Our biggest fan

One of my earliest memories is of me curled up under a blanket immediately in front of a gigantic metal fan. I actually remember doing this a lot. Part of the reason I could never sleep on a bed was because my body needed to b close to a fan for full resting action. This, mind you, was independent of the weather. Our hearty metal allies were originally recruited against the fierce Texas summers, but I slept right next to one even on cold nights, sometimes with several blankets to make up for the fact that all of my body heat was being sucked away. Crazy? Yes. Very.
We also used them to make wind tunnels by clothspinning blankets together. These things could take up a entire room and stayed up as long as we could convince Mom to let us have them.
Sometime someone discovered (and I think it was me) that if you attached a balloon to your favorite action figure, fired up the fan and tipped it vertical, lo and behold, the ting would hover! On medium you could usually fit a good four or five of these balloon warriors and they'd bounce around congenially, but when you shifted it to high, they'd start thrashing about wildly until only the victor remained. Marvels of engineering, those fans.

Ahhh....Toads.

There are few animals capable of bringing more joy than a toad. Toads had a variety of attributes that made them desirable for Rugglets. For one, they were durable. You could hold a toad all day and it would be fine thanks to its dry skin, unlike a frog. They were ready eaters in captivity, which means you could keep them. You could skip a toad across ditch water three or four times and the thing would swim off no problem. They could even survive Cherish, who would scream "fwog!" until Mom made us go out and catch one, no matter how much we protested on behalf of the toad's well-being (Dad still claims this as Cherish's first word). It also helped that they were easy to find and catch. We were constantly hunting them, partly because they were fun and partly because Dad offered an unbelievable monetary sum (100 dollars, if I remember) for the capture of a rare Houston toad. We never found one, always just the more common Gulf Coast toad. They didn't bite, didn't move too fast and were virtually ubiquitous. You could even catch them as tadpoles and let them grow up. There seemed to be swarms of them in the ditches after rain. My favorite time was a few weeks after a big summer storm when all the tadpoles had grown up into extremely tiny toads, which were (and no other word choice would be appropriate here) adorable. One night we foolishly decided to catch as many as we could and load them into one of our many terrariums. The haul was 34, plus a couple tree frogs. Unfortunately, this was the equivalent of starting a night club for toads and their flirtation consists of loud and incessant ribbiting which effectively prevented any sleep on our part. In the morning we just dumped them unceremoniously into the umbrella grass, glad to be rid of them. I don't think there is any Rugglet that can say he or she hasn't kissed a toad. They served as pets, toys, novelty prank items (Sorry, Mom!), pacifiers, friends (for those of us who had none else), and stuffed animals. To a poor family this plague of toads was manna from heaven.