For Old Guys Only

[Allen_Wrench]

A bicycle/riding-mower is a very green idea. So what if you can't exactly ride it down the street to the market without mulching a poor possum that was just trying to cross the road. I would enjoy one. Even mowing with it.
Ya know, it probably isn't correct to say "can't ride it to market"; I should say "shouldn't ride it to market". I'm living out on the far edge of town where a couple of the locals tend to drive their riding mowers on the street to get to the store and back.

 

[Jumpa]

I can relate to that Tom, I lost my shop keys one time and they were master keys for security doors at the Gov's mansion and the Capitol Bldg. I had them dangling from my belt loop how they come loose I will never know. Now I wear a back pack or a fanny pack and know where everything is at plus my billfold and so forth.
buzzard

Roger that I always had a brass clip on my keys & I stiull doi Like you Buzz the fell off however somehow I heard them sliding and jingling and looked and saw them I only heard them because I had let off the throttle at the exact time they hit the ground my belt loop was broken ..no idea how So I always carry a shoulder bag aka "man purse" like a laptop bag around my shoulder when i ride, I can fit a gallon of milk in it if need be.

Speaking of loosing stuff' on weekend mornings 4:30 or 5:00 AM. I get on my M/B and cruise the local bar room parking lots and look on the ground /parking lots. It is amazing what drunk people drop from keys to cash , wallets, phones , themselves!. I have to say cash money is the most found item they must have balled up bills in their pockets or something then go out side for a smoke pull out their lighters and drop the cash I can almost always make out with at least ten buck The most I've found and was able to keep was $160 bucks

I've returned numerous wallets cell phones it's hard to return cash though when nothing is attached to it with a mere 20 minutes of searching I call it drunk detecting LOL

 

[Jumpa]

As a matter of fact I'm heading out now!! even though its a thursday morning !!

 

[Dan]

That is pretty cool Jumba. (and good luck this morning!)

A while back there was a discussion about a purpose built, can collector motorized bicycle. Fun thread and just a bunch of folks spitting out ideas. Some got really ornate and high tech. Wish I could remember who it was that first asked the question. Seem to remember it was a retired gentleman who just wanted to get out and get some exercise.

I live just outside Hartford and the city is like a post apocalyptic movie on early sunday mornings. Really great to ride around and has a ton of trendy, hipster kinda bars. I might have to try your MBin' for "cash and valuable prizes" thing. (har or "Wheels of fortune")

Sitting here and thinking about it, sounds like a great Sunday morning. Sure beats being the guy waking up in the parking lot who had dropped some thing staggering back to his car.

 

[amealnet]

I remember the pant spring clips the kept your lower leg pants cuff from getting caught in the sproket chain. old timer

 

[xseler]

I remember the pant spring clips the kept your lower leg pants cuff from getting caught in the sproket chain. old timer

I just used a clothespin.

 

[happycheapskate]

I use strips of old inner tubes, or sometimes cheap electrical tape, but office clips ("Bulldog clips") work ok. They also make the best chip clips.

 

[Trey]

I live just outside Hartford and the city is like a post apocalyptic movie on early sunday mornings.

Hey! That sounds just like High Street in Brockton during the 80s.
Except with a bunch of Irishmen taking their families to mass. And even that sometimes had an ominous feel. lol

 

[Dan]

Trey, you made me think of Bank st. in New london CT. It is a sleazy waterfront that in my well spent youth hosted some very unseemly bars. At 2 AM you really could see some zombies staggering around.

LOL, I sailed with a guy on the ferries. When the bars closed, he would hop in a skiff and row out to fisher's island as that was NY and the bars closed at 4. He had one leg due to his brother running over him with a fork lift.

Great guy. He would leap down companionways (steel flights of stairs) and his crutches would bend. But not him. (we of course kicked them out from under him)

And he was one of the sane ones.

(well spent as in we had fun. Not that we earned degrees, snork)

 

[2door]

We've dragged up some great old stuff here and today I thought of a contribution.

Who remembers stomping on steel beer cans so they'd wrap around and hang onto your shoe and would make that 'clack, clack clack' sound when you'd walk?

Kids today wearing sneakers and soft aluminum cans probably will never get to experience that. Too bad.

Tom

 

[xseler]

Dad used to put short, fat headed nails in the heels of our shoes so they wouldn't wear as fast...............true story.

I didn't realize we were a little poor until I grew up. I guess that means I had a great childhood!! Wouldn't trade it for anything.

 

[Greg58]

I had forgot about that Tom, good one. We put balloons on our forks to make motor sounds. How many of us wish we had that priceless baseball card back that we clamped on the fork with a cloths pin?

 

[xseler]

How many of you guys went crawdad 'fishing'? Tie a piece of salted pork to a string and go to the crawdad holes. Fry 'em up........good eat'n! Didn't know what a shrimp was back in those days. I would still choose crawdads over shrimp today.

 

[2door]

How many of you guys went crawdad 'fishing'? Tie a piece of salted pork to a string and go to the crawdad holes. Fry 'em up........good eat'n! Didn't know what a shrimp was back in those days. I would still choose crawdads over shrimp today.

I've caught crawdads that way. How about frog giggng? I'm not sure where else people do that but growing up in south Florida, gigging frogs came naturally. You'd shine a bright light along the bank and you could see their eyes. Paddle the boat up close and stick the gig in, haul that fat sucker back and toss it in a sack.

Mmmmmm. Fried frog legs smothered in black pepper sauce and French frys.

The trick to gigging was to make sure the eyes you saw were really a frog and not a gator or a snake.

Tom

 

[KCvale]

How many of us wish we had that priceless baseball card back that we clamped on the fork with a cloths pin?

hehehe, I was never a card collector` so I'd use my folks playing cards, two per wheel.
If memory serves I didn't use the same the deck they found out the hard way didn't have all the cards and they would a new deck but hey, those were the 'crispest' cards.

Never tried the balloon thing but done my share of crawdad catching with my son, we found a spot up north a little on a little river and there was a shallow part with reeds we would walk in to, it was only like 4" deep there and loaded with crawdads, we even referrer to the spot as 'crawdad heaven'.

ANyway the kid could just reach down and pluck 'em up and my wife would saute them up with garlic like shrimp. Fun and Yum at the same time ;-}

 

[Tinsmith]

I always enjoyed trying to get the leeches off my feet and ankles going for crawdads.

Dan

 

[Jumpa]

i do
and baseball cards on the spokes

 

[Allen_Wrench]

We've dragged up some great old stuff here and today I thought of a contribution.

Who remembers stomping on steel beer cans so they'd wrap around and hang onto your shoe and would make that 'clack, clack clack' sound when you'd walk?

Kids today wearing sneakers and soft aluminum cans probably will never get to experience that. Too bad.

Tom

Oh man! I've done this. Old Bud cans were the best for this. (That was back when the pull tabs actually pulled a wedge shaped piece of metal out of the can.) Coming back from friends' houses, I'd always find at least a couple. Lawd, I used to this after dark too. Man I might have woke people up a time or two, I dunno.

 

[Allen_Wrench]

I just remembered another one: a few of us know what carbide is, being that we like the look of vintage bikes. I found some in Grandpa's garage one time, on a high shelf, in my early teens. It looked for all the world like it had been sitting up there since he first got a car with electric headlights or something.
I devised a way to find out if it was still good. I happened to have a sponge-rubber ball that was the same size around as a Campbell's soup can. And having a flair for the dramatic, I plucked a fuse out of an old firework. (I'm a bit of a pyro, always have fireworks tucked away someplace.)
Put some water in the can, drop in a chunk of carbide, shove the ball in the top whilst tucking the fuse in at the edge. Light the fuse & get back. It wasn't as dramatic as I'd hoped, but the ball went up pretty high.
There are just some things that, if we allowed kids today to play with them, we'd get in soooo much trouble.

 

[deacon]

My brother has recently moved back to town. We have spent the few days we have time for each other's comparing old poor stories from when our grandmother ran a boarding house for the mill workers.

After we moved out to our own mill house, our dad installed the first bathtub on our block. It was in an unheated porch so we could only use in in the summer. It was still baths on sat night in the kitchen in a big wash tub during the winter. Maybe that was why they called it a wash tub as well as for clothes.

That bathtub emptied into a wooden trough that ran the water into the backyard. Gee the things he forced me to remember