They’re probably somewhere at my mother’s house, but I really have no idea where my marbles are.
Many Queenslanders have done this, because macadamias.
Which I guess leads me to saying I’ve dealt with things that were tough nuts to crack.
I have failed to teach an old dog new tricks, but I have let sleeping dogs lie.
I once took a candy heart (Dove) to San Francisco.
Didn’t eat it.
Didn’t return with it.
Not as classic as leaving a chocolate heart in SF, but I did stand on a corner in Winslow, Arizona.
While hiking in the fall woods recently, I saw my son fall off a log. As expected, it was rather easy to do.
I did this once at Burger King with friends; we were trying to see who could eat a Bacon Double Cheeseburger in the fewest bites. I won, but at the cost of having to sit there for a bit letting my saliva soften the thing for a bit.
Years later, I had a smallish dog who snatched up a whole lemon that had fallen to the floor. He had no leverage over the thing to be able to chew it, and it was stuck behind his teeth, so he couldn’t drop it, and he would growl at us when we tried to help him. It took him about 10 minutes to realize he needed human intervention.
I’ve been up Shit Creek.
I have been barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.
I’ve seen the fur fly- when our two longhaired cats were fighting.
I’ve:
stepped into the ring,
had someone in my corner,
come out fighting,
gone toe to toe,
taken it to the mat,
fought with no holds barred,
rolled with the punches,
been beaten to the punch,
been up against the ropes,
taken a low blow and been hit below the belt,
been down for the count,
been down but not out,
and I’ve come up swinging.
I thought the cliche was “go down swinging”? And I honestly thought it was a baseball reference.
Google hits:
22.8 Million for “go down swinging”
31.6 Million for “come up swinging”
528 Million for “go down fighting”
I bow to Google.
To me, “Come up swinging” means that, even tho you’ve suffered damage (gone down for a count), you still have plenty of fight left in you. So you don’t even finish getting up and settle into place, you come up swinging.
Oh, I didn’t mean to imply that I couldn’t parse it, only that I didn’t think of it as a cliche, particularly vis a vis the alternative I mentioned, which I do tend to think of as a cliche.
Every picture tells a story.
Not me, but my sister was once a “girl in a flatbed ford” passing a corner in Winslow Arizona (not so much cliches I guess as song lyrics). 
Some years ago I was looking at trinkets to buy as souvenirs from a street vendor in London. I saw an old penny coin made into a necklace and was thinking of buying it for my sister when the vendor pointed out a version made with an old 1-pound coin.
What the hell, in for a penny, in for a pound.
While visiting Paris, we were quire hungry and stopped for lunch at a cafe on the southern shore of the river Seine. While waiting to be served, I pulled out a pen and paper and began to draw.
So, I can say truthfully that I have been a starving artist on the left bank in Paris.