Never Stick Your Tongue on a Frozen Flag Pole

No, I've never done that. Thank you I do have a few cells of common sense. Just a few though mind.

*Thought of this because it's like 100 F in DC right now. Ugh.

In addition to living in the middle of nowhere surrounded by nothing but trees and more trees, my parents also have a semi natural pond that my dad has enlarged. There's a hill (which is basically all the sand dug out of the pond) that makes for great sledding in the winter and if the pond froze quickly enough it was good ice skating. Mostly though it didn't freeze quickly enough so the surface wasn't smooth. It would semi freeze and then all the millions of trees would drop the last vestigages of leaves at which point the pond would totally freeze...leaving (ha ha) leaf bumps all over the place. A couple times my dad tried to flood it after it froze to create a smooth surface. But then it would snow again. He also tried, just once or twice I think, to clear the surface with the snowblower. Like our very own zamboni.

He stopped doing that when the snow blower fell through the ice.

Despite these issues we did a fair amount of ice skating as kids. At night my mom would even drive the car back into the woods and run down her battery shining the high beams on the pond for light. Much as with any sport, my sister was always better at skating than both my brother and I were.

I thought I was pretty hot stuff when I learned how to skate backwards. Slowly and very wobbly. Bernadette could cross her feet (and later skated around thusly on roller blades) while Brian and I satisfied ourselves with less fancy footwork. I tried the cross over once. And fell on my face. One time I fell down and just did not feel like getting back up. I'd fallen one too many times that day and just wanted a time out. So after I rolled off my face I lay there for a while contemplating why it was I bothered to bother, while Bernadette zoomed around me showing off her triple lutz.

Ok so maybe she couldn't do a triple lux. It could have been a double axel. Whatever it was it just rubbed salt in the wound after my mom told me that I could not be both a professional ice skater and a nun (one of my choldhood goals). I still think she might have been lying. In any case, I did lay there a good while contemplating my ice skating failures. And then I tired to get up.

And promptly slammed my head into the ice when my curly hair bounced back. Small problem; I was frozen to the ice. I had not considered this possibility during my quiet contemplation. So I solved this problem the same way I solved many problems back then; I yelled for my mom.

After she stopped laughing at me did offer a solution that did not involve cutting off all my hair; that was Dad's solution. She brought over a thermos and pour hot chocolate all over my head.

While I was happy to be free I was less than thrilled to be drenched on hot chocolate. It's really sticky. And my the time I'd trekked back to the house I had frozen, sticky hot chocolate all over my head. Awesome.

So the moral here is the same as with flag poles. If something is frozen, do not allow any part of your body to rest on it for a period of more than about 3 Mississippis.

Flight of the Bumblebee

My siblings and I were weird kids. I blame it partially on my parents and partially on where we grew up. Small town, yes, but we weren't even in the town. We lived between two small towns (right on the school line actually) in the middle of no where. After school, weekends, and summers were spent entertaining ourselves as our friends were all spread out so much. Growing up in Michigan we also learned how to play both in and outdoors since eight months out of the year Michigan has winter.

One of the things we used to do for entertainment was listen to classical music. Yes we did. Our mom is a clasically trained singer and I think we can all verbatim quote Verdi's La Traviata. In the original Italian.  A favorite tape, yes I grew up when not only cassettes but also records were still used, was Hooked on Classics and our favorite piece was Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee". It was also my mom's favorite or most hated piece, I'm not sure. Either she hated it because we played it all the time and were really annoying when we listened to it, or she loved it because it exhausted us.

How could a classical piece of music exhaust a bunch of kids? you might might ask. Well I'm glad you asked. We were sedate children who sat quietly on the couch experiencing early music appreciation lessons. We played to the music. And really if you don't know the piece, check out the Wikipedia link and listen to it so you can better understand our game. And was was our game? Glad you asked!

We ran around and around and around in circles.

And around and around and around some more.

And then we stopped the cassette, rewound it, and did it again. A lot.

Wikipedia says: ""Flight of the Bumblebee" is recognizable for its frantic pace when played up to tempo, with nearly uninterrupted runs of chromatic sixteenth notes. It is not so much the pitch or range of the notes that are played that challenges the musician, but simply the musician's ability to move to them quickly enough, because of this and it's complexity, it requires a great deal of skill to perform."

In addition to running around and around and around in circles we also raced to see who could do it the fastest. Not that there was a start and end point by whcih to judge this, I think we just decided that you had to pass the other two more often than they passed you. It got somewhat rough and my brother, who is the youngest, probably took the brunt of it.

He's 6'7" now. We no longer play this game with him.

The moral of the story is that if you want to both tire the heck out of hyper kids AND give them a deep appreciation for music...encourage them to run around madly while listening to the classics.

P.S.
The depiction there of my living room does not do the rough, dark brown, wood paneling and the red and black shag carpet nearly enough justice.