<p>mafool. My pm’s are almost full. Think we can start a thread of favorite family recipes?
My s won’t eat baked mac and cheese. Only boxed velveeta. Ptooey!</p>
<p>Opening a beer with a seat belt or on the car door latch.</p>
<p>Mail ordering tickets for a Grateful Dead show.</p>
<p>“unkinking” a cassette tape that your tape deck munched on.</p>
<p>curchmusicmom-</p>
<p>What “secret ingredients” go into mashed potatoes? I can’t imagine not making these from scratch, either, but my ingredient list is pretty standard. You can tell us…we won’t breathe a word.</p>
<p>My not-so-secret ingredient with mashed potatoes is to use whipping cream instead of butter and milk, which is how I was taught to make them. Whipping cream is just as bad for you, but makes for really fluffy mashed potatoes. I also occasionally add some chicken broth, roast garlic, shallots, or other flavorful things. Mostly though it’s just potatoes, cream, salt.</p>
<p>I buy my syrup, though, from a friend who taps his own trees and makes real maple syrup, the rich dark kind that most stores don’t sell. (Grade A is insipid; grade B is the best.)</p>
<p>The only syrup I’ve made is blueberry syrup, and it’s delicious! It’s also better for your health, I think, since blueberries are such a great source of antioxidants.</p>
<p>Ironing your hair on an ironing board with a regular iron.</p>
<p>icesk8mom-
I probably stil have scars on the tops of my ears from doing that.
and mafool-
I used coke cans, not OJ cans. cut out both ends of the coke cans hand bobboe pinned then in with those gigundo bobbie pins. then slept all night in the hairdryer that looked like I was tethered to an octopus. The bonnet was plastic- connected to the central dryer unit by something that resembled a eustacean tube (clear with a coil built in it).</p>
<p>The “secret” ingredient to wonderful mashed potatoes (learned from a good ole southern boy and his momma back in Alabama) is butter, a little milk and…a little mayonaise. Sounds kinda strange, I know, but try it. They get universal acclaim!</p>
<p>:)</p>
<p>“Ironing your hair on an ironing board with a regular iron.”</p>
<p>…Oh my word. Did that leave you with severe hair damage?..HOW did you manage that? hahaha I can’t even imagine that. I stay away from straightening irons as it is…but an actual iron?! oh man</p>
<ul>
<li>Reading a clock with hands (find an eight-year-old that can do this today)</li>
<li>Making lanyards</li>
<li>Scoring bowling by hand</li>
<li>Computing car’s gas mileage by hand</li>
<li>Finding the best prices on record albums (Korvettes - $3.33)</li>
<li>Scoring high in Stoop Ball and Hit the Penny</li>
<li>Filling bottlecaps with wax for Skully</li>
<li>Hand claps</li>
<li>“Once, twice, three - shoot”</li>
<li>chasing the “Mr. Softee” truck and the ride trucks</li>
<li>“Calling for” a friend (if you’re from NYC you know what I mean.)</li>
</ul>
<p>Writing hall passes and “late to class” excuses for my friends in high school. I signed my real name. No one ever questioned them.</p>
<p>Ah, this raises the question of whether kids still write “notes” and pass them in class: The art of passing a note, creating a code, etc. may have been lost to the electronic arts and PDA, cell phones, etc. </p>
<p>For no good reason this also reminds me of ways kids would goof off in now-obsolete classes like Typing (There was Personal Typing for the college prep/writer types and Business Typing for the vocational track/serious minded). I was regularly tortured by a guy who would toss a wad of paper into my “key basket” in the midst of a timed typing test…Such forms of flirting are now lost to the winds of time…</p>
<p>“ironing your hair on an ironing board with a real iron”</p>
<p>While never guilty of that, I do remember waxing my skis with my mother’s iron - then going to ski school where the instructors taught us to make “parallel turns” with our skis never more than an inch apart. We all wanted to ski like Jean Claude Killy.</p>
<p>Dragonmom-
I ironed my hair and my skis. No wonder both were dreadful!! I think my hair was waxy slick and my skis were straight :)</p>
<p>Making chains with chewing gum wrappers.</p>
<p>Ooh! forgot about that one! Except I didn’t chew gum so had to get wrappers from other people.</p>
<p>dragonmom - parallel skiing with the feet virtually locked together is by far more aesthetically pleasing to watch than the current, ungainly and graceless “form” they teach now. And, it is much harder to execute. My spouse does it beautifully. It should be revived!</p>
<p>icek8mom-
See post # 135. You and bethel can compare gum chains!
leanid-
We ski every year and I <em>almost</em> always lock the knee of my downhill ski behind the knee of my uphill ski, keeping my skis together. My kids look like wrecks on the slope, but they are much faster than me at this point. I guess I’ll take “aesthetically pleasing” 
In “my day” we had really long skis. When you held your arm up over your head, the tip of the skis came to your wrist. Nowadays they barely reach over the top of your head. And I still have the older pointy skis-- no parabolics for me. Maybe I don’t looks so “asthetically pleasing” on the slopes after all :(</p>
<p>aahhh…but we used the “colorful” wrappers…juicy fruit and teaberry were the favorites! Which reminds me…</p>
<p>Doing the Teaberry Shuffle!</p>
<p>jym626 - It is not the equipment, it’s how it is used that makes it pleasing (or not) to watch. Too many skiers have forgotten that the journey is what matters, not the destination. : )</p>