December Semi-Daily: gifts
Dec. 27th, 2018 07:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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I had some sort-of-cousins (not really related by blood but might as well have been) whose parents were a lot less suspicious of television than mine were.
I had a lot of lovely things as a kid (my father was one of eleven, so I could never complain about not getting enough gifts) -- but these kids always had That Great New Thing. They had Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots and an Easy Bake Oven and one of those toys where you poured the rubbery liquid into the mold and made a bunch of tiny rubbery monsters (boy, I remember so vividly how that liquid smelled), and those big inflated things you sat on and hopped, the whole giant three-story Matchbox garage, Velvet and Crissy ("with growing pretty hair!" said the commercial, which even in first grade I could tell was a weird adjective order) and the Barbie giant makeover head. And a rock tumbler.
Oh, I longed for a rock tumbler. My semicousins polished me a whole batch of rocks -- by that time they were sick of the thing themselves, and mostly wanted to watch TV and run shrieking around the house -- and they gave me some of the cheap jewelry findings it came with so I could make ugly too-big necklaces out of them; I remember that one rock I found in the yard polished up to look a whole lot like the inside of a Snickers bar after you've nibbled off all the chocolate.
A generation later, someone gave the kidlet a rock tumbler. My god, the endless roaring noise the thing made! It took about 72 hours to put the rocks through all the stages of polishing! Even the basement wasn't far enough away. It ran the last day of its one and only cycle in the garage.
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(no subject)
Date: 12/28/18 04:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 12/31/18 02:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 12/28/18 11:35 am (UTC)I always wanted an easy-bake oven though!
(no subject)
Date: 12/31/18 02:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 12/28/18 03:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 12/31/18 02:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 12/29/18 04:32 am (UTC)Notably, however, it lived in the garage, under a box, further muffled with a wool blanket. :D
I probably still have some of the rocks that I polished, and I often wish I still had the tumbler! Perhaps one day I'll buy another - though without a garage, I'm not sure where it will live...
(no subject)
Date: 12/31/18 02:47 am (UTC)