Quote:
Originally Posted by jp4m2  Alright Mike, you got me thinking about soooo many stories, unfortunately some I won't post about  .....
I remember my dad putting up a Christmas tree and he couldn't afford a tree stand... wait a minute.....he couldn't afford a tree either so he went into a woods and cut down a tree..... and then he nailed two pieces of wood together into a "+" shape and nailed it to the bottom of the tree....when he stood the tree up he drove what appeared to be spikes from the top right through the carpet and into the floor  ....the tree tipped over so he put a hook into the ceiling and tied a string from the hook to the top of the tree to anchor it ...by the time Christmas was over that tree was soooo dry static electricity would have created an indoor inferno......and that my dears was a Christmas to remember...... |
Ha ha. I remember Christmases like that!
Good stories, everybody. My onion story really doesn't show the depths of my poorness. Here's one more:
When I moved to Alaska in 1985, three of us and my dog drove up together in a VW van towing my Ford Fiesta. I arrived with $50 to my name.
Two of us lived in the van for four months. We parked it all over town, and moved it when somebody rousted us. At one time, the van broke down so I towed it around town with my Fiesta.
Although I had a bachelor's degree and five years of experience in journalism, I was turned down by the newspaper. I made ends meet by getting a job at a fish cannery, working what they call the "slime line" cleaning fish. When you're broke, you become creative. We showered at another college and used their free typewriters to send out resumes. I was even swimming in their pool several days a week.
The real jobs came all at once. I was hired as a part-time teacher at the very college whose parking lot I was living in. The newspaper also called and offered me a job in the sports department.
It wasn't for a few more weeks that I got an apartment, and those weeks were awkward. A co-worker at the newspaper used to drop me off at the college after work. I'd told him I was living in the dorms when I was actually living in the lot. And just before classes started at the college, I was kicked out of the lot by a campus security guard. (You should seen the look on the security guard's face
a couple weeks later when he realized the new teacher was the same guy he had just kicked out of the parking lot.)
They say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. That experience definitely made me stronger. Ozzie's Person is right in her post above. I wouldn't trade it for the world.