What Is It that Scared You While You Were Growing Up

Last night at the school our children attend the faculty put on the annual "Spooktacular Math Night", as part of the evening, students go scurrying from class to class as fast as they can getting stamps on their playing cards. The object is to fill all the slots on your card with a stamp so that you can go through the school spook alley.

Here we are getting started. In this game we each had a dye and we would throw it at the same time. Whoever got the highest number got to fill in their pumpkin and if we tied we got to both fill in a pumpkin with our color.

This next game involved dice and stacking blocks. You would throw down your dice and what ever number appeared on them you need to stack your blocks to match the blocks on your paper.

Another game that involve dice, this game was like Bingo, you filled in your card trying to get four beans of your color in a row. By this time our cards were getting filled up with many stamps and we were getting close to the big event of the spook alley.

We still needed a couple of more stamps so we threw our dice down, counted the numbers on the dice and made skeleton's out of the number that appeared on them. This activity reminded me of that girl on Zoey 101 that likes to collect Q-tips, I think her name is Stacey.

After collecting all the required stamps we went to the cafeteria where there was a lot of hustle and bustle. People were anxious to get to the spook alley. You could get some popcorn, make guess on some candy jars on your way.

Here's the gateway to get into the spook alley. We had finally arrived. Hannah was feeling reluctant to go. We made it in the first few steps and that's all she could do. As these creepy guys came from our of the walls. McKay and I had done the spook alley earlier and were ready to take Hannah through, but she got too scared.

I can't remember anything that specifically scared me in my wee years. But my father always tells me that one time when we used to sleep in Grandpa Plowman's unfinished portion of the basement in Smithfield, UT there was a great thunderstorm. Think of Queen's song, "Thunderbolts and lightning - very very frightening". It was in the summer and there was lots of lightning an thunder. I must have been about 4 years old. My father says I came over to the roll-away bed he was on and said, sleep me daddy. That's a phrase I continued to hear while growing up, especially during my teen years.

Another more recent story, of scary experiences didn't effect me but my old boss. We had to go to our two Florida offices in Ft. Lauderdale and Tampa Bay. (I used the word had but it was an enjoyable trip.) Well, at the Tampa Bay office there was a lifesize poster of our then company president, Ray Noorda. If you were not paying attention and walked by the poster it could catch you off guard. Well, much of the work we did after all the employees left the two offices and it got to be dark. Well, I took the lifesize poster of Ray and moved him strategically around the office so when my boss passed by it would scare him. After doing this several times, he thought he'd get back at me. He thought I had gone to the bathroom and set the lifesize Ray so that when I came out the bathroom I'd be startled. Well, it so happens that the janitorial service was in the bathroom cleaning and when they came out they about jumped through the roof. My boss got a good laugh at that and fortunately the janitor did as well.