Given the context, I find it ironic that you said “fell” instead of “hell”.
I think my mother now knows just about everything actually. I used to think there were plenty of them that she never knew, but I was wrong. She always found out somehow. I did so much stupid crap, it was a common thing for me to come home bloody or bruised.
It set her up well though, because I became a pilot- airplanes and helicopters- and she doesnt even flinch at my stories of near-crashes from when I was teaching, or the engine failure and the engine fire stories. So I have her trained I guess.
Welcome to the board, RotorHead !! We’ll be asking you airplane questions from this point on.
Is it really safer to sit by the engines? Does the toilet waste really get expelled down to the earth, as in the Blue Ice death in the last episode of Six Feet Under?
Thanks for the welcome, Blonde. Slight hijack then: I dont watch tv, so I never saw that episode, but I believe that is true. (I’m not in the airlines, so I am not certain). As for the safest spot in the plane, depends on what you want to be safe from. No actual stats handy, but the rear would be safest in alot of crashes, but not very much safer. The front will be safest from feeling a really hard landing.
So tell us about your near-crashes! Welcome to the SDMB, and fasten your seatbeat for a bumpy ride. 
You’re gonna love it…
Well, sometimes teaching requires letting students make mistakes. The trick is to not let it go so far that you cant recover. So lets see. I have missed trees by ten feet before. A couple times I had to use the lights on the edge of the runway as a slalom course when students lost control of the plane. My actual in-flight engine failure and (different incident) engine fire were both when I was a student myself. Any experienced flight instructor has similar stories. All you need for a near-death experience when flight instructing is a really bad student. Personally though, I prefer simulating an emergency over having a good story later.
About the time my sister turned eleven years old she got really tall and just looked older. When us 15 year-olds got to wantin’ us some beer, we’d go get my sister, give her the money and send her into a convenience store to buy the beer. We’d let her keep the change to buy lollipops and stuff for herself. She was never carded and never got caught. If my mom had found out, I wouldn’t be alive today to post on the SDMB!
There were lotsa’ other things, including some weird stuff in storm sewers too, but our “Beer Buyer” is the most bizarre.
[ul]
[sup]I still ain’t telling[/sup][/ul]
I went thru a pyro phase as a youg teenager. My friends and I had a sizable underground bunker where we’d do our stupid burning of various things. Gasoline, paraffin, magnesium and home made napalm all contributed to my near permanent lack of fingerprints during those years. I remember one particular occasion where we invited a new friend along on our escapades. We were having fun writing our names in agsoline and lighting it on fire. Until our new friend got scared and started to run away, knocking over a mostly full 5 gallon gas can. Which promptly caught fire while spewing its burning contents around our feet. We eventually got things under control, although the gas can was a total loss. My boots had the tread quite melted as well.
Oh, and there was also the little bb gun CO2 tank I put in a vise and hammered a nail into. Which promptly shot into the ceiling, imbedding itsself rather neatly.
Good times…
My cousins had an old couch that was full of bees in their huge back yard. They dared me and my sister to jump on the couch. What did we do?
You guessed it!
WE approached the couch slowly. We could hear the sound of all those bees. buzzzzzzzz buzzzzzzzzz
We jumped once and took off running. I escaped unscathed. My sister was slower than me. Bees in her hair…seemed like bees everywhere! (She only got one sting though :-P)
The boys cousins followed through on our dare. (They had more practice it seems.)
When I was 15 years old, my mother and her friends decided to go to this festival. (I don’t care to go into more details than that…it would be really obvious to anyone from my area what that was) It was generally considered to be a drunken gathering, and my mom left my brother, myself and my friend home alone for the entire day. We were BORED out of our minds.
She left her car, but took her keys with her…well, she took them the FIRST time they left. After said festival had died down, she came back to change clothes and she and friends left again to go to the bar. While they were home, I slipped the keys out of her purse.
About 10 minutes after they left, we got into my mom’s car, and with my friend driving, took off for a little joyride. Being a small town, and not knowing exactly how long we had, we just took a small trip around town. For some reason we ended up in the projects (well, one street away if that counts). We didn’t get to see any drug dealers or hookers though. ~L~
Eventually, we just turned the car around and went back home, with me driving this time. We didn’t have any money to do anything anyway. We pulled into the driveway, shut off the lights and car, and I watched with a SINKING heart as my mom and her friends pulled in RIGHT behind us. :eek:
We got out of the car, hearts pounding. (One of my mom’s friends was the freakin’ police chief!) They seemed surprised to see us get out of the car (Think quick…they didn’t see us drive up!). They asked what we were doing, and I quickly stammered out that we were listening to the radio. I GUESS because they were all HAMMERED, it really didn’t occur to them that in the house, I had a radio in my room, my mom and brother each had one as well, and we had MTV, et al. on the TV. None of them checked the hood of the car, which was hot. They merely laughed and continued into the house.
I know, a little thing really…unless you factor in the crazy mom’s response. That’s what would have gotten my brother and I killed.
~J
You know what? A lot of poeple seem to have “climbing on roofs” as something dangerous they did and didn’t want there mothers to know about. I think my mom wanted me dead, because she actually MADE me get on roofs! Between the ages of 12 and 18 I worked a lot (sometimes whole summers) for my uncle, who did construction (and yes, it was her idea to work for him.) And, in the summer, the most popular thing is roofing! I would be climbing on super-steep roofs with no harness of any kind. The scaffolding that went from the ground to the roof? Well, let’s just sat that when you have to put it in uneven ground, and part of it has to go into a driveway that is ten feet below the ground level, some rather un-safe methods are used to keep them in place.
Of course, when you mom is a nurse, for some reasons she gets less mad that you did something stupid, and more angry that you hurt yourself, cause then she has to work and not get paid for it!
Oh, there was this one time my friends and I were coming back from the movies, which were almost an hour away from were we lived, and us, being teenagers, decided to race our cars down the highway. Of course, the fact that there awas a severe blizzard didn’t phaze us, Hell, we lived in Vermont, this was nothing. (Of course, it was almost a record-breaking snow fall that night.) Add to that the fact that we also had a bottle rocket fight between cars…with no bottles. Just held 'em in our hands then let go after they were lit. Ahhh…good times…