So, one time when I was 9 years old I decided to go camping in our back yard.  This was very brave of me, because we lived on an acre of land that was nearly all woods.  I would NEVER do that now.  It was at the end of summer, and I'd spent the afternoon making a tent out of two sheets that were hanging on the laundry line, and placed bricks on the bottoms to hold them out at an angle.  I'm not sure why Mom let me do that, but she had always been really good about letting me make hiding places and cubbyholes for myself underneath tables and inside cardboard boxes.  What? Don't look at me like that,  I was an only child...I had to amuse myself.  

Anyway, so I had been playing in the "tent" all day, and when evening came, I just wasn't ready to say goodbye to it,  so my parents gave me a tarp to lay on the ground inside, and let me carry my sleeping bag, pillow and a flashlight down with me so I could spend the night.   For a while, it was all fine.  I could see the glow of lights through one of the sheets coming from the house, and as long as I knew my parents were awake, I felt perfectly safe.  After the lights went out, I started to get that butt-numbing fear of all the things that were probably lurking and salivating through sharp yellow teeth just outside of my cloth walls, and the crickets chirping from what sounded like underneath my sleeping bag weren't helping matters.  Not to mention that I could feel every little rock and twig underneath the tarp, but I had been determined to stick it out all night, scoffing at the idea of coming back to the house if I got scared.    In fact, I wasn't even going to go inside to use the bathroom, because I knew they would hear me and think I'd chickened out, which was just not going to happen!  But, eventually my imagination got the better of me and I started to panic, so I picked up my pillow and sleeping bag, and headed up to the house.

I remember all of that vividly, right down to the exact moment I made the decision to give up, but for some reason I have no recollection at all of what made me decide not to go inside, after all.  Perhaps my bravery came back once I saw that there were no werewolves laying in wait for me, but whatever the reason, I stopped just short of climbing the steps to the screened porch, and passed out on one of the patio chairs, instead.  That's where I was found by my parents, at whatever hour they came to check on me:

 I try to scan old pictures and add them to Flickr on weekends, and the process takes a while on our old PC so I don't get many posted at a time, but with the last batch I had a particularly good time remembering all kinds of little things that I haven't thought about in years.  (These aren't listed in chronological order, or any particular order, really)