Guns, many guns, freely accessible to me. I never even thought about messing with them, of course, but I could have taken one out, started cleaning it, and put it away without so much as a second glance – I wouldn’t have, because I don’t like to clean, but I could have.
My mother. She’s nuts. It wasn’t until I was 10 that I realized people just don’t do the kind of crazy shit she does. She’s a grown ass woman who throws temper tantrums, WTF?
My grandparents had a cat named Jake. My Mom figured he was practically a sibling, so we called him Uncle Jake. Got some weird looks when I referred to him in conversation. “Uncle Jake isn’t allowed on the couch.”
My dad is also a contractor/carpenter, and another implication of this was what we used for firewood. He would just bring home scrap lumber and we’d burn that in the woodstove. Aside from sticks picked up outside for kindling, our fires consisted entirely of 2x4’s. It still looks a bit odd to me when I go to someone’s house and they’re burning real logs in their woodstove or fireplace. I imagine they’d think it was pretty strange that scooping the nails out of the woodstove was a routine household chore for us.
Well, it’s not very exciting, but every night at dinner, we would have milk to drink. And we always put plenty of ice cubes in our milk. Because according to my dad, that is the proper way to drink milk (you just have to drink it fast before it gets a layer of water on top).
I grew up outside of Fort Meade, Maryland, where everyone knew people who worked for the National Security Agency. My parents, now long since retired, both worked there for most of my childhood. I was a freshman in college before I realized that most people actually knew what their parents did at work.
Oh gods, my mother and older brother did this.
Brown sugar and butter on bread. Or, taught to us by our German step-grandpa, a slice of bread with a thin coating of butter, then a thin coating of sour cream, then sprinkled lightly with sugar. A heart-attack of a snack but YUM!
We had an honest-to-goodness slot machine which we all played 5 nickels a day on. The bowl of nickels sat beside the machine and if you hit the jackpot, you had to put your winnings into the bowl. Interestingly enough, none of us kids became interested in gambling.
I started with “explosives in the basement” and “killing dinner for mother to cook” and realized that nothing I grew up with would sound normal to most of the people here.
Well, I originally read that as “killing mother to cook dinner”, so you’re actually less weird than I previously thought.
Oh yeah, I forgot about that. We didn’t have a woodstove inside, but the fire pit outside was where we burnt all the scrap lumber.
I was in college before I realized that it wasn’t normal for 85-90% of any given group of people to be nearsighted. Growing up mostly among Ashkenazi Jews (Jewish schools, synagogue, and social group), the large majority of people I knew wore glasses or lenses.
My mom had a dog, who she referred to as our sister. It might have started as a joke, but it’s easy for Mom to sound a little nuts.
All the men in my family are bald. I still assume, whenever I see a man past the age of 30-ish with a full head of hair, that he’s wearing a wig.
There was a lot of divorce in my grandparents’ generation, so my brother and I had a lot of extra grandparents. We never really thought about it, but it made for the occasional confusing conversation.
Both of my parents were artists, so it didn’t seem unusual to be around people doing art work, with wonderful art supplies all around the house. Except that I was always stealing my father’s supplies and ruining them.
Pretty anemic compared to the foregoing, but I grew up thinking Velveeta was cheese.
My uncle and cousin both had bars in the basement of the house. Both drank. The cousin quite heavily. This was in Iowa, where it seemed common to me. I am from Tennessee, where there are few houses with basements. With both my uncle and cousin (who were father and son), the upstairs was for cooking and sleeping, while the basement was for TV watching and whatnot. I knew a girl from Ohio whose family complained of lack of basements in Tennessee and found one to their liking.
My parents never had a pet of their own, but sometimes had a ‘rent a pet’, usually a cat that lived down the street of some unknown neighbor who would let the cat out at night, the cat would wander down to our place, my mother would feed it and let it sit on my mother’s lap while she was watching TV. Usually puts the cat out before we went to bed.
I’m not sure which side I’d place my bets on so lets just leave it at “I’m strange but in a basically non-threatening manner”. 
Are your parents British? That’s the British/Commonwealth way to say it.
When I was growing up, my family had a habit of regularly bouncing back and forward between Australia and the UK every five years or so. That’s not my contribution to the thread - I figured out fairly early that was unusual. What I didn’t really think about till much later was the fact that each time my grandparents came and joined us for long stretches - as in, multi-year stretches. When I think back, I find that rather interesting in an analyzing-family-dynamics kind of way - particularly since as far as I know they didn’t go live with my cousins when they were overseas, but just did a quick few-weeks visit.
When I was a kid, growing up in the Lower Mainland area of BC in the 60s, my dad always owned a pick-up truck. To have such a vehicle was basically unheard of then. A second vehicle was always another car, never a truck.
But then again, we were originally from Northwest Ontario, and such a thing was quite common there.
We had a picture very similar to this onehanging in the hall (same clock, same Jolly Rogers, different white guys in suits). I used to ask my dad about it, and he’d tell me it was just a club he was in when he was a kid. It was many years later when I found out exactly what club it was, and how rare it was for someone with my dad’s background to be a member.
We had a cistern in the basement when I was a kid, so for most of the year we had nice soft water for washing and bathing. It wasn’t really potable, though, so there was a separate faucet in the kitchen sink for the ‘city water’. I always had to explain to my friends what that meant.
We also had a coal burning furnace and water heater until I was about eight. Any time we needed a lot of hot water, like for laundry or baths, Mom would go down to the basement and shovel coal into the water heater about a half hour beforehand.
My dad traveled during the week and was only home from Friday night through Sunday afternoon. My mom cooked a special dinner for Daddy the nights he was home, and we ate leftovers or simple suppers the rest of the week. Until I was about ten, I didn’t realize that other dads came home every evening and most people had a regular dinner each night.
My sister was younger, and she thought Daddy lived at the airport all week: we would pick him up Friday and return him Sunday.
