Zero Bars

You guys remember Zero bars, goey nougat and nuts encased in white chocolate? Mom would randomly buy them for us after filling up at the gas station. I don't remember ever begging for one or Mom using them as bribery. Just, every once in a while, Mom emerging from the gas station store with a plastic bag full of 6, 7, 8? Zero bars, one for each of us. Simple pleasures . . .

Van of terror

We Rugglets experienced a variety of vehicles of varying levels of class and volume. The earliest I remember are the White Chrysler Le Baron and the tan 1977 Buick Estate Wagon (red vinyl interior? You bet! More stories on it later, I'm sure). They are both deserving of their own posts - I'm looking at you, Andy, with the various throttle fun you had.

But we outgrew our big-pimpin' wagon. There are only so many people you can fit in a 7-seat car before it starts getting unsafe. So we upgraded to the 1985 blue Ford Econoline van - our Mormon Assault Vehicle. It was blue on the outside, and possibly blue-er on the inside. It had the V8 to make the Mustang drivers jealous. 5.0? Please. 351 all the way!

There was all sorts of genuine fun and madness ensuing constantly. Vacations were downright roomy! Well, if you don't need legroom. We are tall folks - what vehicle short of a limo or luxury car has rear legroom for 6-footers? But we could have a spot open on each row to at least provide elbow room. Mom and Dad probably won't like hearing this, but we could alternate who would lay on the floor and who was on the seats. You grab your old-school music-playing implement of choice, lay down, and rock out! Or read.

Once - I think after Andy had already left home, Craig and I sat in the back row on the way to Tim and Joann's making various projectiles out of some weird wax to shoot out of my blowgun (Thanks, Uncle Tim). We were going for highest pain quotient for the future twin hunting we had planned. We made slugs, and hollow-points, and the more traditional ogive (normal bullet shape). Then, I would have Craig pull up the leg of his shorts and shoot him in the thigh to gauge his reaction and get his feedback. In the end, the projectiles may have been a bit heavy, limiting the range, but they did their work as the twins can attest.

The van never embarrassed me like the wagon. Not that I remember, anyway. That being said, it occasionally sputtered and backfired. The backfires were dramatic as the exhaust developed some crack or something. People in the hood would duck and wonder who bought the light cannon on the black market for Mud Alley use. Andy figured out how to make it backfire on command. It was quite impressive. I remember him doing that in Pecan Grove as we were passing people - awesome.

That exhaust crack had another upshot: we could hear and feel Mom approaching home from a LONG way away. The frequency of the trembling would tell you how fast she was going - and we could literally feel her slow to turn off Mennonite Rd onto Powerline, and slow again to turn onto Mourning Dove. By the time she turned into the driveway, we were bouncing along the floor (where we tended to lie to watch TV for some reason). Except usually we would use the advance warning to do the chores Mom would assign before leaving home. There weren't many chores we couldn't accomplish in her last mile home.

Craig and Mike Lowe didn't believe us that you could feel our van approach. Once though, Craig (brother) and I were at the Lowe's after some activity at the Crane's/Thayne's. When the Blue Whale rumbled down the road and it made every piece of furniture in their full-foundation home tremble and sway - the higher the furniture, the more the swaying - and they had incredulous looks on their faces as they looked outside to see our MAV approach the complex.

I never drove that monster - but I'm not sad. I am a tiny car person in the end. It is weird. I have long realized it is weird that I like small cars in light of me being Texan, but I never realized until just now that it is counter to my automotive experiences in my youth. Maybe it is for me like leftovers for Andy. I think it is for purely nerdy physics reasoning, but I have to wonder. Anyway - that was a good one. Until it started sucking more than was worth trying to fix and we got rid of it. But it was good till then.

Except for the single-digit gas mileage. There is a little hole in the ozone that I think belongs to us...

Girls troubles and yes, even more stinging insects!

As long as I can remember I've preferred feminine company to masculine, and the same was true in elementary school. In third grade however my awkward phase began because it was no longer socially acceptable to hang out with girls (which did not end until high school *shudder*). Anyway, in third grad I tried to hang out with girls anyway, but they would always beat me up (if they could catch me, sic their older sisters on me to beat me up if they couldn't). I reacted as any warm-blooded Rugglet would: with spite and with science. Using a small plastic magnifying glass holder, I would gather as many honey bees as I could. In a confrontation, I would release my hymenopteran minions and let them scare away my foes. I always came off victor, but I never seemed to reconcile fully with the fairer sex till 9th grade.

Regrets

From my bizarre and somewhat deprived childhood I have but one regret: lack of documentation! We need to get more of our stories down, especially seeing as how the last Rugglet will start to contribute soon. I propose a flurry of activity in celebration of Adam's triumphant return, so get on it Rugglets. Rugglet spouses, get on your Rugglet's case about blogging. Cousins, feel free to chime in more often. Need inspiration? Start reading posts from the beginning, we mentioned dozens of topics that your memory could fill pages with. Cats, neighbors, bikes, lawn mowers, porches, piles of bricks, parafoils and DOS computer games are all waiting for their stories to be told!

"It sounds like something...evil..."

This is another story not about growing up in the ghetto, but the fact that we never grew out of it.

The summer after I graduated high school I spent in Texas working for Andy, and in general causing problems. It was one of the best summers of my life.

One day Natalie and Alison were over and we were watching Charlotte, long gone to bed, chatting. That's when we heard the chirping. I'd been hearing it all week, coming from the walls.

"It sounds like something...evil..." Natalie said, and for some reason that line became hilarious. We tried to track down the source of the chirping, but it seemed to be coming from the walls, and moving. A bird perhaps? Muhahaha.

The next day on the can I hear the chirping crazy loud in the wall right next to me, not near the living room where we heard it before and nowhere near the outside. Andy and I decided to take matters into our own hands and cut a hole in the drywall to remove....wait for it...a baby raccoon!

Never before have I been privileged to care for a cuter secret pet. I bottle fed the little guy myself up in my room hoping Jen wouldn't discover our machinations. My favorite part of the whole affair was actually when Jen did find out. 8 months pregnant at the time with Claire, Jen had little patience for us using her baby's bottle to clandestinely keep a varmit in the house: Andy and I got quite the talking to. The thing needed to go, and quicklike. We just set him outside and in less than a minute the momma raccoon was there and scooped him away like a cat. It was awesome.

P.S. To get a more hilarious version of this story, ask Jen about when we ripped a hole in her bathroom to catch a baby raccoon.

TV

One appliance in our household had the curious and dichotomous title of least functioning (saying something in our trailer) and most beloved: the TV.

We got three channels. Kinda. We just had snapped off rabbit ears because cable didn't come our to where we were from (not that the rents would have shelled out the cash to waste even more of our time). Getting the receiver to work involved shoving pillows back by the antennae (whether to hold them in place or as a dielectric, I don't know) and my personal favorite, having someone stand in the middle of the room. I don't know why this helped. But it did. Sometimes we'd stack pillows on a chair to try to simulate a person, which was less effective. Mom's sewing machine also sent the poor contraption into fits. I have studied physics and engineering for almost four years now. I have no idea how any of this works.

Really, the TV was meant for one thing, and one thing only (besides watching Masters of the Universe): Saturday morning cartoons. Nothing has ever gotten me out of bed so early quite as well as SMCs; I even got up hours before in anticipation sometimes. The first kid up would always turn on the TV, but not before placing our massive floor pillow (an entry in itself) over the speaker while we had to pound on the metal buttons to quite the static before we got it to the right channel so mom and dad wouldn't wake up and tell us to go to back to bed. X-men, Spiderman, Batman, Animaniacs: we all had our different favorites, and there were some we all loved (The Tick!!!!).

Other fun times with the TV were Saturday nights when we all rushed through showers to miss as little of Star Trek or Walker: Texas Ranger as possible.

We also just watched a lot of mindless TV, Fresh Prince and Home Improvement. We absorbed the stuff like sponges. I think in response to that, I now rarely watch TV.

Just when the poor contraption seemed to be at its nadir, Tracy and I discovered the wonders of running a cow magnet over the screen. The bizarrely warping colors were fascinating, much more so than reruns of Ghostwriter. However, each time we moved the magnet close, a little more of the color change became permanent, and pretty soon we had an all green TV. It eventually returned mostly to normal, except for a big green patch in the corner. Ahh, good times.

Any other thoughts on that wonderful hunk of scrap?

The Hills

The uninitiated would have hard time identifying any "hills" in a 20 miles radius of our house, but we know better. Once when the ditches were being re-dug Dad decided to ask them for some of the leftover dirt so we could level out the backyard (AKA The Back 40). Ha. Haha. We've since lost3 British exploration expeditions to the maw that was The Back 40, but the dirt remained in two rows of mounds stretching perhaps half an acre. Texan gumbo is Nature's most perfect plaything, luckily, and we put these "hills" to ready use. I'll only recount a few of the more colorful uses here.

Typically they remained overgrown pretty badly, which was ideal. First they served as bike and running trails. Then we started to dig massive holes in some of the larger ones, making a fort. Add water via hose, and this fort becomes a gumbo quarry, perfect for preparing ammunition in a mud war. Don't add water, and they still made perfect quarries for mud wars, but of a more violent and painful sort (I got beaned behind the ear onetime so bad it's still a memory. Brian threw it. He was expectedly impenitent. War is war, eh?). One of may favorite times was when we made the valleys between the hills into houses. Using sturdy dried out bloodweed stabbed into the ground around a perimeter and balanced over the top, we could use grass clippings and such to thatch a roof. These houses rarely survived a mildly windy night. The hills even had their own form of currency, red rocks being the standard. Luckily our driveway (made with loose river bed rocks) was an ideal source of the bullion. I think we even planted watermelons back in those hills one time.

We'd spend hours in those hills, sometimes so busy our parents must have wondered why such ingenuity and effort couldn't be expended on more useful chores, and sometimes just laying on the hard packed trail reading. Any more memories from the hills? I'm sure Brian has some horror story about having to mow them.