Poor Kang's We were a poor family back in the days... No pots for cooking - i remember the first place we moved into, we had to make dinner in our rice cooker cause we were using all the pots to catch the leaks in our roof. We also found a huge dead rat underneath our kitchen sink cupboard. home sweet home... Velcro shoes - i never got name brand shoes...it was always velcro shoes up to 8th grade. I remember my dad got me a pair of fake nike's (the swoosh was a different shape), but i thought it was so cool that i kept wearing it even though it was too small for me. I jammed my feet into those shoes every day for months, and now my pinky and ring toes curl inward cause the small shoes forced them to grow that way  Trailer home - we lived in a trailer home where we literally thought our house was going to fly away during severe thunderstorms. They would teach us in school to go to a safe place in your home during tornado warnings, like your bathroom, or an inner hall way, but we had nothing! we would have been at the mercy of the tornado. and during just regular rain storms, we couldn't even have conversations cause it was so loud. sounded like a train running through our yard. Every last drop - my dad would cut open our toothpaste tube and scrape out the little that was left. i remember throwing away a tube one day, and the next day, it somehow found it's way back on the bathroom counter, cut open, ready for someone else to take the last scrap of toothpaste. but that's not the worst...i've seen my dad reuse my bath water after i got done taking baths...now that's conservation... Weird meats - we never really got real meat in our house. (see nov 12 entry) cow tongues, cow hearts, dead birds, cow's feet, cow's ankles, turtles... and it was all in a soup...we ate soup for weeks. you can't feed 7 people with one cow tongue...but put that in soup, and you could feed 7 people for 7 days. i love soup... Dangerous cars - we used to have a car where the floor of the car on the drivers side had a HUGE hole in it. i'm not talking tiny peep hole...i'm talking hole big enough where rocks have come up and hit me. i remember as a little kid staring at it all the time cause i thought it was so cool being able to see the road beneath us while we were driving. Thinking back on it...it's not so cool anymore... Avoid doctors - we never had health insurance so if you were sick...good luck. i cut my hand ice skating and they rushed me to the emergency room to get stitches. got home and my dad was so mad that i got hurt...and he was even more mad when he got the bill. so when it was time for me to get my stitches removed (back in the days when they didn't dissolve away), i removed them myself and it killed! i never knew something could sting so much! all that just to avoid hospital cost. my dad was so proud of me...i think it was my first cost saving effort for the family... No toys - i NEVER got toys...90% of my toys were given to me by parents who had kids to old to play with them. the other 10% i found on the road. i remember i used to get excited when my dad washed the car...cause then i could make mud. that's how i played...i played with mud... so much more i could write about...but i'll stop there. i must admit though...looking back...it was fun being poor. guess cause you appreciated things more...i love real meat... | 
