where there was a relatively open area of concrete floor with the paint. I squirted the paint on my feet and made red, yellow and blue footprints on the floor.
My mom was very angry.
Ruining of furniture:
I collect stickers. And one time when I was really little (hey, this is BEFORE we moved) I took a big bunch of my stickers and stuck them all over our nice dining room table. My parents were not happy. Not at all.
122- Stickers.
When I was little, every time I got a sticker, I put it on the window next to the seat in the car where I always would sit. Needless to say, it became very hard to see out of the car window after a while.
Um, bump…?
124- What?
123- link: car windows
Our car window once came down and never came up, and for a while, we had a piece of cardboard there instead. My dad cut a hole in it and put some heavy-duty plastic wrap on it. It was actually pretty cool.
125- It’s something you say to enliven a dead thread.
126- Link: plastic wrap.
Red light is better for your night vision than white light, so astronomers are supposed to cover the ends of their flashlights in red plastic wrap. Only, red plastic wrap is REALLY hard to find, so I made do by using sharpie markers to darken regular plastic wrap. LED flashlights, however, always lean slightly towards the blue, so the light that comes out looks more purple.
Try red tisue paper or really thin fabric. that has always seemed to work for me, but when I can, I uuse my headlamp that thas either red or white light.
Link: stickers.
I used to collect stickers. I got one of those books of stickers, took out all the extra sticker material, put the stickers closer together, and put in other stickers in the places left over. It was really cool…I still have it, but it’s not a “collection” anymore…now it’s more of a file the contents of which can be used for school projects and such.
Link: Paint
I got this really cool black sweatshirt for New Year’s this year. It has pandas on it. The problem was, when the people were transferring the design onto it, there were these white streaks on it. The people in the store it had been bought at had said that theyu would come off after the sweatshirt was washed, but they didn’t. I decided to paint over the streaks. Let’s just say I am not good at painting pandas on sweaters, so it ended up looking like a zombie. My friends call it “the undead panda”, which is quite interesting…
128- Ha, I remember that sweatshirt!
128-Link: Embarrassing unintentional decoration mistakes.
I wrote a comic once where a character said “Hi, my name is Burt.” in one panel. When I was finished, I gave it to my brother to read. He read it out loud, but he isn’t very good at reading my writing, so he read “Hi, my name is BUTT.”
We laughed our heads off over that one.
Once we were in the car and my sister was reading out loud from a book about animals and when she was at the bobcat part, it was talking about the noises they make and it said “the shreik of the Bobcat is similar to a domesic cat, but peircing and…”. Everyone in the car heard “domestic cat butt peircing” . Laughter ensued.
Link: comics
My friends and I sometimes make comics, and some of them were about some stick figure or other getting chased by pancakes. Also, one of my friend is making one called “The DUCK is rising” I think so far it’s sorta dumb, like little kid-ish. And the drawings… UGGHHH…
Link: stick figures.
My brother had to make a recipe book for school, but there were some blank pages, so he filled them in with drawings of stick figure Roman armies, fire-breathing dragons, and the cutest dinosaurs you’ll ever see. I actually paid more attention to the pictures than the recipes.
To enliven this thread.
Link: Star Trek.
When I was younger, as I mentioned before, I spent a lot of time at home with my dad and he liked to watch Star Trek with me. I thought it was okay, but I didn’t (and still don’t) love it like some of my friends.
So, anyway, one time I went outside to play with my dad and I said “Let’s play Star Trek!”
And my dad said “Okay, I’ll be Captain Piccard.”
I said “No, I want to be the Captain!”
So my dad rolled his eyes because Why-the-heck-do-I-have-to-have-the-only-kid-in-the-world-who-doesn’t-want-to-serve-under-Captain-Piccard? Then he smiled and said “Gosh, my little girl wants to be the Captain of the Enterprise.”
I said “No, I don’t want to be on the Enterprise. I want to be on the Discovery!” Somehow, from TV or something, I knew there was an actual space shuttle called the Discovery, and I wasn’t very clear on the boundaries between fiction and reality at this age.
So my dad rolled his eyes again because why-the-heck-do-I-have-to-have-the-only-kid-in-the-world-who-doesn’t-want-to-be-on-the-Enterprise?
Link: Comics. My precocious 8-year-old cousin was sitting in the kitchen reading a newspaper. My aunt came in looking for string and looked over her shoulder. She shrieked because there was a comic about gay marriage. Then she snatched the paper out of my cousin’s hands, deeming it to be inappropriate. She gave a long lecture about the things we do and do not read when we are young. Then she gave my cousin a comic book. But she neglected to see that the book was actually “A History of Indian Architecture” and it contained some pictures of temples, upon which were… well, read Larry Gonick. She didn’t realize it until the next day.
Discovery… um… well… As you say, you were young.
Link: Art and young children
So, this one summer when I was about nine, I went to a science camp at a school for rich kids on Long Island. They had a lot of reproductions of famous artwork all over the school buildings, including one of the Winged Victory of Samothrace in the middle of a fountain. (The head and arms of the statue were lost before it was discovered.) There was a little kid in our group who saw the fountain and said “I think she wants her head back.”
I laughed so hard.
126: link: dilapatated cars
My mom’s minivan has been totalled. The horn doesn’t honk, the ‘door open’ light lights up when it shouldn’t, the trunk doesn’t open, and it’s covered in scratches. My uncle calls it a scrap heap.
I remember this thread!
Link: Red lights
When I was sailing, we’d often have night watch and come back to the berth deck in the middle of the night/early morning and have to get ready for sleep, which included changing clothes (or at least getting the top layers off), crawling into a hammock next to all your sleeping shipmates without waking them up and stow any objects you might have on your person in a place where you can find them again (namely your seabag, if you can get to it). I didn’t have a red flashlight, so I had to do everything by touch, and only use the light with my fingers over the beam if I absolutely had to see something.
I’d forgotten what this thread was called…
Link: Star Trek
One of my friends (or I hope she’s still my friend) used to be really, really obsessed with Chris Pine. At the time I didn’t know who he was, but I thought he was ugly (still do). We would email each other in class sometimes, and our emails went something like this:
L: Look at these pictures of Chris Pine!
ML: Ew. He’s ugly.
L: Go die in a big black hole.
ML: Go die in a big black hole with a hot pink bunny in it!
L: What?
ML: *explains about MuseBlog* Chris Pine looks like Mr Joe.
L: Then Mr Joe must be sexy.
ML: No, he’s ugly. And he needs to brush his teeth.
L: The Enterprise will zap you with its phasers!
ML: A hot pink bunny will eat you!!
And so on until our teacher caught us. (And if you think that’s crazy, you should see what I got up to with ilh.
)
Link: A famous person your friend likes but you think is hideous
My violin teacher also teaches piano to a friend (well, sort of friend, I haven’t really talked to her for a long time) and for a while our lessons were right next to each other, so we’d see each other for a few minutes each week.
It was pretty amusing trying to sort it all out after that.
She’s a Twilight fan, and when they were first making the movies she was obsessing over Robert Pattinson, saying how “gorgeous” and “perfect” he was. Well, quite frankly I think the guy is completely hideous. So for several weeks we had an ongoing debate over whether he was sexy or not.
Of course, this also led our teacher, who’s pretty cool about such things, to remark at our recital some time later about how “DL and Fern have the most guys between them…” And mistook her friend for the guy who said I looked like a hippie, who was, in fact, another one of her friends who I’d only met once.