Lazy days

There was a time where I was left up to my own devices. These were good days for me, not so much for my parents. Summer as a kid never fails to let one down. Growing up there was a pretty big field behind my house full of scotch broom. If you haven't seen scotch broom consider yourself lucky, its a big weed with little redeeming value. However when I was about 10 (just a guess, the only time I cared about how old I was as a kid was around my birthday) I looked at that field and thought to myself "its a gold mine". With Paul, my best friend, and Kristian, my brother, we would hand make brooms and then go door to door and peddle our wares.

Thanks goodness for neighbors, who either took pity on us or felt it necessary to reward such ingenuity (probably the later ;), we sold a couple. Keep in mind we were selling them at close-out prices to move inventory. Well after a hard days work we had earned enough to buy large quantities of bubble gum from the "Bi-Mart". This wasn't an easy task, Bi-mart was a "members only" type of a place where once you flash your membership card they buzz the little swinging door to let you in. We as 10-year-olds, had no membership, but we were pretty clever. Besides after biking 3 miles from home, without telling our parents where we were going, we weren't about to turn back empty handed. So we waited outside for a single person who could be our "parent"; and then just followed closely behind like we belonged to them. Pure genius, well that's what we thought.

Once home, we sat on the front porch to enjoy the bounty of bubble gum that was ours. Being fairly competitive we were able to turn chewing gum into a competition. The first was was an obvious test; who could get the most gum into their mouth at one time. We didn't finish this competition before we realized that copious amounts of saliva were gathering in our mouth. At first this was great, all that sugar was a reward for a hard days work. But that didn't last too long it became too much. We started to spit it onto the walkway of the front porch. The walkway had a slight slope away from our feet; and the next competition presented itself. Who could spit enough saliva to create a river of spit to cross the walk-way first? The game was on!

Those lazy days are gone, much to my mother's delight. Not that she didn't love us, she just didn't love us when we were left to our own devices.

These days I have other things to distract me.
Golf
Photography
My kids
Triathlon
Reading (just kidding)

Every once and a while I'll post something here to distract me and perhaps someone else will be a little amused or at least, distracted.