the weather has been ever so temperamental lately. last week i wrote about the early arrival of summer, but i think summer has had a change of mind. case in point: it dipped into the 30s last night, and i awoke to a frosty breeze swirling around my bed because i'd left the window cracked open. why can't DC weather just make up its mind? if it's going to be warm, be warm. don't oscillate between sweltering heat and icy chill! or, if it's going to be cold, can't it snow a little? i heard it snowed in ottawa and new england over the weekend... *wheedling tone*

flashback: i remember when pencil boxes were The Thing to carry around, and i was so proud of my multi-compartmental ones with the felt-tip pens and fancy erasers and the mechanical pencils with colored and scented "lead". and the container of eraser shavings -- did anyone else do this with their erasers? i think we used to call it eraser dust, and the idea was to rub your eraser on a clean sheet of paper and collect the shavings to keep in a little container. so silly. and i had sticker books of scratch-n-sniff stickers, puffy stickers, shiny foil stickers, etc.

i was also really proud of my battery-operated pencil sharpener -- my #2s were always honed to razor sharpness. :) that reminds me of the time in fourth grade when my deskmate inadvertently stabbed my palm with a pencil and left an indelible mark that remains to this day. i still remember his name -- pat o'rourke. hehe.

ooh, and i remember those pencils that had sharpened pieces of "lead" embedded in plastic, and when the point became dull, you just popped the piece out (plastic and all) and pushed it in the end to make the next one come out of the tip. that's a poor explanation but does anyone know what i'm talking about? :D

what cool things did you have in your possession during your childhood days?

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