December 02, 2005

• The Portable Playground (it is a cardboard box) is a good reminder that spending a lot of money on toys for small children and for pets is an enormous waste of money. A cardboard box can be a ton of fun for kids. I had more lightsabre duels as a child with the wrapping papper tubes than I probably would have with official lightsabre toys.
• I'm happy to say I defeated both my (older) brother multiple times with cardboard tube swordfights. The tactic, which they of course felt was foul play, was to concentrate the awesome hacking power of the cardboard tube upon your opponent's cardboard tube, whereupon it would collapse into a the equivalent of a big brown ringlet. Then, deprived of their weapon with which to parry, you could then skewer them with impunity (and not much effectiveness, as it is of course, a cardboard tube).
• now i want a terror alert xylophone.
• Musical Xylophone of Terror. Priceless.
• One Christmas when I was two or three my mom and dad went crazy buying me fun toys (probably spending too much money). On Christmas day they were so excited to see me play with all the neat stuff -- and I played with the boxes for a week. My mom cried, but says she learned a lesson.
• Boxes were always fun to play with. I remember making a house out of one in the garage one time. And decorating it. Then about a week or two later it was thrown outside with the garbage... Damn my brother.
• I still love boxes... and shiny things... nothing beats a shiny box.
• Hot, wet boxes beat shiny boxes.
• Cardboard boxes and laundry baskets are the best cars/houses/turtle shells/stuffed-animal holders/airplanes ever.
• Boxes and laundry baskets also make excellent race cars. I also used to play with the cardboard tubes from wrapping paper, paper towels and toilet paper. Except I called them "doot dah doos," because that's the noise you make through them -- at maximum volume -- once you get your hands on one. Doot dah doooooooo!
• meredithea I love you! I still "doot dah doo" everytime I put out a new roll of TP or papertowels. mr. medusa always gives me a funny look...
• Towels plus carpeted stairs with rounded lips = endless hours of sliding fun. My brother and I would also raid the bedding closet and make tent cities in his bedroom using sheets, cardboard boxes and his bunk bed. I still miss that, once we finished, playing around in it was like spelunking.
• I still do doot dah doo, too! The people around me have learned to ignore that I am, at heart, still kind of twelve.
• there is also the everpopular staircase parachuting: tie the width end of a bedsheet around yr waist, hold corners of other width end over head, with length of sheet billowing out behind you. now jump from whichever step you dare. can't believe none of us ever broke a bone (doing this, that is)
• around age 7 i discovered that the mattresses of my bunk beds fit perfecly within the stairwell, permitting the construction of the slide of doom™. only once did i hit the glass window in the hallway at the end of the stairs.
• We parachuted off the roof of the garage, until we got caught.
• *GramMa waves cane* I told you kids get offa that roof!
• *giggles, runs*