Childhood stories #2 (playing outside)

Childhood stories #2

     The summer of 4th grade-5th grade was crazy. I would do alcumus, then go dig holes with Naveen. TLDR, We dig holes, we kill bugs.


Man, so much to talk about

In my backyard, there are these big rocks, that if you lift up, you'll find bugs. Some rocks would have worms and slugs under it, while others would have rolly pollys and pincherbugs. One rock had this big red spider that got me creeped out. I didn't tell my sister cuz I knew that would make her never approach the backyard ever again.

Anyway, types of bugs we found in the holes were

worms
slugs
pillbugs aka rolly pollys
these mini slugs
snails
pincherbugs.
These rare centipedes


Kay. Let's talk 'bout worms

Worm:

Now there are two types of worms I would find, these super crazy ones and ones that play dead. What I mean by super crazy ones is that if you put it on the palm of your hand, it STARTS DANCING AROUND CRAZily. The first time I saw one of these I freaked out. The ones that play dead are boring, so we just cut them in half and watch both halves move. Cool

Slugs:

These slugs are basically snails with no shells. One time we wanted a slug so Naveen crushed the shell of a snail and tried taking it off. We ended up killing it. lol. Anyway, 
These are hexbugs. I had a hexbug track. I would bring it outside with the bug, and the snail. I would literally put the snail in there, even though they would literally just climb out everytime.

Pillbugs:

Ahhh. I love pillbugs. These guys are awesome.

Naveen had a basketball hoop, and there was a small hole in the basketball to fill sand. Me and Naveen would stuff rollypollys into that hole. We literally stuffed SOOO manyy. One time we poured water in the hole just so we could say "hey, those rolly pollys are at a beach ;)"

Now the number one thing with rolly pollys is that they die if you force them to uncurl. Well, Naveen doesn't have a lot of patience, because one time he literally ripped out a rolly polly's guts. That was disgusting and disturbing.

I started a rolly polly farm with a Sunny D bottle. Before this we just put it in like a plastic jar I guess. We poked holes on the top, and we WERE PROUD that we knew to poke holes. We put bugs like rolly pollys, slugs, snails, and a pincherbug in there. We checked the next day, and it wasn't a pretty sight. The slugs crawled to the top, and hogged ALL the air. The bottom was just dead stuff, and the slugs were still alive though.

Anyway, the Sunny D bottle survived for two days! Since this was in the summer, one time I accidentally left it in the sun during the day, and uhhh THE ROLLY POLLYS LITERALLY TURNED WHITE.

Mini slugs:

Remember those rocks I was talking about. There was one near Naveen's house, so we lifted the rock together and carried it to where we dug. We found this wooden plank and then we used the rock and plank as a CATIPULT. lol. We put rocks and then we'd jump on it. Never told anyone about this.

Anyway, after the catipult fun ended, we used the rock to store these shells. Well, basically we'd find these little shells, that were pretty cool. We stored them in a plastic bag, and we hid it behind this bush next to the shovel Naveen stole from his mom, and our digging sticks. We checked on this rock once a while, but one time we forgot to check about the rock for like two months? Wait. I think it was a year. idk. We lifted the rock open, and I swear I almost fainted. THERE WERE LIKE A MILLION ANTS THERE. I saw moving white dots. LIKE WTH. I first thought those white dots were eggs, but figured out that those were the crumbs of the shells. RIP



Snails:

On a big rock next to Naveen's house was a snail farm. There were tons of snails on that rock ranging with different sizes. Naveen had this mini DIY fooseball thing, so we literally got one of the snails, and we used the snail as a ball. Oh man, after one game, the shell started to crack like crazy, and then the fooseball table turned into a gooey mess. Oh gee. We had to wash the fooseball table.

Other than that, during the Summer, next to the pool, there were these bushes, and in those bushes were TONS of snails. One time me, Naveen, and Jio(other kid from neighborhood) went over there. We got one of those free bags used for dogpoop and used that as our racetrack. We ended up having to use rocks to keep it in place from the wind. We gathered our snails and we let them race. Snails aren't great at following directions, cuz some started to crawl on top of each other, some went backwards, etc. We ended up putting the winner in the place we found it, and the rest on some tree.

Now let's talk about the shells. In another part of our neighborhood, there were lots of snail shells. There were trails of empty snail shells. We collected them in a ziploc bag. Now we had this "secret hideout" aka some lame place that people can't see us. There were bushes in front of us, and this church thingy behind us, so it was comfortable sitting there. We hid our snail shell bag there. One day it vanished, and I'm pretty sure Jio stole it. IDK.

For a period of time, me and Naveen got REALLY attached to this secret hideout. It wasn't a great spot to dig. One day, THEY TOOK DOWN THE BACK OF OUR SECRET HIDEOUT. They were doing construction. And that also took down the Pokemon Go gym. Oh man, I swear I literally started crying. Okay, BACK ON TRACK


Pincherbugs:

Everyone's scared of these...except for me and Naveen. For some reason people are scared of these bugs. PShhh. All you do is hold it by the pinchers and it won't pinch you. The only problem is that these guys are fast.

For a long time I thought pincherbugs don't pinch. I tried it out, I took a queen pincherbug, and placed it on my index finger. It literally pinched me so hard, my finger started bleeding. Was a small bleeding though.

One day when I was digging, I dug and then a pincherbug started going crazy. Under it were a bunch of eggs. I thought this was cool, so I put the eggs in a ziploc bag. I was PROUD since I also put dirt in the ziploc bag. I wanted to see those baby pincherbugs. Yeah, it didn't work out.

One time I tried putting a rolly polly at the end of a pincherbug like next to the pinchers, but like the pincherbug was so fast so yeah.

Sometimes it'd rain(not in the summer) and we'd plug the small hole in the basketball hoop with a stick. That left a puddle of water. One time, we captured a pincherbug and dropped it in the puddle just to see that happens. IT STARTED SWIMMING. It was moving it's pinchers and legs in a way so cool. We also put rolly pollys in there and it would just sink down and climb out, boring.




Another thing in the summer were plum trees. Nearby the pool, there were these plum trees, and we would climb those plum trees very often, and eat the plums. At first I thought it was disgusting to be eating stuff off of a public tree, but the plums actually taste GOOD.

Besides digging holes, we'd play basketball, soccer, kickball, baseball, frisbee, and ping-pong.


Basketball:

Us three(Jio, Naveen, Me) would play games like poison, knockout, HORSE, and rob the bank. Knockout got pretty competitive, we were pros at knocking. HORSE exposed our weaknesses. We quit after a while because it was boring, we all knew who was good and bad at doing what type of shots so we took that to our advantage. Poison was interesting. And rob the bank was a game we made up where we have to hit the backboard at a certain spot to gain "money"

Soccer:

We'd sometimes go to Jio's backyard to play soccer. Since Jio was pretty good at soccer, we'd sometimes let me and Naveen be goalie while Jio tries to score on us. Other than that, we played this game called two-touch so much. In this game you try to get the ball to touch the firetruck red line thingy, AUGH

that red thingy, we had one on our street.

ignore that guy. I'M TRYNNA FIND A GOOD PICTURE LITERALLY.

wth is that jack's party thing lol


Anyway, you can only use two touches to let the ball hit the red line. We had three lives. We played that game A TON. A TON.



kickball:
Our court looks something like this.
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That thing in red was the firelane. The thing in blue(if you can see it) is the basketball hoop. Now pretend that square-shaped thingy is a circle. That's where we played kickball.

Since Jio is good at soccer, he kicked the ball SOOO high. Sometimes it'd reach towards the basketball hoop. Other times it would land in rose bushes. In this case, we called this "spikey" cause the bushes had "spikes." When spikeys would occur we'd basically just redo. I'm pretty sure one time the ball got stuck in a tree.


Baseball:

We wouldn't play baseball too much, but if we were bored, I had a foam baseball bat. Nothing really cool with this. We'd play in the circle too.

Frisbee:

Lemme redraw the ascii art for you


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That thing in orange was a fairly tall wall. On the other side was apartments. Just cuz we thought it was cool, one of us would bike to the apartments, and we'd play frisbee like that. Don't ask me why that was fun.



Ping-Pong:

Naveen had a ping-pong table in his garage, so that's where we'd play it. He also had bean boozled, this jelly bean thingy



Anyway, we'd play kings court, the lose would have to play bean boozled while the winner would get to eat chips.

One time, the bean boozled fell down and spilled in the garage. naveen thought it was a good idea to wash the jelly beans, but then it smelled SUPER BAD. lol. Seems like if you wash jelly beans the outer part comes off.

We played this quite a lot. I remember flavors like toothpaste tasted GOOD. So did lawn clippings.



Us three, Naveen, Jio, and I had a big adventure, watching Pokemon movies, playing basketball, soccer etc.

There's a lot more to talk about.




Lyric(s) of the Post: I will make my own way
I will not surrender I will do my best until I get put under

Stronger – Omar Varela, Xavi & Gi, Miss Lina