at home: around the house

I'm 25 years old, and it's only a year ago since I found out what a wall-to-wall-rug really was. I had heard people talking about having them, but they could never prove it to me when I visited these people. I could see rugs on the floor, but where were the rugs on the walls!? I thought it meant having rugs on all the walls in a room meeting in the corners. Finally, last year someone told me that a wall-to-wall-rug meant a rug covering the entire floor. Silly me.

I believed that the groove in the doorway that is the place that latches the doorknob was really a place where a mouse lived. I would always stand in the doorway to the bathroom and look for a mouse. Never saw one though.

Triffids lived under the back verandah ... i was 10 when i saw the movie about those terrible plant alien things invaded ... we had plants called elephants ears (obvious reason)... we lived on a hill .. the breeze would rustle the leaves and make exactly the same noise as triffids ... usually around the time i was downstairs feeding the dog ... i was terrified ... still will not have them near my house as an adult ... you just never know do you ??

When I was three or four years old, we lived in a fourth-floor walk-up flat that had steam heat. The radiator would go "hsssssssss-PFT!" every few seconds when the head was on. I would hear this sound in my dream, and I remember quite distinctly a nightmare I used to have where I would wake up and the radiator would be coming after me, going "hsssssss-PFT!" It would chase me into the living room and burn me on the knee. Then I'd wake up screaming, convinced that the radiator had chased me into the living room and burned me on the knee, and somehow I'd managed to crawl back to bed. I soon became terrified of the radiator in my room, certain that it was just waiting for its chance to get me.

Finally one day my mum came in and handed me a cap gun, one with the little rolls of paper with a bit of black powder that made a snap when the trigger was pulled. She told me that if, in the night, the radiator began to threaten me, I was to shoot it.

That night, instead of being woken up by screaming, my folks were woken up by loud SNAP!s of the cap pistol. There I was, sitting up in bed, shooting my radiator.

It went "hsssssss-PFT!" for many years to follow but I never had that nightmare again.

I thought that there were little people that lived behind the curtains on the windowsill when the curtains were closed. When I used to walk to bed across the landing Id say good night to them, and sometimes have a little chat.

When I was much younger, I used to believe that there were cameras in my living room, and they would watch my every movement. They didn't know that I knew about them, so whenever my mom or dad left me alone in the living room, I would act normal, only moving my eyes to search for the cameras. I never did find where they were hidden...
This stems from watching a show on bad babysitters, and how worried parents would hide "Nanny-Cams" to keep an eye on the sitter. For some reason I believed my parents wanted to keep an eye on me, in case I was bad.

Before I was tall enough to see into the washer, I used to think that the close went into a bottomless pit where the fairies magically made them clean and then the washer star-wars style beamed them back up. Now that I think about it, I was a very strange child...

When my older brother Neil was 4, he saw a glass table for the first time ever! It was at a friend of my mother's house and he was confused. He asked his older brother, my eldest brother, Martin what it was because he had never seen one before. Well, Martin explained that it was A PORTAL TO ANOTHER DIMENSION. Being only 4, Neil believed it. While no one else was in the room, He jumped through the table !!!!!!!! He wasn't badly injured for the rest of his life but he did receive LOTS of stiches. The table did lead him to another dimension, a dimension of PAIN.


Even funnier though...Martin at thanksgiving 4 years ago(14 years after the incident)finally told my parents about "the portal" and why Neil had really jumped through the table!!!

When I was little, i thought that there was a little man in the attic that turned a crank above your room to make the fan spin. I thought that when you flipped the switch, he knew how fast to turn it, so I turned my fan off alot to give him a rest!

we have a laundary shoot. i was sooo fascinated by it when i was younger. i thought it was a mail box to a different dimension ... so one day, i took a note that said "to my message friend" on it and it said "wanna be friends?" and had a poem on it ... every day i would throw something down there. it wasnt in use,but after awhile it was clogged up with notes and gifts, so it never came out where it was supposed to. well, a few weeks ago, i remebered that i used to do that, and i wondered where all that stuff went? so i got a broom and loosened everything up and out fell: 7 funny notes and stupid poems, a beanie baby, some junk mail, a few computer game CDs, and and some reading glasses ...

When I was little my older sister said she was tired and just needed a little extra strength to make it through the day so remembering the label on a medicine bottle I had seen in the cabinet I brought her a bottle of Extra Strength pain reliever. I had no idea it was for headaches I just thought it was a bottle of extra strength.

I always used to sneak out of naps to get books. It would have been more fun to sneak downstairs and get snacks sometimes, but many of our stairs squeaked. I decided to use a marker to mark each squeaky stair with a big "X" on the white wooden railing beside it. Thank God the marker wouldn't write over the lacquered wood - I would have been in SO MUCH trouble. At the time, I just thought I'd be the only one to notice the x's.

One of my uncles is called Michael. I used to think that the microwave was called a MichaelWave and he invented it. It heated things up by Uncle Michael waving his hand and sometimes when I walked past I would wave to it!!!

As I child I was terrified of holes. The slightest nail hole in the wall would keep me awake all night. Eventually my grandfather covered all the holes with duct tape, because NOTHING can get through duct tape.

When I was about five, my sister would tell me that the funky noises coming from behind the big chest freezer was a valasa-raptor from Jurassic Park. I would have to make the "Caoo-Caooing" noises it made in the movie to fool it every time i walked by.

When I was a kid, there was a smoke detector in my room, and most of the time the light was green but sometimes it would flash red for a second.

I believed that if I saw it flash red three times in the same night I would die. No idea why I thought that.

We often had invisible/incredibly fast visitors who would ring our doorbell and be gone from the door no matter how fast we (myself and my brother) could open the door. Fortunately my brother saw my dad flicking the doorbell clapper arm to get it to "ring" one day or I could well be still camped at the front door with my hand on the lock trying to catch the "callers".