Feeling Nostalgic Day 8: Nobody had Ever Heard of Gluten

                I didn’t really get into cereal too much as a kid because I could not drink milk, but I would eat cereal dry like a snack. Krispy Kritters and Oreo O’s were two of my favorites that are no longer. Krispy Kritters was like animal crackers, and Oreo O’s were like Cheerios but chocolatey with cream sprinkly things on them. 

               

                One night I had some Cocoa Puffs in a baggie and was walking around downtown Dells snacking on them like a bag of chips. My friends were laughing and asking why I was walking around eating Cocoa Puffs. I think I replied something like I wanted a snack and that was all I could find.

                Or going to the Wooden Nickel with our “allowance” to get the Frooties tootsie rolls for a penny or the weird unwrapped two-colored suckers for a dime or a can of soda for fifty cents. We’ll never see those prices again. These days it’s even difficult to purchase a single can of soda. I needed one can of Dr. Pepper awhile back for a recipe and could not find one anywhere without buying a 6 or 12 pack. I had to purchase a single bottle instead.

                Orbitz! Who remember Orbitz? No, not the gum or the travel website but the drink! Yes, the fruity water drink with the jelly balls suspended in it! Kwik Trip in Adams used to be the only place I could ever find it and whenever I had an extra buck or two I would stop there and get one. It had the funkiest texture ever. I remember our Chemistry teacher in high school doing a project with Orbitz trying to explain to us density and mass and how the jello balls stayed suspended in the drink. Or something like that… I failed Chemistry. Twice. 

 

                Anyway, continuing to read this may think about you destroying your crazy diet with my flashbacks of the days when a regular size candy bar was fifty cents and king size was 89 cents…

                I think it was Blue Bunny that used to always do a limited or special edition ice cream flavor and when we could afford a treat while shopping we would always get the special flavor if it looked good. That was usually on a Saturday after spending the mornings doing chores and the afternoons cleaning the church. Yeah, there were no Saturday morning cartoons in our house.

                I thought Kool-Aid Kool Bursts used to be bigger, or maybe it’s just that I was smaller. When you are little, everything seems so big. Like when I was in Future Educators in high school and we went to teach in the K-3 classrooms… the chairs and desks were so tiny!

               

                Remember collecting Kool-Aid and Pepsi points? We always had to get the new flavors of Kool-Aid also because those ones had two points on the back. I remember cutting them out and keeping them in an old red peanut butter bucket Dad brought home from Camp Chi when he worked there. I don’t think we ever sent them in for any merchandise. I think my brother sent in Pepsi points for a baseball cap or something like that. 

 

                Crystal Pepsi and Pepsi Blue! I was never much into a cola phase so I don’t really remember what they taste like. But we can’t forget about Surge! 

 

                My Mom reminded me today of YooHoo! We were watching a television show about it and I learned something new… apparently warm or cold, YooHoo! will not go bad as long as it is unopened… which means it may have a longer shelf life than Twinkies… ewwwwww!

                Tahitian Treat fruit punch was one of my favorite drinks as a kid. I had not seen it in forever until last summer I found it at the gas station by work. Temporarily… now it’s gone again. 

 

                Are there any treats or drinks you indulged in that are no longer available?  

Feeling Nostalgic Day 7: Imagination Only; Batteries Not Required

                Speaking of toys…. Ahhhhhh…. I could go on all day about the toys we had while growing up that inspired creativity compared to today’s cheap-o “why does everything run on batteries” nonsense. No wonder children today do not have an imagination… because all their “toys” do everything for them!

Heck, when I was 15, I was still asking for nothing but a bucket of Lego bricks for Christmas! And not one of those fancy technical kits where you could only build one thing using every Lego in the kit, but just a bucket of bricks. I liked to build skyscrapers and mini cities with the blocks.

One Christmas I got a K’Nex set and by that afternoon had built a 3-foot high Ferris wheel that really turned by twisting the crank.

I was completely satisfied with my Lite-Brite or Legos or K’Nex or coloring books and crayons. One of our secrets was always trying to get the new “special” crayons and art stuff. Through the years I had glitter crayons:

 Magic scent crayons:

 

 Glow in the dark crayons that we “painted” my bedroom ceiling with, super stamp markers:

 Color change markers, crazy tip markers, watercolor pencils, tri-color pencils; anything that was new and unusual or out of the ordinary and fun, we had to get. And I was anal about my coloring books. If someone wanted to color a picture in one of my coloring books, they had to ask me if they could color that picture and put their name and the date on it when they were finished. Hmmm… maybe that’s why I didn’t have (m)any friends.

Nah. Doubtful that had anything to do with coloring books.

Yes, barely any of the toys we owned required batteries. We played school and we played house and we created our own cities on poster board to use with our Micro Machines and we built forts in the woods and had family board game night and my Mom even created this silly mix-up sentence drawing game and we did Mad Libs and laughed until we thought our guts would burst. Ha! Mad Libs! Thanks to the “common core” I’m wondering if they even teach children nouns and verbs and adjectives in today’s schools.

Arts and crafts don’t take batteries. Micro Machines and Tonka trucks don’t take batteries. Most board games didn’t take batteries…except that loud buzzy game of Operation:

 

If I remember right, we lost Adam’s rib and have yet to locate. Legos and K’Nex don’t take batteries. Coloring books and crayons do not require batteries.

See, these are all things that sparked imagination and creativity. When was the last time you had a screen free evening and played a board game or put together a puzzle with your family?

Feeling Nostalgic Day 6: All-Day Shopping Excursions

                Recently I saw a slideshow online of two abandoned malls in Ohio. The pictures were pretty creepy. I wonder how the person inside taking the pictures felt!

               

                I was never much of a mall person. I really only wanted to go to Mall of America to see LegoLand and ride the indoor rollercoasters, which I finally got to do for my 28^th birthday.

                There weren’t really any malls very close to where I grew up. We had to go to Wisconsin Rapids (about 40 miles north) or Madison (about 70 miles south) to get to any malls. Going to the Rapids on a Saturday was an all-day affair for us.

                We would usually start at the Rapids Mall, which had Wal-Mart, an arcade where we would send my brother off to, the Tea Shoppe, which was this neat little store I loved that was kind of like a mild version of Spencer’s, but they had Jelly Belly’s. Actually, one of the first years I lived in La Crosse, my roommate and I took a road trip to the Rapids because she wanted to see the place. That was the last time I remember being there. At the moment I don’t really remember any other specific stores that were in the Rapids Mall. Wal-Mart left and built a Super Center on the south end of the city and everything has seemed to follow. There are all kinds of little plazas and mini-strips and new buildings going in all around Wal-Mart on the south side.

                Then there was the ShopKo Plaza mall. This mall had ShopKo, of course, and a Radio Shack where we would usually lose my Dad and my brother, a Christian bookstore called The Lighthouse where we would usually lose Mom, and I would usually wander back and forth between those two places and The Aquarium pet shop, where I would engage in conversation with the gigantic $2,000 African parrot. If I got really bored, I would find a piece of paper and pen and write down the titles and authors of all the books I wanted to read and then at a later time, go see if the library had them.

                As it sits today, the Rapids Mall still has a few stores remaining. A thrift shop, Subway, Dollar Tree, some insanely outrageously priced clothing stores, but the anchor ex-Wal-Mart still sits empty. The ShopKo mall is now a church but ShopKo remains. The Aquarium moved into a strip mall across the parking lot, and most of the other stores have followed to the area of the new Wal-Mart. The old K-Mart, which was across the highway from the new Wal-Mart, is now a car dealership, with The Lighthouse in a little spot around the side of their building.

                In high school Marketing class, my partner and I actually drafted a business plan to purchase the old Wal-Mart building in the Rapids and convert it to the most awesome gigantic toy store in central WI, since there are like… none. And yes, me being the hoarder that I am, still have it. We got an A-.