BLASTS FROM THE PAST (Repost from January 3, 2005)

Monday, January 3, 2005

2:41:00 AM EST

Feeling Chillin'

Hearing What Do The Simple Folk Do~from Camelot

Blasts from the Past

::singing......."What do the simple folk do to help them escape when they're blue?"::

I got to thinking about how I killed time when I was a kid. Geez, there were tons of things to do and play. Running around outside playing kick the can, tag, red rover, girls chase boys or boys chase girls (yeah, that game is still being played well into adulthood along with "Doctor"), hide 'n seek.

But, it was the toys and games I was mainly recalling. We had some kick-ass stuff. Granted, they weren't computer games or other overly high-tech toys. Didn't matter. They were still awesome. Some of the games are still around today. They'd be called classic games, though. Ugh. That makes me sound as if I am ancient (well, I'm NOT). Those games would be Battleship, Monopoly, Operation, Clue, and so on. Most have been updated and are way cool.

There were amazing games/toys that today would be banned and deemed dangerous as hell. It wouldn't be an unfair label, either. The things WERE dangerous. One of my favorites was probably one of the most hazardous. It was called Vac-U-Form. You were given these colored squares of plastic, you slipped them onto this 70 bazillion degree metal mold, and then you closed the lid until the plastic could be molded from the heat into the shape you chose (in two friggin' seconds). Ah, the smell of the plastic as it heated was good. The smell of your flesh burning from accidentally touching the metal wasn't so pleasant. You whipped up the lid, let the plastic cool, then you trimmed away the portions that weren't part of the shape. You could paint them...add wheels (if you'd chosen the car mold)...or even glue on a jewelry pin, so it could be worn. Ha! My sister had her school picture taken with this really ugly Vac-U-Form turtle pin she made and painted. Throw in that she had buck teeth then, too, and she was a real looker. We've never let her forget that.

Along those lines were two other fire-causing toys I particularly liked. One was called Creepy Crawlers. Same premise as Vac-U-Form in that metal molds were used, but you squeezed colored goop into the mold before dropping it into the friggin' kiln. ::laugh:: I loved how you could mix the colors together and end up with awesome looking spiders and worms and butterflies. Incredible Edibles was pretty much the exact same, except the goop was edible (duh, hence the name). Oooo...you made your own gummy worms essentially. I loved messing with that stuff.

I really do like that my family was into playing games. We had a blast with this giant Skittles game. Damn, Mom still has it. It was a huge wood rectangular "box" maybe 5' long, with wood bowling pins, and tops with strings. You wrapped the string around the top and whipped it to set it hopping out of the entrance and on its way to knock down the strategically placed pins with varying point values. That sucker would sometimes hop the gate on its way out. Of course, all of us had our own unique style of wrapping the string to coax the best performance from our tops. ::sigh:: All six of us played that. We reallllllly had fun.

We four girls fought like crazy playing games like Booby-Trap (outta the gutter, pervs...it's a GAME that doesn't involve body touching). The object was to pull out a round disk without moving the wood bar on the spring-loaded board. Amazing just how friggin' keen our eyesight was when it wasn't our own turn. ::snicker:: "It moved...it moved...we all saw it move...it's my turn...cheater...Mommmmmmm, she's cheating." Pick-Up-Sticks was the same damn way. Of course the sticks were practically flying across the room when it wasn't your turn. But when YOU picked up one, the air didn't even move. Lordy, we bitched at each other a lot during games like those. God love Mom. I do not recall her ever yelling at us during those times. Well, 'cept for the one "game" I played with my little sister ONCE. I called it the Match Game. Me: "Hey, wanna see a match burn twice?" Her: "Yes." Me: Lighting a match and saying, "One"...then blowing out the match and immediately holding it on her thigh while it burned her and saying "Two." God, I got in HUGE trouble for that. Mom nailed me with that damn flyswatter...and Daddy spanked me when Mom told him about it. Maybe I wasn't such a cute lil kid after all. (I don't care. I'm still sitting here laughing about that.)

And so here it is, 2005 and all sorts of nifty toys are available for kids. Some would have been fun to have had when I was wee little. But, I think everyone is left with some wonderful memories regardless of what toys were available. It isn't really the game as much as the fact you were involved in the playing of a game with your peers, your family, or whomever.

Today's quote: "You just wait until your father gets home!" ~My Mom and everyone else's Mom