| What weird thing have you done? | |
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+6Abe F. March alj Carol Troestler Dick Stodghill Phil Whitley alice 10 posters |
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alice Five Star Member
Number of posts : 15672 Registration date : 2008-10-22 Age : 76 Location : Redmond, WA
| Subject: What weird thing have you done? Sat Jun 13, 2009 8:15 pm | |
| The weird, fun thing I did was fly in a hot air balloon. I liked it so well I went four times.
What did you do? Curious as usual. |
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Phil Whitley Four Star Member
Number of posts : 907 Registration date : 2008-04-01 Age : 81 Location : Riverdale, GA
| Subject: Re: What weird thing have you done? Sat Jun 13, 2009 9:36 pm | |
| The weirdest/most stupid thing I ever did I recorded in my memoir "Stories From My Childhood". You will recognize the pertinent part when you see it...
I called it "The Far Tar", which is suthun for "Fire Tower"
Pine Mountain Valley is situated between Pine Mountain and Oak Mountain. Someone decided that a fire tower was needed on Oak Mountain, so they built a beautiful 110 foot metal tower right on top. After it was finished and electric power was ran to it, they abandoned it – never to be used as a lookout tower for fires. Seems there was no way to get a telephone line to it or something… at least that was the story we all heard.
But it made a GREAT place to go camping! My brother Johnny, Jimmy Mosley, Jimmy Crawley and I would spent most of the day hauling sleeping gear and food up the mountain and then into the cabin at the top of the tower. No (decent) road was ever cleared so there was no driving there. We always brought a screw-in fuse to “power up” the electric outlet. Our “campfire” was an old hotplate we had salvaged from the dump. We also had an extension cord and one of those trouble lights to hang in the ceiling. We would stay up most of the night, telling ghost stories and just watching the stars and the porch lights wink out one by one as people in the Valley below went to bed.
One night the lamp started flickering badly. We discovered that the line from the fuse box at the base was swinging free and had rubbed a bare spot about ten feet down from the top. It was arcing and sparking on the metal beams. Since I was familiar with electricity and knew that as long as I wasn't grounded I could climb down to where it was sparking. I tied it away from the metal with a shoelace from my high-top tennis shoe and climbed back up to the "cabin". DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!!! I can't believe I was that dumb, but I was – and it worked.
Something we had not planned on was the “ghost story” that our light in the tower created. Seems that the faint light from our lamp could be seen from the valley below. Some people didn’t even know there was a tower there! We began hearing stories about the “ghost lights on Oak Mountain”. We never told, since a good ghost story is much better than a camping trip story! |
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Dick Stodghill Five Star Member
Number of posts : 3795 Registration date : 2008-05-04 Age : 98 Location : Akron, Ohio
| Subject: Re: What weird thing have you done? Sun Jun 14, 2009 6:38 am | |
| It's surprising that you're still around to tell the story. By all rights you should have become the ghost of Oak Mountain. Myself - never did anything weird. At least not in my opinion. Well, there was that episode about a month before my friend Hawkeye and I were kicked out of the Boy Scouts. We went to Scout camp and knew there was to be a contest for building a fire by rubbing two sticks together, This seemed pretty stupid to a couple of streetwise kids so Hawkeye took along a small vial of gasoline and I brought matches. We had flames shooting high in the air while those other poor fools were rubbing sticks. We won, but then they took the prize away from us. |
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alice Five Star Member
Number of posts : 15672 Registration date : 2008-10-22 Age : 76 Location : Redmond, WA
| Subject: Re: What weird thing have you done? Sun Jun 14, 2009 6:46 am | |
| Brew nd Dick, Your poor mothers, must have worried themselves sick over what you would think of next! Great exploits and thanks for sharing. |
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Carol Troestler Five Star Member
Number of posts : 3827 Registration date : 2008-06-07 Age : 86 Location : Wisconsin
| Subject: Re: What weird thing have you done? Sun Jun 14, 2009 7:01 am | |
| My husband has stories such as those of Phil and Dick, and I always have felt a certain amount of sympathy for his mother. Then there were my sons whose stories come out over the years.
As for me. . . I'll try to think of something.
Carol |
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alj Five Star Member
Number of posts : 9633 Registration date : 2008-12-05 Age : 80 Location : San Antonio
| Subject: Re: What weird thing have you done? Sun Jun 14, 2009 7:39 am | |
| People often asked me, years ago, why I married my ex.This was one of the main reasons: That's Bill in the white cap, manning the tiller. Our sailing buddy, Jim is beside him with the jib sheet. I'm forward, in the straw hat, trimming the spinnaker. This boat was called a Flying Scot, flying because it could plane. To get it to plane on a reach (The picture shows it on a run, hence the spinnaker), we all had to hike out over the edge, by tucking the toes of our deck shoes under the centerboard frame, and leaning back until our bodies were level and parallel to the deck, which meant, since the boat would be heeling, that we were at a 45 degree angle to the water. We sold the Scot just after this sail, and bought a 26' MORC (Midget Ocean Racing Cruiser) we named Escape, which had two cabins, a head, and a galley. We were racing it in Sabine Lake's Midwinter Regatta less than a year after the photo above (tried to find a picture of the Escape, but couldn't), and as we came off the spinnaker run, we were in first place. The larger boat had an oversized jib called a ginny, and we were dropping the spinnaker (the striped silk parachute looking sail) which was a tricky process, but we did it perfectly and started to raise the ginny when its halyard broke. We thought we were doomed, but as I looked down into the spinnaker bucket with its thin halyard still attached, I shouted, "raise the ginny with the spinnaker halyard!" Bill said it wouldn't work; it would break under the strain and we would lose the ginny, but Jim was already hooking it up, and Bill came about, cursing us as we raised the sail. The reach was the home stretch and we didn't utter a single sound, all of us watching that quivering halyard. We were still holding our breath when we crossed the finish line, back in first place. Oh, and pardon the technical language. I can't believe I still remember it, after 40 years. Nobody on one of Bill's boats dared not to use the proper sailing terms. Ann |
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Abe F. March Five Star Member
Number of posts : 10768 Registration date : 2008-01-26 Age : 85 Location : Germany
| Subject: Re: What weird thing have you done? Sun Jun 14, 2009 8:30 am | |
| Guess I'll add my dumb action. I was deer hunting with my Dad. I was fifteen at the time carrying my newly acquired 30-30 lever-action Winchester. The strap was attached to the stock at the one end and at the tip of the barrel at the other. I wasn't sure the deer I spotted was a buck but had cocked the gun ready to fire. I decided to climb a tree for a better look and placed the strap over my neck to free my hands for climbing. I didn't realize that the barrel of the gun was pointed at the back of my head and that the trigger was considered "light to the touch" or "a hair trigger." When I took hold of the strap to remove it from my head, I noticed that the hammer was in the cocked position and then remembered the barrel scraping the back of my head while climbing the tree. All thoughts of the deer were gone. I un-cocked the hammer and sat for a bit until the shaking stopped. Yes, hunting accidents do happen and they are usually from carelessness. |
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Don Stephens Five Star Member
Number of posts : 1355 Registration date : 2008-01-25 Age : 86 Location : Wherever my hat's hanging today!
| Subject: Re: What weird thing have you done? Sun Jun 14, 2009 8:38 am | |
| I got off of a perfectly good airplane while it was still flying...1,400 times! |
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Dick Stodghill Five Star Member
Number of posts : 3795 Registration date : 2008-05-04 Age : 98 Location : Akron, Ohio
| Subject: Re: What weird thing have you done? Sun Jun 14, 2009 10:24 am | |
| Don, you just never learn, do you? Tell me, Marie, why would a young girl want to go to Buffalo of all places? We're lucky that Abe is still with us. Reminds me of the guy who forgot and violated a cardinal rule of infantrymen in combat by failing to engage the safety on his rifle when he wasn't firing at someone. As he climbed down into a slit trench the trigger caught on a twig and the bullet entered the back of his foot. It was at a time when a number of young replacements were shooting themselves in the foot and he was afraid people would think that was what he had done so he kept it a secret. A big mistake because a few days later he had gangrene. He also forgot that no one ever shot themselves in that area of the foot. |
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alj Five Star Member
Number of posts : 9633 Registration date : 2008-12-05 Age : 80 Location : San Antonio
| Subject: Re: What weird thing have you done? Sun Jun 14, 2009 11:00 am | |
| Brew wrote: - Quote :
- I called it "The Far Tar", which is suthun for "Fire Tower"
Oh, my, Brew, but this brings back old memories. i was visiting my grandparents on their East Texas farm when a group of distant cousins came by on horseback, leading a saddled, but empty horse. It turned out, they had brought the horse for me. As I was managing, barely, to mount the thing, my cousin told my grandmother we would be going to the far tar. I, in my citified ignorance, had no inkling of what a far tar might be. A tar pit deep in the piney woods? At a far distance from Granma's house? I did eventually learn that a far tar was, as you said, a fire tower, but it was a very long time before I told my grandmother what we did when we got there: We clumb it. Ann |
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Phil Whitley Four Star Member
Number of posts : 907 Registration date : 2008-04-01 Age : 81 Location : Riverdale, GA
| Subject: Re: What weird thing have you done? Sun Jun 14, 2009 12:23 pm | |
| Ann, that's a great story! (synchronicity rules). The worst case of vernacular I ever heard - and believe me, I have heard some pretty bad - was a man I worked with at the hospital. He was from Alabama. The two of us were sent to a room where the bathroom had flooded and shorted out the electrical circuit.
He said to me, "I'll fix the mote, and you take keer of the `lectricicums."
It took me a minute to understand that he was going to unstop the commode while I worked on the electrical problem. |
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alice Five Star Member
Number of posts : 15672 Registration date : 2008-10-22 Age : 76 Location : Redmond, WA
| Subject: Re: What weird thing have you done? Sun Jun 14, 2009 5:54 pm | |
| Wonderful exploits--I am so glad you are all alive. You reminded me that I used to be a logger. Whem I was little, I set tongs for my dad when he was loading logs. It was not the normal run of the mill thing for a kid to do. |
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Betty Fasig Five Star Member
Number of posts : 4334 Registration date : 2008-06-12 Age : 81 Location : Duette, Florida
| Subject: Re: What weird thing have you done? Sun Jun 14, 2009 6:22 pm | |
| Alice, you have always been brave and extra-ordinary. I get a vision of you walking on the water over the logs and yelling at the top of your lungs....It is a nice vision. Warrior Alice. I have done some fairly bizarre things in my life. I dug a swimming pool once. This was long ago. We had an above ground pool and I considered it an eyesore. I thought that if it were in a hole in the ground, it would be much nicer. I started digging. All the neghborhood kids and their dogs dug with me for days. Finally all the neighbors began to dig and then my ex sat on a chair and watched. We had a hole that was eighteen feet round and four feet deep. The pool shell went around and the plastic liner was down, the pump hooked up, water filled the thing and it stands this day, 28 years later with the new people who bought the house after the divorce. Once the pool was in, I built a wooden deck that went from the house and around the pool. I am not just another pretty face. I wish sometimes that I were. Love, Betty |
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Abe F. March Five Star Member
Number of posts : 10768 Registration date : 2008-01-26 Age : 85 Location : Germany
| Subject: Re: What weird thing have you done? Sun Jun 14, 2009 10:07 pm | |
| Betty, you are some special person. |
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zadaconnaway Five Star Member
Number of posts : 4017 Registration date : 2008-01-16 Age : 76 Location : Washington, USA
| Subject: Re: What weird thing have you done? Sun Jun 14, 2009 10:57 pm | |
| I second Abe's remark--wholeheartedly. |
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Dick Stodghill Five Star Member
Number of posts : 3795 Registration date : 2008-05-04 Age : 98 Location : Akron, Ohio
| Subject: Re: What weird thing have you done? Mon Jun 15, 2009 5:53 am | |
| I agree - a very special person and a wonderful writer. |
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alj Five Star Member
Number of posts : 9633 Registration date : 2008-12-05 Age : 80 Location : San Antonio
| Subject: Re: What weird thing have you done? Mon Jun 15, 2009 7:21 am | |
| Add my name to this list. Betty you are one of the most beautiful people I know.
Ann |
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alice Five Star Member
Number of posts : 15672 Registration date : 2008-10-22 Age : 76 Location : Redmond, WA
| Subject: Re: What weird thing have you done? Mon Jun 15, 2009 7:32 am | |
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Carol Troestler Five Star Member
Number of posts : 3827 Registration date : 2008-06-07 Age : 86 Location : Wisconsin
| Subject: Re: What weird thing have you done? Mon Jun 15, 2009 7:33 am | |
| Betty is probably floating through her garden this morning with all those kind words.
Add mine to the others.
Love, Carol |
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Betty Fasig Five Star Member
Number of posts : 4334 Registration date : 2008-06-12 Age : 81 Location : Duette, Florida
| Subject: Re: What weird thing have you done? Mon Jun 15, 2009 4:31 pm | |
| I feel like a flower! Thank you all for the lovely words. Today was my day to clean my house. I started it off with picking a new bouquet for the kitchen. Each of you are a flower in that bouquet. I should take a picture and post it as my avatar so you can all decide which flower you are. Such lovelies that adorn my life! Love, Betty |
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alice Five Star Member
Number of posts : 15672 Registration date : 2008-10-22 Age : 76 Location : Redmond, WA
| Subject: Re: What weird thing have you done? Mon Jun 15, 2009 4:54 pm | |
| Betty,
I want to be the yellow flower |
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zadaconnaway Five Star Member
Number of posts : 4017 Registration date : 2008-01-16 Age : 76 Location : Washington, USA
| Subject: Re: What weird thing have you done? Mon Jun 15, 2009 5:05 pm | |
| I'll take the red one. Not the one in front, the one behind it! How lucky you are Betty to have such lovely flowers in your garden. Of course, I am sure you put no small amount of work into growing them. |
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Domenic Pappalardo Five Star Member
Number of posts : 2557 Registration date : 2009-04-27
| Subject: Re: What weird thing have you done? Mon Jun 15, 2009 5:11 pm | |
| Take care Betty...there are horn dogs on this thread. Their words are like honey... |
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Betty Fasig Five Star Member
Number of posts : 4334 Registration date : 2008-06-12 Age : 81 Location : Duette, Florida
| Subject: Re: What weird thing have you done? Mon Jun 15, 2009 5:24 pm | |
| I am smiling here! These are the flowers that I grow for the U Pick flowers. Some are still growing, like the white marigolds and the peppermint zinnias. I do have too much fun with myself sometimes. Today a lady came and ate the nastursium flowers right in front of me! Where on this earth is that possible... right here at Easy Pickins. Alice and Zada, your wish is my command. Consider yourselves zapped into full bloom. Love, Betty |
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zadaconnaway Five Star Member
Number of posts : 4017 Registration date : 2008-01-16 Age : 76 Location : Washington, USA
| Subject: Re: What weird thing have you done? Mon Jun 15, 2009 5:35 pm | |
| You are truly lovely, Betty, and a wonderful friend. I will be smiling the rest of the day, and hope you are smiling too. (I'm sure you smile a lot. At least, in my mind, you are a smile.) |
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