I think I’ve mentioned before that one of the parks up the street from us is one of the only ones I know of that still has an old school carousel (I think that’s what these are called… feel free to correct me). Most of them have been removed because of kids falling off and cracking their skulls scraping their knee, and I guess that is too dangerous for the worry-warts that make such decisions, which is too bad, because my observation has been that kids will spend endless time on them. And they’re good exercise too — I bet Nefarious $5 that she couldn’t sprint around it, spinning us, for 32 revolutions, and she had no problem at all meeting the challenge and then some.
Oh, and wow… it’s the end of November and it’s still so warm here, nearly t-shirt warming. I don’t know if that’s global warming at work, or if it’s just an unusually warm winter, but wow. Pretty crazy. I am looking forward to the snow, and to sledding and skating.
I didn’t get a ton of work done today (not that I would expect to on a weekend) — all I wrote was a “de-Frencher” that takes input text written in a UTF-8 character set (which is what Kijiji uses) and converts it to standard 7-bit ASCII, although it only handles French characters (ie. cedillas, circumflexes, diaeresis, and so on). Assuming I don’t have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow that I’m blanking on, I’ll finish off the Kijiji code tomorrow and upload a new version of the search tool then. It’s nearly complete.
I saw the strangest “People of Walmart” strangest woman at the grocery store after the park. She was morbidly obese, probably approaching five hundred pounds, and was dressed up like a Ren-fair princess. Very strange… The girls got a kick out of her outfit.
When we left for the park, the band next door was jamming, and when we got back hours later, they were still playing (must have been almost five hours in the end). Nefarious and Cassie and I played outside, with Cassie drawing in chalk n the pavement, and Nefarious rode her bike (I just got her some cool lights for the spokes — I provide the link because they were $3.71 including shipping and would make a great present for any kid), and I shot at pop cans with my pellet gun. One of our other neighbors came home and told us about her day performing trapeze, and Nefarious had a great time listening to the band as well. When they came outside with their gun as well, she had fun showing off her knives as everyone compared their toys. This is the first place I’ve lived where I’ve really enjoyed having neighbors.
Anyway… not really sure what this week entails other than doctor visits. I haven’t written much (other than code) in the last couple weeks, so I should do some book work… and then there’s a suspension party this weekend coming up that I’m looking forward too because it’s been so long since I’ve been at anything like that. Some time I also want to take molds off of a chess set and cast a few sets in white and regular chocolate, the idea being a set for kids where they can eat the pieces that they capture. Assuming it doesn’t already exist, I think it could be a successful product.
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https://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&=&q=chocolate+chess+pieces&aq=1&oq=chocolate+chess+pie&aqi=g8
but you would have googled it already, surely!
I hadn’t yet… So thanks for making it easy with a link! That’s great that you can get molds for a couple dollars. I’m totally going to get some.
I’m so glad I’m not the only one with a people of walmart addiction. Morbid really.
Love the Merry-Go-Round.
Would love to play on one with my camera! We don’t have them around here anymore. *pout*
(re) squirrel nests.
i had to look this up myself because i’ve seen these everywhere, and discovered this photo ( https://api.ning.com/files/kuZCUtmqsWCmZG57-fVzNT8QK0wyI-9LvUUaZ*I-oO4GrAqSjeP4A2y3JJOWi57*0VDKW9KlNMbzzAMNrYhp68S*21VxQklO/porcupine.JPG ) of a porcupine in a tree that looks like a nest. awesome.
I’m getting ill just by looking at a carousel. They were fun when I was a kid but now even the idea of riding one makes me nauseous. But you are right about one thing, playgrounds aint what they used to be.
Here’s one reason you might see and end to the carousel:
https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=47d01bfadd
I have a pretty substantial scar on my knee from one of those carousels…from when I was 19! But I still think they are great fun :D
I hadn’t noticed the vanishing carousels/merry-go-rounds. What I’d really seen is the total lack of real slides from playground. When I was a kid, a 20′ tall slide was pretty normal, made of nice, thin, shiny, frying pan hot steel. Now, the big slides are maybe 5′ high and plastic.
We’re doing everything possible to ensure that kids don’t get exposed to any danger at all thanks to lawyers. Is it any surprise that they grow up and don’t have any understanding that they can be hurt, leading to law suits because coffee was hot?
Being 37, now when I see playgrounds I wonder how kids can have any fun on them at all. We had merry-go-rounds, the huge high slides WLFDRGN mentioned, very high swingsets, and teeter-totters. And, the whole place was covered in sand, not the weird rubber stuff they have now. I can’t even count how many times I fell off the merry-go-round, once was so bad I got the wind completely knocked out of me. Still got back on though.
I don’t really remember anything like this from my childhood at all – or at least, I associate things like slides and climbing frames with school playgrounds. We moved around all the time when I was little and I have only hazy isolated memories of anywhere much until I was about 11. I don’t recollect ever being taken to park playgrounds and I’m not sure we lived anywhere where there was one, though I suppose we probably must have done. I certainly don’t have any photos of it if we did.
nice beard for real,… how long has that taken you to grow, is there an end in site or goal for it ha?
A year and a half? Maybe more…
Merry-go-rounds!! My brother fell off one once and somehow his leg got caught underneath. It took off all the skin.. didn’t stop us playing on them though.
I don’t have a brother…I loved these too when I was a kid. My friends and I would play at the public park in NOTL and one girl fell off and was crying REALLY loudly and an actor from Shaw Festival told her to buck up, that it wasn’t that big a wound!
At my elementary school (which was built in 1909), we had an even older and more dangerous merry-go-round, one that had a steel or cast-iron post coming from the ground up through the center of the merry-go-round that was stationary, and everything spun on a bearing or whatever on that post (now that stuff is all hidden below, for good reason).
Anyway, when I was 5, just a few months into kindergarten, I was on it as it was overloaded with a TON of other kids, and I ended up getting pushed into the center, and the cuff of my jeans somehow got snagged on the post — right in the rapidly spinning mechanism on the center post.
While my leg stayed in one place, my foot ended up twisting all the way around until it was facing forward again, and then some — over 360 degrees. It broke my lower leg in 3 different places via spiral fracture(s). I was in a cast from my toes to my hip for over 6 weeks.
Of course this was 1985, so my parents didn’t consider a lawsuit. Heck, the school was in a very small rural town that was 20 miles from the nearest hospital, so instead of waiting on an ambulance to drive all way to us, the principal (a tough old football coach) drove to the hospital with me on a cot in the back of the school’s cargo van with a homemage splint on my leg and the school secretary at my side. How times have changed, huh?
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