Old School Memories

[I had some conversations with college friends over the last couple of days which prompted me to upload some old school pictures to my flickr. This is the story behind one of them.

One day back in 2003, Brendan and I were grocery shopping at H.E.B. In the cheese isle, we found some toys displayed on top of the food. We picked out one of those rebounding punching bag things, a Batman one. It had a reservoir in the bottom which you fill with water … this makes the whole bounce-back action work.

We kept it in our apartment for most of the fall. After months of abuse and neglect, it sprung a leak. But not the kind of leak that would make the carpet wet. An internal leak … the inner reservoir was leaking into the rest of the bag.

For a while, this was comically irritating. You would punch the bag, and it would fall backward then return very slowly as the water rolled to the top and then back down again. We kept filling the bottom with more water whenever it got too low. After a while, it stopped springing back up, and we lost interest in the toy.

In order to keep it from eventually leaking all over the living room, we stuck it out on the deck. Batman lived out there for most of the winter, until Christmas break, when we got really bored.
One this day, we decided it would be awesome to fill the entire punching bag with water, haul it over to Chris’s (or old 3rd roommate) and leave it on his doorstep.

Oh noes!We had enough sense left to veto the plan of leaning it up against his door. So we decided to lean it up against the wall next to his door. The only problem was that this wall was made of textured stucco, and it immediately popped our taut bag-filled-with-water.

Our prank in jeopardy, I applied pressure to the wound while Brendan went looking for a bandage. Once we gave up, we called Chris to wake him up and at least show him what we were trying to do. He was not impressed.