InOutSideSideInOn

Chad and I were reminiscing tonight, about the good ol'days. We were talking about the playground (It's not important on how we got with this topic, just go with me. ) He was very surpirsed to hear about our playground situation. And when you think of it, it probably explains a lot about who I am today, or was, way back when I was single. I mean, it's proably the sole reason why I didn't get any dates.

We had a parking lot. It was a church/school parking lot, behind the school. On the left, the boys. They had a basketball hoop. They had a building to play dodge ball against. The same building acted as a nice buffer when the winds kicked up, as they do in NE Ohio.

The girls' side was, well, bland. There was a nice dip in the far corner by the light post that made a great base for tag (more on that in a bit) . There was a good sized round patch of blacktop, mid way down the side which also made a good base. Oh, and we did have a piller about three feet high, to keep the cars from running over the bushes, that made a great leg for Chinese Jump Rope (inoutsidesideinon) But no basketball hoop. Nothing but chain link to buffer the wind from our bare legs. (OK we did have leg warmers, which looked pretty stylish with our plaid uniforms - and yes, that uniform below was the one we wore sans tie, and yes, I did have a pair of red and white leg warmers - my favorite pair)

Where was I going with this? Oh, yeah - the boys. The boys weren't allowed to cross the LINE from one side of the parking lot to the other. Neither were the girls. During my formative years, I never really played with boys at school, and therefore didn't really know how to act with them later on. Now, we did have gym class where we did play with the boys, whenever they deemed us important enough to add to their team (that, and they were forced to by the gym teacher) so no, I never really "hung out at the playground" with boys. No wonder my life was wacky for a while.

I did promise more on tag. Seeing as how we didn't have a basketball on our side, and you could only jump rope so many times, we were rather inventive with our games. Some of our favorities:

• Smurf tag (Evil Gargamel was out to capture the smurfs)
  
• The Jacksons - we would act out the life of the Jacksons. (I think I was alway Tito, but that's another story.)
  
• Witch in the Well (Ok we didn't invent this one, but it was cool to run down the line of upturned hands and smack the ones belonging to the people who were mean to you that day.)
  
• Colored Eggs - somehow we always found a way to work in "That's just Grandpa flushing his teeth down the drain again"
• Line crack tag
  

Line crack tag was probably the most inventive. No, we were not shooting up on the playground. Again, since we had nothing but a blacktopped parking lot to play on... this worked extremely well. The person who was "IT" had to only stay on the lines - the painted lines for the cars. Everyone else could go on a line or a crack. Too bad for you if you got stuck on a crack that ended in the middle of a square of lines.

Fun was had by all.

Wow. It's a wonder I am still sane!


Our Uniform: I even wore the Peter Pan coller!