Things ya used to do as a youngun

We don't have one of those "Neentendoes" growing up... we just have vacant spaces on the walls we just stare at...

All the kids on the block were jealous of my kodak chrome

Wacky homemade webcam movies.

Also, I used to use bathtime as an excuse to bring all my action figures into the bathroom and have massive free-for-all battles for the strategically important bathtub rim.

Well, the luckier kids had woolly mammoths to ride to school. I, however, had to walk uphill both ways in the frigid cold.

I mostly played video games.

Wandering the woods and fields, when growing up in Scotland. Scotland has no trespassing laws for the countryside — you can't enter someone's house, but you can't keep people out of fields and woodlands and all the rest.

^ So you're just free to roam the countryside, no matter what? That sounds awesome.

Yes, the Scots are very big on their freedoms.

I used to live by the sea as a child. It took less than ten minutes to walk there; less if I was at my best friend's house. I miss surfing with her, and getting dumped miserably into the waves. I miss watching the pipis dig their way into the sand after each wave dragged itself back into the ocean. If we weren't at the beach, we were at the rockpools. I spent hours watching a tiny pool for fish or octopuses. I remember finding a little crevice with minute, nearly transparent shrimp, sharing a home with a brightly coloured fish and a baby crab.

There was also a place which I called, with my typical imagination for names, "Starfish Lagoon". It was a long walk through the actual lagoon and a field full of cowpats, but it was worth it for the amazing number and variety of starfish there. My favourite was a many-armed, bright yellow-orange-red specimen. Like a miniature Sun. You could flip them onto their backs and watch them slowly somersault over.

I don't miss the sea slugs which vomited stinky purple ick at us when we disturbed it.

Read a lot.

I miss swinging.

I spent hours in the McDonald forest reserve.

http://www.cof.orst.edu/cf/recreation/visitor_map.php

Yes, hours of "where the hell am I" can be yours too - just head south until you hit a road, we did that one time and spent a good twelve hours trying to get back home.

Played hide and seek barefoot.

Wait. I still do that.

edited 15th Mar '11 2:23:18 PM by OriDoodle

Jumped off trees, roleplayed, pet animals, touched everything in museums, talked, played video games, played with my toys, read books...Lots of things that I still do now...

Things in particular? I'd set up fake chess board looking things with my Legos and create two armies of left handed troops (I am left handed obviously). I'd then try to play games similar to Shining Force with their turns and combat and such. I used dice rolling to determine attack damage and shit. Not sure how I actually calculated this shit though.

I also used to make board games that looked like Mario Party rejects. Sadly figuring out how to play minigames this way wasn't easy...I never had anyone to play with anyway...

Jump rope. Also, fly a kite.

I used to run up and down and all over the creek going past the neighbourhood. My friends and I have done things like grabbing the tail of a trout hiding in a pool and dragging it out from under a rock to show my friends the "awesome fish".

Damn it, Aon. You make me want to be your friend...

Climb trees fall out of trees. Ride my bike through all the puddles in the neighborhood and hit that one puddle that was a pothole and fly over the handle bars. Stand on one car and jump over to the other car misjudge distance break elbow. Take a burn barrel fill it with leaves and crawl in it and roll down the hill. Dirt clod fights. I was a very girly girl.

I used to love climbing trees, too! This daycare I used to go to had this one really tall tree that I climbed all the time! But eventually they cut it down.

I climbed trees up until the age of about... 16 or so, when I reluctantly decided I was a little old for it. Even then I still climbed them, I just took a book with me and sat up there to read.

There was this depression in the garden around our house that would fill with water every time it rained. My brother and I called it the Fish Pond, and when it rained we would play in it for hours. Some years later my father tried to plant something there, and dug up a collection of plastic toys that we'd lost.

Not hesitate to take my shirt off to go swimming. Build stuff out of junk big storms washed in. Comment non stop on the smell of salt water. Suck on my PFD for the salty taste that was almost sweet.

Wait for the ice cream truck, which doesn't come around anymore.

Ours was one of the first houses finished in our neighborhood. It was this amazing landscape of half-constructed houses, land that had been cleared (fossils ahoy!) and land that had yet to be cleared, which was full of ponds and the youngster-attracting things that ponds hold. Like tadpoles. Buckets and buckets worth of tadpoles. And enough box turtles to feed a family for a year.

It sucked when the area finally finished being built up. But at least I still had the lake! And if you dug around in the rocks near the shoreline long enough you could find crawdads! Angry, angry crawdads.

Juan: Heh. The games I did play with friends were mostly those ridiculous make believe things kids love so much. Ours were more or less very bad crossover fanfiction in LARP form. You had...Kingdom Hearts, Lunar, Final Fantasy, Gundam, ZOIDS, Digimon, Pokemon, Final Fantasy, Legend of Legaia, Tenchi Muyo, Saber Marionette J, Breath of Fire, Dragon Ball Z, Metroid, The Legend of Zelda, Shining Force and more mashed into one huge horribly convoluted plot that makes the average American soap opera look like a perfectly sensible and well acted masterpiece. We had wooden swords, sticks, PVC pipes, plastic shields, foam swords and shields, lightsabers, plastic helmets, various Halloween costumes and props, and those capes from Lego Land to act all this out with.