You’ll appreciate this, maybe. After a whole spring of rain, we’ve had almost no rain this month, and the temps have been hot. Things are drying up. I have a small pool that I dammed in a runoff creek in my pasture. Only about 10" deep at the best of times. It’s full of tadpoles, and drying up fast. This morning I emptied my horse trough into buckets and into the pool to keep the tadpoles going. I can hopefully declorinate the water in the horse trough and keep the pool going until at least they tadpoles become amphibious.
Most water utilities these days use Chloramine rather than plain chlorine in the water. Chloramine is much more robust, and letting it sit out won’t break it down, you have to use a water conditioner. They sell them in the pet dept. with the aquarium goods. Very cheap.
About the same here: high temperatures and no rain for nearly 2 weeks. I noticed I haven’t seen the Leopard slugs out in the evening for awhile. After temporarily moving my recycling roll-out container to trim grass, I noticed a few leopard slugs reposing, hunkering down in the last remaining vestiges of moist soil where the container sits. Feeling sorry for them, I’ve been pouring some water on them and the damp dirt patch they’re on every few days to help them survive.
Another little girl in the neighborhood kept a rabbit as a pet. Her family kept a generous supply of carrots for the rabbit, and we kids had free access to them. Once when visiting her, I ate a whole bunch of unpeeled, tough raw carrots.
That evening, I didn’t want any dinner because I was so full. More than full - I was queasy. I wouldn’t volunteer that I had spoiled my appetite eating what was essentially rabbit food, so I kept my mouth shut.
My misdeed would have gone undetected, except that later that evening I suddenly vomited out a whole stomachful of poorly-chewed raw carrot and then my parents knew why I didn’t want any dinner. They didn’t punish me though. I guess they figured I had learned my lesson.
Ah… reminds me. I didn’t want any new homes being built in my neighborhood, so I would go out in the dark and remove any “For Sale” signs on vacant lots. Worked about as well as your INCREDIBLE ACT OF VANDALISM!!!
Living on a new housing development, there were plenty of building sites to explore with friends (at a time when nothing was fenced off with H&S warnings everywhere). One time, a large digger was left on site and so we climbed all over it and investigated the cab. I found a broken teaspoon and tried it in the ignition: incredibly, it turned it to the lights and wipers position, but thankfully not the engine.
Must have got distracted because I left the digger with the lights on, so the battery ran down. The building company stopped leaving equipment on site after that.
Second one: my dad grew plenty of fruit and vegetables, including three gooseberry bushes. Much of the crop went into the freezer so gooseberry crumble and gooseberry pie became a monotonous routine. One day I mixed up a bunch of chemicals from the garage (e.g. weedkiller, petrol, methylated spirits) and poured it around the largest bush. Needless to say, that one bush died, reducing the number of weeks’ supply of gooseberries.
Perhaps being an only child made it harder to attempt crime: there’s usually only one suspect. Or perhaps it meant I had to learn to profess innocence more convincingly from an early age…?
Construction equipment have the best knobs! I liberated a real nice big (just slightly smaller than an 8 Ball) shiny black one for my car, ditching the little crappy rectangle one with the shift pattern on a sticker.
Heh. Funny story. When I was seven years old and under the loose supervision of a neighbor I missed the school bus, and decided to ride my bike to school. We lived just off of a highway and it was snowing hard. I also had no idea how to get to school. For some reason this still seemed like a good idea.
After riding my bike down the freeway for a few miles I ended up turning into a subdivision and getting hopelessly lost. It was cold and very snowy and I realized I was pretty much screwed. So I banged on a random door and asked the guy who answered to use his phone to call my Mom. My Mom wasn’t available.
So the guy offered to take me to school. He loaded up my bike in his trunk and took me first to the babysitter’s but she wasn’t there, and finally dropped me off at school probably around 11am.
The thing is, everyone at school found this highly amusing and didn’t bother to call my mother.
To say it did not go over well would be an understatement.
I remember saying in my defense, “But Mom! I was careful! I checked the air in my tires!”
This reminded me of a dumb thing I did when I was about 12 years old. I went with my school’s ski club to a nearby ski resort, and for whatever reason I did not stay with the group - I think there was no chaperone or anything like that anyway, so I went off on my own. I vaguely remember, but some random dude rode the chairlift with me and started giving me tips and we did a few runs together with him coaching me, and then he offered to drive me home at the end of the day, which I innocently accepted. I think I told the bus driver from school I had a ride home, and then this stranger drove me back to my house. Nothing bad happened, but in hindsight what I did was incredibly naive and dangerous.
When I was in 3rd or 4th grade, instead of walking home with my brother from school, I took up the invitation from my friend to go hang out over at his house. I think that time my mom called the police and they tracked me down, after my brother showed up without me. So I have a tendency to just wander on my own, but at least now I know to tell others where I am going.
I was a pretty good kid but I did have one friend who was constantly doing mean shit to other people: putting roadkill in the neighborhood mailboxes, going around and shooting out the neighbor’s porchlights with a BB gun, making crank calls to fast food places, going around at night and girdling the trees in the local filbert and apple orchards, painting graffiti on the walls of local businesses, and similar crap. Being an impressionable 12 year old without many friends I was highly susceptible to his antics and thought he was the pinnacle of wit so of course tried to join him whenever I could. Amazingly we were indeed never caught. For some reason or another we lost contact with each other about the time I started driving. The last time I saw him was when I was ~18 and standing in line to order a burger at McDonalds. He was in the kitchen working one of the grills. He never noticed me and I didn’t say anything.
He had a very distinctive name and I just googled it and there’s basically no record of him anywhere. He’d be 43 or 44 today. I have no idea what happened to him and frankly don’t really care. He did, however, introduce me to Sim City which is a game I still love to play.
I grew up on a river. When I was 11 or so I thought I was going to be cool and sneak some of my dad’s tobacco and a rolling paper, go down to the river, and have myself my first cigarette. After successfully rolling it I lit it, took a few puffs, and immediately lost my lunch. It smelled like ass and made me sicker than fuck, so I never tried it again. It wasn’t until many years later that I learned that funny green stuff wasn’t tobacco.
For 3-4 summers, a guy who lived down the street would have his father visit with him for several weeks before the Fourth of July. He was from Kentucky and he had a pick-up truck with a cab that was full of fireworks. I guess he would go around to job sites or bars selling them. I don’t remember how we discovered them but he did not lock his cab. So we would steal fireworks from him regularly. Not a lot just, what we could carry, we tried to not make it obvious, maybe he knew. Any way we looked forward to June and the arrival of his truck.
When I was in middle school, I lived across from the bus station. I would sneak out and throw overly ripe tomatoes at the signs at the station. One time the station security guard said " you’re a nice kid. At least you’re not like those brats who keep throwing tomatoes."i looked him in the eye and did the respectful innocence act.
My nephew just committed a well-timed misdeed. My sister, a middle school teacher, went to a midsummer training and took my nephew to the school district office. She gave him the usual activities to do and sat him down in an old student desk in a supply room. After two hours alone he started writing graffiti on the desk when my sister and her administrator walked in. She chewed out my nephew and the administrator said with a smile “Looks like we’ll have to make school more enticing coming up here - gotta update the curriculum.”
When I was a teenager (back in the days when you returned empty beer bottles to the liquor store to get your deposit back), my mom discovered an empty beer bottle tucked away in my closet. She quietly and discreetly scolded me, but promised she wouldn’t mention it to my dad.
What she didn’t know was that I hadn’t actually drunk any beer; I had simply swiped an empty beer bottle from the closet, and I had been using it as a dildo.
If she had found that out, it would have been an entirely different, much more awkward/unpleasant conversation.
