Boys Vs. Bordem Part II

Well, after writing my last post I came up with a few more things that we use to do as kids to fight bordem.  Of course yard work was always more of a torture than a chore for us growing up. I don't know why,  but we just didn't dig it. So of course we came up with a way to make it fun. In the front yard we had a tree that dropped these little spine balls that released seed. Well these things looked like a minature mace.  This tree would drop hundreds of them. So I think you can see where this is going. We use to collected all of them into two buckets, and then we would team up, two on each side of the yard, and we would hurl them each other as hard and fast as you can. Now there were some rules, the head and eyes were off limits, if you hit someone there they were allow to get 5 feet away and get a free shot at you. Of course are goal was to get one of these little spine balls to stick.

Growing up we always felt that trees were naturals jungle jim. Of course we had a tree that we could get pretty far up in, about 20 feet or so. So we would climb up the tree to see what we could see. Now I have to tell you, in my younger days I didn't fear heights, or falling. So we are 20 feet up this tree, and my brother K and I are hanging out, he is laying inbetween two branches, when I see one above and beyond him and I some how get the idea that I should just climb up a little hire, and the leap out and swing on that branch. So I did, and actually grabbed it and swung once, however my brother K didn't know what I was doing, he thought I was going to jump from now 25 feet up so, as I swung back he grabbed a hold of my legs and wouldn't let go. We both looked at each other with the, what the heck are you doing look. We also had an apricot tree that grew right next to the house, well it didn't take us long to figure out that we could get on the roof off that tree. So when playing hide and seek, we'd climb the tree, get on the roof, run across the roof and climb down off the roof using the swingset on the other side of the yard. We completely cheated. And we could never figure out how Mom always knew when we were on the roof.

Another one of our bordem fighters was our bikes. With that being said, I have to say, Dad, I am sorry we made you have to work on those things constantly. The list of parts is long, forks, frames, wheels, chains, handle bars, brakes, and once even a seat. So we will start from our younger days. We had an avacado tree that had a branch that hung over the driveway. I''ve already told you what we thought about trees, so we scurried up that tree, and tied one of Dad's good ropes (sorry about that too Dad!) to the tree. Then we would ride as fast as we could and then we would let go of the handlebars and grab ahold of that rope and ghost those bikes right into the fence. If that wasn't bad enough, the street we lived on was slight hill, our house was at the botom of the hill. Across the street right next to the curb, our neighbor had some very nice soft grass. So for kicks we would ride down the hill along side or infront of cars, and would run our bikes into the curb right infront of our neighbors, and roll on that nice soft grass. We knew how to take a fall so we didn't get hurt, and we would pop up and laugh as cars would screech to a halt to see if we were okay. The local park had a very bad design that we used to it's fullest. There was a slight down hill, and then a 6 full retaining wall and then the bottom level.  Well we use to see just how far we could fly off of that rataining wall. As we got older and moved in to mountian bikes, from our BMXers, we would race down stairs as fast as we could, then we would turn around and try to ride up them.  Man that was fun!