Wow, I’m glad I’m not the only pencil tipper on the boards. I was in sixth grade at the time, getting something out of my locker while for some reason holding a pencil point first in my hand (
). Somebody walking through the hallway bumped me, and the pencil tip ended up embedded in my palm. It really didn’t bother me until I though about ‘lead poisoning’, because I didn’t know what graphite was.
My childhood home had the requisite “growth chart” doorway. All down one side were small bits of masking tape, well marked with names, dates, and the then-height of myself and my three older brothers. The oldest ones were from the early 1950’s.
One day when I was about four or so, I decided that those bits of tape would look better on the other side of the doorway. :smack:
Mom was decidedly not pleased.
Odd that I should happen across this thread today. I woke up this morning with a memory of something from childhood, many years ago. We kids had a pet gerbil in a cage in the basement and I was supposed to feed and water him. Only I got sort of distracted and forgot. For several days. When I finally remembered it was a bit late but I was afraid of getting in trouble so I filled his bowl before anyone else found him. Poor gerbil.
My older brother is another member of the graphite tattoo club. He got stabbed in the arm back in grade school. Still has the mark nearly forty years later.
Just to cheer myself up I’ll tell a couple on my mother, the farm girl. Grandmother was out in the field one day, putting out plants. My mother, toddling along the row behind her, was helpfully uprooting each one. Grandmother wasn’t expecting that when she looked back at the end of the field. On another occasion my mother was taken with some fluffy baby chicks and grabbed a couple a little too forcefully. Not fluffy anymore.
Another member of the Pencil Tip Club checking in. Fourth grade, stabbed in the hand. No actual tip break-off, but it left a nice little gray mark on my right hand, just on the right side of the first knuckle of my middle finger.
I’m 22 years old, and I graduated in a class of 69 people. I’d be amazed if I could remember a quarter of their names. But I’ll never forget the prick who stabbed me in the hand with a pencil.
Since we’re tattling on ancestors, I’ll drag one up from ~1918. My maternal grandmother, then the tender age of three, decided she was going to help Dad chop firewood - and took the tip of her pinky almost clean off. They called in the local doctor, and it was nothing short of a miracle that they got it re-attached. Eighty-seven years later she still has the scar, and curiously, no fingerprint.
As for myself, I’ll plead the 5th 
My father and uncle, however…
Back in the early 50’s (when no one really locked anything up), they found their way onto someone’s houseboat. They decided that this was a fantastic place to play “pirate”. Dunno where they found them, but somehow they got ahold of an axe or two, and managed to scuttle the ship. Yep…right to Davey Jones’ locker, mateys. :eek:
I hear it took my grandparents quite awhile to pay for the thing…Arrrgh! 
Before I was born, when a lot of my cousins were living with my grandparents, one particular cousin was known to have quite a smart mouth. (Actually, more than a few of my cousins have a smart mouth, and I’m probably no better. Just ask my mother. 
) Anyhoo, quite often, when my grandparents would ask him what he wanted for breakfast, he’d answer enthusiastically, “Horseshit!”
Well, one day, my grandfather took him up on the request. He didn’t say anything to my cousin, simply left the house and went to the barn. My cousin was still sitting at the kitchen table when my grandfather dropped a bucket of horse crap in front of him.
I’m not sure if they made him finish the whole bucket.
Anyhoo…
Sign me up! Freshman in high school, a friend made a playful stabbing motion with his pencil, but didn’t warn me, so I reflexively put up a blocking hand, and ever since then I’ve had the faint but unmistakable gray dot in the middle of my right palm.
There are a lot more of us than I would have predicted. Now we need a newsletter and a logo.
Well, heck, there goes my afternoon plans…
These are great posts.
My younger brother and I one day were playing in the house, and it must have been summertime because my parents had one of those huge old box fans set up on a step stool in the corner, running full blast.
Somehow (kids are nuts) we got the idea that throwing wads of wet toilet paper into the fan was the absolutely most hysterical thing ever conceived of. As a matter of fact, it did have a great result, shreds of wet toilet paper exploded everywhere, on the walls, the windows, the furniture etc before drying to a cement like consistency. This is the day that I learned the meaning of apoplectic through a wonderful demonstration from my mother.
My mom still has some of the furniture with 20 year old toilet paper stuck to it.
Well, I’ll offer this one up since it seems to be in an all-new category: accidental bleaching.
When I was about 12 or 13, bleaching your jeans was all the rage. Mom only bought me embarrassingly dark jeans from un-cool places like Sears, so I decided to take fashion into my own hands and bleach a pair. I chose, for whatever reason, to do this up at my grandparents’ cabin, which is more house than cabin and a bit of a showpiece for their friends.
Everyone else went out for a walk on the beach. I stayed behind, filled the bathtub about a quarter-full with water (that’s a no-no in itself, as the island gets little rain and water is always in short supply) and added lots of Clorox. Then I added my jeans, and swished them around in the water, then took them outside to hang on the line, thinking no one would be the wiser until they saw me in my ultra-awesome bleached jeans.
Turns out I’d splashed water out of the tub and onto the bathroom rug, which of course bleached in giant, random splotches. More bleach ate away at the finish on the hardwood floors leading to the front door, and further onto the aggregate porch. I got in so. Much. Trouble. Some of the damage remains to this day, some 16 years later.
At the same house I mentioned previously, there was large pile of gravel, about five feet high, at the end of a driveway that was being readied for resurfacing. This driveway also went down a hill and met a strip of itself that was asphault. The gravel sat at the border of the two parts.
At the age of about 11, I decided that an awsome bike jump could be produced if I just went down the hill and jumped over the gravel pile. I believed that accolades and praise would follow my feat.
I started at the top of the hill for maximum acceleration. Pedaling furiously for premium speed, I reached the bottom of the hill doing very well. I was impressed with myself, so far. The bike and I went up the gravel hill, and launched into the air! I felt on top of the world, for about a second. Then the bike started to turn sideways. Instead of hitting the ground at 100 MPH, as I had planned, I smacked right knee and right elbow first into the asphault. The bike escaped my grasp and slid about ten feet. I slid about two feet, giving myself considerable road rash. It could have been much worse.
This next one is really bad idea. We had a plastic kiddie pool and an air pumped BB gun. My brother had the wonderful idea that one of us should shoot the pool as another was standing behind it and holding it up. The THWACK of BBs was cool as it echoed in the pool. We did use one pump of air, but I doubt it was less dangerous.
Speaking of family stories, my brother woke my sister up one night and told her “Patti, when Mom and Dad ask you about the car in the morning, you don’t know anything, ok?” Of course, she didn’t know anything, much less why our car was stuck in the ditch across the street from Brother’s girlfriend’s house.
While I was in a top bunk at summer camp, the counselor in the lower bunk started kicking the bed. No problem there, except that I was on a nylon (read: ‘low friction’) sleeping bag. I slid off and landed straightarmed on the cot beside our bunk. My arm wasn’t just broken, it was bent. It didn’t hurt much though, so there I was, holding a bent arm and walking around among a bunch of shocked kids and screaming, distraught counselors, trying to calm everybody and telling them that everything’s all right. Good thing that the kid assigned to the cot was across the cabin trading comic books or I would have gone through his chest.
Another member of the Pencil Tip Club here. Mine happened when I was in Kindergarten- I put my knee down on a pencil and OW!! It’s still there, 30 years later. I tell people it’s a tatoo of the earth as seen from a great distance.
Anyway, when I was about 10, I wondered what would happen if I put a pair of tweezers in an outlet. I found out. Several years later, my dad picked up those tweezers and said, “Looks like somebody put these in power outlet.”
As a very small elf, somewhere around age four, I had a tank of goldfish on my dresser. You know I like gold fish they still don’t have names The thing was, at four, I was very tiny. I always was smaller than other kids, which is how the whole elf-nickname thing started. Anyway, being short, I couldn’t see the fish very well, because it was a tall dresser. One of the drawers was open, so I got a great idea: I’d use them like steps to climb up and see the fishies. It was then I learned about the stablity of mostly hollow objects. Poor fishies, they were all flopping in the water and glass on my carpet, while I cried. Somehow, they all managed to live because my parents did a very quick rescue mission and retrieved them before they dried out or injured themselves on the shards of glass.
At six, I learned that you should never, ever close a storm door by pushing on the glass. If you do, the glass, which your landlady was supposed to replace with plexiglass but didn’t, will break, cutting your wrist open. Then you go to the hospital and have the wound checked for glass pieces, and have butterfly tape put on it. But they’ll think your pregnant mom is in labor, and she’ll scream at them that it’s you with the problem first. A couple of hours later, your best friend, who is seven and should know better, will stick his head through the hole in the glass, and be invited not to play at your house for like a week, because your mom thought he was going to cut his fool throat on the glass.
Then, when I was ten and my brother four, we learned a very important lesson. While it’s funny to throw wet wash cloths at each other during the summer, you shouldn’t do it inside. Or if you do, you really should be careful you don’t hit the (on) lightbulb with wash cloths. If you do, the blub with explode with great force, spaying glass shards around the room, which coupled with the sudden dark will make you scream and have a parental investigation start post-haste. Then, after your mom recovers from her mini-heart attack, you both have to stand in the corner for an hour.
When my parents bought their first house in 1961, I was five years old and thrilled to be getting my Very Own Room. It had wallpaper. It was rather stupid wallpaper, as I recall, but wallpaper.
At five, I was (gee, here’s a surprise for a Doper!) a bit of a smarty, and I wanted to show off that I could write. Not print, write. Cursive. I thought that the difference between printing and writing cursive was simply that in cursive the letters were connected. So my idea of showing off how I could write cursive was to write my three letter name (all in caps) with the base point of each letter connected to the next - everywhere I could.
Do you see where this is going? It’s worse. Apparently the only writing implement I had access to was an inkless pen. So rather than writing my name (in cursive!) on the wallpaper, I gouged it. Repeatedly.
My poor mother was not happy. 
The pentiant for dangerous acts runs in the family. This story told by my Mom is one of my favorites. When she was twelve years old, her mother took her and her nine year old brother to see The Excorcist. This movie seriously creeped her out. A while later, a few days or something (I don’t remember the timeline) she was in bed trying to sleep. It was completely dark, so pretty much nothing could be seen. Here bed started shaking slightly. She thought it was the dog scratching, so she said “get out” and it stopped. She thought the problem was solved, but the bed started again. She commanded the dog to stop again, but it didn’t. The shaking intensified, scaring the hell out of Mom, then it suddenly stopped. She was out of her mind by now. Next, she saw a shape rising above her bed, with its arms reaching out to grab her. Mom was in the baton corps in school, and she was skilled at it. A baton was on her nightstand next her bed, so she grabbed the baton and with a mighty swing: WHACK, smacked the Thing on the head. The Thing screamed “SON OF A B----!” You B----! It was her brother.
It’s hilarious when She tells it.
With respect to the vinegared egg thing: I think what’s occuring is that the vinegar basically dissolves the hard mineral shell but leaves the inner membrane of the egg intact. Assuming the membrane is robust enough, the egg ends up acting like a little egg-shaped bag of water. I don’t think this does anything in particular to preserve the internals of the egg, however. I learned this one as a Boy Scout, a trick to fit an egg into a bottle with a narrow neck.
Add me to the long list of pencil-mark folks. At least one on each hand, one on my right forearm, and two in my scalp. <sub>We won’t discuss the fact that the most recent one was during a university engineering drafting class…</sub>
When I was a wee’vark I was home alone from school and watching PBS. The science show was talking about how food=energy and the spokesgeek burned a marshmallow with a kitchen match to demonstrate the energy content of the food. I thought this was the greatest thing I had ever seen, and proceeded to obtain an empty coffee can and a box of kitchen matches, and tried to burn a number of dry foods (cookies, crackers, spaghetti, a small pile of flour). Nothing was catching too well so I put some kleenex in the base of the can to get things started. I ended up sitting mesmerized in front of the can, feeding in Kleenex after Kleenex…
Nothing too serious happened, although the house got rather smokey and a small ring mark was burned into the table I was “experimenting” on. My mom was more disgusted at my stupidity than actually ANGRY, after she caught me when she came home. (I was so transfixed by the flames I didn’t even hear her come in…) I was grounded for a month, No TV.
You can bet it doesn’t. Our chem teacher did a demo for us except with HCl and the egg went off! :eek:
And yeh, it just dissolves the calcium.
I did that to my lab partner in science class once. The point pierced her skin and broke off. She had to have her sister dig it out with a needle and tweezers (how humiliating) and has a scar from it. I still feel awful about it. She was always the homecoming queen, prom queen, cheerleader, etc. and was/is a really, really nice person. She was at my 25th HS reunion last summer (it was the first time I’d gone to one) and she brought it up (jokingly) and I told her how bad I still felt about it.