Shenanigans

Ok, I'm going to share some things that will probably make my parents not only roll their eyes, but be slightly disappointed, then be glad I didn't get caught and came out unscathed. My parents probably know the truth about all these stories--because parents aren't as dumb as their kids think--but this still gives me the feeling I'm confessing sins here. I'll try to be brief, but as we all know, brevity is not a strong suit of mine. I like to tell stories with lots of detail.

The Tractor
The house I grew up in had a huge field behind it. Many of my friends' back yards were accessible by crossing the field, or following the ditch that ran behind all the houses. We would play hid 'n seek, guns, fly kites, throw snowballs, and have a general good time out in that field. There was a tractor out there, however, that we were instructed never to go near. I'm not sure what kind of tractor it was, but it wasn't the normal farming kind; it had some big compartment for storing stuff, some belts and pulleys, and I don't even remember where you would sit when you drove it. I think it was more some add on to some larger trator used for sugar beat farming. (Ward siblings, maybe you know?) Anyway, I don't know what the deal was with it, but it just sat out there, not used, getting rusty and taunting the imaginations of the neighborhood children. Thus begin the shenanigans.

Contrary to the advice  of our parents (coupled with crippling consequences like having the Nintendo taken away), there were a few of us brave enough to play on the tractor. I remember being told if I did play on the tractor, I could fall, break my neck, be stuck there with no help, die, get tetanus or lockjaw from looking at it too long, etc. We climbed on it, played in it, and even wondered at the blankets we found inside (possibly belonging to homeless people who slept in it at night). I'm not saying we didn't get mildly hurt and scratched, but we'd be damned if we told our parents that's where the scrapes came from.

Golden Eye
This story only requires a couple items for back story. First, yes, I was into video games as a kid/teenager. I was NOT good at the shooter games, but had fun playing them. I was also not a big sluffer (sorry Hayley, I'm keeping this true to life. While I know you hate the term "sluf," that's what we called ditching class.) and mostly went to every class on time.

One day, however, there was some assembly that was going to take up the last three class periods. Someone had brought his N64 to school with the intent to take it to a friends house for a weekend-long Golden Eye-fest. Someone in a group of band geeks suggested it would be more fun to play Golden Eye than go to the stupid assembly, so I immediately offered up my house as a place we could go. We piled into Wyatt Barrett's mini-van, and sluffed the assembly. We were happily shooting each other in the virtual face, when suddenly I hear my dad's car pull in the driveway.

My immediate thought was something like, "We can sneak out the windows when he comes in the back door!" But that would not explain the giant mini-van parked in the driveway, so I had to figure something else out. Everyone else was freaking out a little, because I had told them that both my parents work and wouldn't be home until after school got out. I then went straight upstairs, looked my dad in the neck region (because who can lie to their dad in the eye), and said, "Hi, how was work? ...there was an optional assembly at school, so we decided not to go... but we're going to head back... uh... for band practice, so see ya!" And we piled back into Wyatt's mini-van, and went to his older brother's friends' house to keep playing.

The BioTech Center
At least that's where I THINK this last bit of shenanigans took place. This is one I don't think my parents know about. Unless I've told them the story already.

My senior year of college, I had a roommate name Marcus Aurelius. ("You knew Marcus Aurelius?" Name that  movie.) Ok, not really, but that's what I called him, and subsequently, so did the rest of our roommates. Mark was having a little identity crisis. I tried to be a good friend, but I was nearing the end of that not-true-to-real-life-in-any-way period of time known as college, and trying to figure out where I was supposed to fit in society and life in general. In trying to get through this period of time, I wasn't always the beacon of reason myself, and fell into some of Marcus Aurelius's  plots. One of which was to see what buildings on campus are slightly accessible in the middle of the night.

We totally broke into the BoiTech Center. Again, I'm not sure that was the building, but we jumped over this fence, onto some mechanical devices covered by sheet metal, climbed down the devices, and into an unlocked maintenance door. Once inside, we found that various rooms were unlocked because the rest of the building was secure. It was then I realized that were I ever to be homeless, I would move to Logan, because not only could I sleep on a soft couch at night, the HYPR building was available during the day for showers, with no supervision or regulation on who accesses the facilities. That night, we also got into the English building (not very hard. The doors were wide open.) which then granted access to the Family Life building.

All we did was walk around and see who had offices that were unlocked. But the whole time, the voice of reason inside me was saying, "This is ridiculous. Probably the stupidest thing you've ever done. Even if you're not doing anything, if you get caught, you have ONE semester left to graduate, and you could get kicked out of this school. Do you REALLY want to suffer through more college classes?" It was really dumb. And just one of those things stupid college kids do when they're bored in the middle of the night and don't want to actually go to sleep.

Well, that's all for me. Care to share any of your shenanigans?