Do you have a very random childhood memory to share?

I can remember when we used to visit my Uncle and Aunt in the city where they live. Their house is in a very quiet cul-de-sac. This seems very random but I always remember in the room I slept in, there being a picture on the bedside table of NYC at night and I always thinking it was such a cool photo.

 

I remember witnessing the birth of a woodlouse.

 

I remember riding a bike without helmet. Was bad ass.

 

I remember thinking the summer holidays were too short..

 

Camping out, backyard or back in the woods just north of the neighborhood. Staying up most of the night because we were running around all over town 'til first light.
Dropping my bicycle wherever I went in the daytime without worrying that it might be stolen.
Being one of the few elementary school kids that even adults didn't want to play games against because I beat them so badly the last time.
(I nearly grew up at that pool/club)
And, like irminsul, no helmet. No shoes or shirt, either. And the dog came in with me.
5/10 cent coke machines.

Stuff like that?

 

picking wild blackberries. building roads with tonka buldozers and back hoes and dump trucks by myself when there was a back yard.
always my happiest times were by myself even then. using an abondond railway trestle as a jungle jim more then an hour's walk from home before i started kindergarten.
the highway being two lane and the train over the hill as fast as the bus because it was. and the bus coming right into every little town and having its own station that you could get something to eat there. and there always being food on the train, but too expensive to afford it usually. matchbox cars long before hot wheels was invented, they were next to the magazene rack in the drug store.
seeing all the different kinds of creatures that lived out in the woods when i went for walks by myself. mostly watching trains go by though. hanging out at the depot where my dad was telegrapher, all or most of the day when i didn't need or have to be anywhere else. and we always had cats, sometimes one or two, one time as many as 24 of them, when multiple generations had had kittens.
it was all about trains, though nature was there too, and just so much of being part and around everything to not have even realized it was a seperate thing. it was just what was there outside of the house. oh there was a street too, but it was more of a road then a street. and it wasn't suburbia either, it was just they way little towns were in those days. we never lived in the same town for more then a couple of years until after i was in the third grade. lol that old cleche' about walking three miles to school. well that only happend if i missed the school bus, and i made dam sure it didn't happen more then once or twice. memories? i remember every minuet, though there are some i'd just as soon not choose to. but they're none of them completely occluded the way some people claim theirs to be if i choose to. bloody hell. i even remember being weighed before leaving the hospital for the first time right after i'd been born. i don't remember my birth itself, but i remember the before and after. and i certainly remember my infancy before i understood words or how to use them.

 

You have just made me laugh and you brought back memories of when our eldest daughter was about 4. We did not have a dog, so when she went out to play, she either borrowed or hijacked one for the day.
The problem was that Jane was petrified of her choice of Rottweilers, Dobermans and German Shepherds, most of who were taller than Christina. A few of the owners were also amazed at how their dogs would roll on the grass, play with her and obey her every command.
Perhaps the funniest day was when I got a frantic call from Jane to come home because their was a huge dog in the house and she had locked herself in the bedroom,
because when she started screaming the dog growled at her. When I arrived home, (it was in the middle of a heat wave), Christina and the dog were sound asleep on the lounge floor and Jane had been locked in the bedroom for 3 hours.
Needless to say, I got a dose of screaming, for encouraging our daughter to play with highly dangerous animals.
32 years on, Christina has her own dog and Jane got quite fond of her. In fact so fond that we now have our own Rottweiler who goes everywhere with Jane, no doubt because she is the one who feeds him when he stars getting under her feet.

 

And YOU On The Other Hand Were Quite Happy For A 4 Year Old To Romp With These

Unknown And Dangerous Dogs......?????



Cheers Glen.

 

If you saw how animals react to Christina, I doubt that you would have been too worried either.

No doubt living in a suburban area means that dogs are well cared for and trust humans.
Knowing her love of animals, as a police officer she gets dispatched to incidents involving them and she has never encountered a situation where a dog attacked an unknown child.
Although she has never dealt with a case where a dog has attacked a child in the household, on the rare occasions that it has happened, the situation is far from simple.
On one case study she read, the child had poked a skewer into the dogs eyes prior to the attack.

It was not about trusting the dogs with Christina, it was more about trusting her to treat them with love and respect.
Unfortunately, their are also stupid parents who allow their children to treat animals as toys.

In her training for a position in the murder squad, Christina read a paper that revealed that more than half of serial killers had started their career by torturing and killing animals.

 

Sorry......But This Response Went No Way Towards Answering My Question......



Cheers Glen.

 

LOL. Being 4 years o[d, she was not out on her own, so being an animal lover myself, I saw immediately how the dogs reacted to her.
Would you be concerned if a friends child started playing with your dog.? (I seem to remember from one of your posts that you are a dog owner)

A funny story for you.
Last year, Christina was dispatched to a call from a hysterical woman who demanded that the police removed and had a dog destroyed that had bitten her child.
She arrived to find that the woman was at her friends house and it was her friends dog who had tried to eat her child. The dog, a 6 week old puppy, had chewed the child's hand while he was playing with the dog.
By the time that Christina went to examine the injury, the red mark on the child's hand had already disappeared. It took her nearly an hour to convince the mother that the puppy was not going to grow up to eat children for lunch.You can imagine how relieved her friend was.
The really funny part was that while this was all going on, the child was in the other room playing with the puppy again.
A real day in the life of a London police officer.

 

Back to posting a personal answer on the thread.

One of my memories (when I was about 6 years old) was being put on a sheet of cardboard and pushed under a broken down tram in central London to close the valve that had activated the emergency brake........ I wonder what health and safety would make of that today.

Another was the day that I also spent with my father sitting in the control room during the commissioning of the reactors at one of the UK's first nuclear power stations. I assume that the scientists and engineers were far too nutty to even notice my age. I still wonder how that poor engineer must have felt when an 8 year old started telling him that he was doing it wrong.

People call me the nutty professor, I wonder what they called my late father who trained me both in electrical engineering and nutty.
Even when we were on a ship, I spent the entire journey either on the bridge playing wit the radar, or in the engine rooms fiddling with the exhaust gas temperature on the first heavy diesel powered liners and telling the engineers that if they get it wrong, the engines wont last for 30 years.

 

7 or 8 I was playing in the alley by the junkyard. Tony the owner had this big ugly tow truck like this. As curious kid we wanted to watch it working, and then he asked me to sit inside while he drug some metal around in the yard. I stood on the seat watching the back. Probably any minute a cable could snap and kill us.

 

This is what was once considered part of "the deadly triad".
Cruelty to animals
Playing with fire
Bed wetting.

I find all this amusing. I grew up wetting the bed and got treated to the worst shame and humiliation ever by my own parents. Their idiotic behavior was an expression of their own frustration at not being able to control something, or in this case, me. More on this later.

As a child, we had a particularly malignant neighbor girl who seemed to delight in getting anyone she could into trouble. No matter what the situation was, her response was always the same: "I'm calling the police!", and she did. With annoying regularity.

One fine day she came over into my backyard uninvited and saw me cooking crawdads on a small fire. She immediately screamed: "I'm calling the police!" and ran off. Naturally, they came over and talked to my mom about this, among other things I'm still not privy to. One thing I know for certain: No way was I gonna' eat them dang things raw. Not for her, nor for anyone else.

And with that, I was labeled as a budding sociopath. I had the so-called "deadly triad" and needed psychological help right now or else dire consequences would come, etc... I wonder what that dumb busybody would've said if she saw me cooking frog legs or fish, or some other animal over a fire... Perhaps she was one of those "vegan" types that don't eat meat. I don't care. I do, and I cook it first. Real good, too.

Remember the bedwetting part? This dogged me into adulthood. One day I wass looking through an herb manual and noticing all the things that could be treated with herbs. I thought, "Why not?" and looked up "bed weting" and to my amazement, there it was, complete with a list of things to try. The one that jumped out at me was "1 tablespoon of buckwheat honey 15 minutes before bed time". I recall thinking that this was weird. I had many 5lb jars of different types of honey in my kitchen, but none of them were buckwheat. I figured it couldn't hurt to try it, so I bought a small jar at a local store. A month went by before I ran out, during which I hadn't wet my bed one time. I was impressed, so I got another jar. And another. And continued waking up dry.

Here all this time I'd been told all kinds of things regarding this ( it was ALWAYS my fault) and none of them were true. It turns out that I was suffering from some kind of nutritional defiency. I was in my early 30's, and I've never had a problem since. So much for "trained professionals" with degrees. I'm now 65 and still have no problems with it. I'll never trust those stupid peckers with their wall paper degrees again. At least not without being able to verify for myself first.

About 10 years ago I noticed my brother filling his water bottle from the outside faucets instead of the inside ones and asked him why he didn't just use the inside faucets? He told me that, everytime he drank water from inside faucets he was like an old lady on a road trip and had to go every five minutes. At this point a large red light flashsed in my head and I understood the root of my problem and how and why mom died when she did. Dad always insisted on installing water softeners in our house. These inject salt into water and hit it with an electric charge, causing impurities to migrate and attach to the salt, which is then (supposedly) flushed away. The problem is that a lot of salt is left in the water, which, when you drink it, causes your kidneys to flush it out of your system constantly, slowly working them to death. Mom spent the last 10 yrs of her life on home dialysis. I only have one kidney and a really enlarged heart.

I don't listen to my dad's advice on $h!t anymore for any reason. He wants to tell, but never wants to listen. He probably still thinks I'm a sociopath just because I don't want to be subjected to his bad advice and opinions, and I've told him that his sadvice os so bad that even HE doesn't listen to it.

Back to OP....

 

Sounds like you're REAL problem is that he refuses to share your pretended panic over it.

 

Being able to run free with my buddy Richard even at the age of 6. My gramma only had one rule--be home at 6 to eat supper. When I got home late, I had to go out to the back yard, pull a switch off one of the Thompson grape vines and then she would raise welts on my back. I knew the rule, so I took it and understood. Small town and we had the run of it. 1st "job '"-- Richard and I would ask people if we could knock the wasp nests down on their property for a dime. We would have a paddle each , knock them down and stand right in there fighting them as they tried to sting us. They succeeded many times and one of my memories is of Richard running down an alley swatting at his neck with a bunch of wasps hot on his tail. Having a 13 year old girl initiate me to sex when I was 10. Best 3/12 seconds of my 10 year old life! Taking a dollar--going to Brownstones and getting a 35 cent hamburger, a 30 cent milkshake a bunch of candy and going to the movies for 12 cents. I was the only kid let in that was allowed to eat sunflower seeds, because I ate the whole seeds, hulls and all. Turning the handle on the oak telephone box on the wall--the operator answering and me telling her to give me--101w--Richards phone number. A bunch of us kids having BB gun fights around the neighborhood. Parades in the 40s and 50s celebrating various things--homecoming they called them. Going swimming every single day in the hot summers of the San Joaquin valley. The places I and my friends drank beer and danced in the country in high school. The country was only a mile out of town. A million more, but-----

 

They were the 3 symptoms that Christina mentioned, but each of them was qualified. The killing of animals was when it was done for no reason and involved extreme cruelty. The lighting of fires was specified only as arson, destroying property and putting lives at risk, while bed wetting was associated only when parents ridiculed the child, deliberately destroying his self confidence. The first 2 also had to involve sexual arousal.
So, sorry, you do not meet the criteria for becoming a serial killer.

The water is an interesting one. London water has a 285ppm anion content, resulting in it clogging pipes, boilers and kettles with calcium carbonate, along with all the damage to bathrooms and showers.
A modern softener contains a resin that ion exchanges the calcium carbonate to sodium carbonate, which is soluble.
When the resin exhausts, it is flushed with sodium chloride, ion exchanging the resin back and producing calcium chloride in the process, This is dumped during the recharge backwash.
For many years, houses were required to have a drinking water tap that was not softened, in order to reduce sodium in in drinking water.
However, 5 years ago, the guidelines were changed, when it was calculated that softened water contained less than 8% of the sodium content of milk.
The real problem was that sodium chloride can go on to ion exchange with lead pipes. leaving plumbic chloride in the drinking water. It is illegal in the UK to install softeners where lead pipes are still in use in older houses.

Simply adding salt to water was crazy, multiplying the sodium level 10 fold. Attempting electrolysis could produce any number of toxins that would destroy your kidneys and liver.
I think that your father may have inadvertently been the budding serial killer in your household.

Whatever you do, don't drink purified water with all the minerals removed. As well as reacting with body fats, it kills all the good bacteria, and depletes your body of minerals.
Remember that without a complete mineral balance, nerves (that rely on the minerals generating electricity) will not function correctly. The worst problem here is that heart arrhythmia is dependent on the correct levels of Sodium, Potassium and Calcium in your blood.

PS, High levels of sodium in the blood are associated with degenerative heart conditions.

 

I like the way you think....

 

I remember getting slapped across the face for beating my sister in a juice drinking contest.

 

Welcome Back Mate.......You Were Missed......



Cheers Glen.