The negativity and hopelessness around me is really bringing me down.
Wallowing in nostalgia makes me feel a wee bit better.
Here are some of the things I did as a kid. I was pretty happy in my own company.
Pry open a D size battery to get the smooth carbon rod and the steel caps out. I found it quite satisfying.
Use my dad’s pen knife to stab trees especially banana trees
Try to get the blades out from twin blade cartridges that my neighbor used to throw out and use them to sharpen my pencils
Adding alcohol to permanent markers to make them last a little more longer. They were hard to come by back then.
4a. Split regular pencils and try to use the lead for my prized mechanical pencil.
I was crazy about small DC motors and LEDs and used to spend hours making fans and cranes.
Hang around houses with good hi-fi systems, hoping they would soon play a record
Make lenses by knocking the base of a light bulb and filling it with water. Burned myself a few times doing it. Also used it to project film slides using a flashlight.
Make hydrogen balloons with cigarette foil, lime and another ingredient that I forget now.
Get in dad’s car and pretend I was driving for hours.
Watch about half a dozen toads that lived in the pit where the water meter was.
Tuning the shortwave receiver
Rest of the time, I read. : )
I sliced the bottom of my foot with a Swiss army knife “to see what would happen.” Uh…what happened was what you’d expect to happen.
Was 6 when I told a flight attendant “I haven’t decided” when she asked what my name was. (I had believed that everyone changed to a new name at some point, and thought I was overdue)
Made “submarines” out of clear LEGO-like blocks for the ants in our house. The LEGOs were airtight when combined together, so I put ants in the submarines in hot bath water. They ran frantically faster and faster due to the heat.
I liked to make mazes out of Lego for earwigs. Unfortunately the earwigs were too clever for me, and found tiny cracks and recesses in these constructions to squeeze through: they rarely made it all the way through the maze before escaping.
I’ve forgotten the details, but we would dig a trench, build a bridge over it and arrange little army men all around the trench and bridge. The trench would get filled with a mixture of (??) which we would ignite, creating a blazing river.
When I was in preschool, I stuck my finger under the stapler and stapled it, to see what would happen. In all fairness I don’t think I really understood how staplers worked at that age. Of course what happened was I pricked my finger with a staple. And I didn’t tell anyone, because we weren’t allowed to use the stapler and I was afraid I’d get in trouble.
I once shorted a 9V battery with a paper clip, which made the paper clip get really hot. I thought that was really cool, and I wanted to show my younger sister. So I went up to her and was like “Hey, touch this paper clip.” So she did, and promptly burned herself.
When I was 7, I had a bad habit of replying “yes” or “no” to questions I did not understand. Some kid asked me if I was a virgin. I had no idea what a virgin was, so I said “no.”
Kitten races: I put two cats on the starting line. They would eventually wander off. The first one that passed the winning line would win. And on the other side was the losing line. If one passed that line then it lost.
I made a water system at a place in the yard where there wasn’t grass. It had lakes, rivers, dams, etc. Then turn on the hose and watch the water flow through the system.
When the ants reach his estate, Leiningen seals it by filling a moat that surrounds it on four sides, the fourth being a river. The ants attempt to cross over by covering the waters with tree leaves, but he thwarts them repeatedly by emptying then flooding the moat. Eventually, the ants breach that line of defence and the men retreat behind a second moat, this time filled with petrol. Leiningen is able to incinerate several waves of attack, but runs out of petrol when the pumps malfunction.
When I would stay at my brother’s place in the summer, another boy and I would make stilts out of scrap lumber. We would also make slingshots out of sapling forks, using strips from old innertubes for the elastic, then decorate them by burning designs in them using a magnifying glass.
We’d make forts in the woods. I don’t think we ever really played in them after they were completed. The fun was finding the perfect spot, clearing it, and finding different rocks that would make good chairs, plants that we’d pretend were food, etc. They were never wooden structures, just a cleared-out space under big trees.
In the spring when the snow was melting and water was running everywhere, we’d build dams or try to force the water into a maze of “rivers”.
In the summer, we’d collect different flowers, pine needles, etc., and make perfume. We’d also capture frogs, bugs, minnows and create a zoo. We’d always let them go after a few hours.
A few days back I had reason to find a photo of me at 13 sitting in front of my ham radio transceiver.
Unfortunately, every time I hit the code key all of the televisions in the neighborhood had black bars on the screen. My dad and I tried all kinds of filters and tweaking but it was still imperfect.
To put things in perspective, an iPhone broadcasts somewhere around 200-300 milliwatts when it’s happy, and it can reach a tower 7 miles away. My ham radio produced 120 watts at the antenna: 500 times as powerful. When I hit the code key, the lights dimmed, the radio hummed, and neighbors cursed.
My mom put an end to my radio career about two years later.