December Semi-Daily: gifts

[resonant]

isabellerecs, "What Christmas present had you wanted badly but never received as a kid?"

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.






26 --runpunkrun, I'd be interested to hear about your experience with the CPAP machine.
27 --destina, "how has your relationship to fandom changed over the years? By which I mean not just participation in it, but your level of tolerance/interest for the cyclical things about it, the way old arguments never really stop or die, etc, but also the ways fandom changes and new ways of doing fandom evolve. (And old ways evolve out, and terms evolve, etc.)"
28 -- kass, "What do you like best about where you live?"
29 -- mecurtin, What is the most beautiful sight you see outside on a regular basis? Can be a building, landscape, plant, animal, artwork, people playing, whatever.
30 -- china_shop, "Your favourite book you read this year."
31 -- wolfshark, "what is your favorite story to reread of your own stuff? what was your favorite story to write?"

Comments

[resonant]

I wonder if the electric bill was higher the one time we used it?