Inspired by a "how ghetto were your parents" thread on another board
My parents had a few funky rules/ways/whatnot.
- my dad refused to utilize the drive thru. Once a month we would bring home McD's or Jack in the Box...and he always INSISTED on going inside and ordering and carrying it out. My parents limited themselves to a sandwich, med fry and med drink, but for us kids it was small fry and small drink.
- my parents never kept any soda in the house except for birthdays and holidays. And even then we all were only limited to one drink. The soda was then saved for the next special occasion.
- my dad saved EVERY receipt for whatever my parents spent. He would keep them in an envelope and write down how much the tax was for each receipt. He had an envelope for every year, and when my mom and I went thru his stuff after he died, we found all the envelopes...1 for each year from 1961-1995
- my dad also for whatever reason wrote down the temperature for each day. We also found countless notepads of dates/temperatures recorded from June. 1971-just 3 weeks before he died (May, 1995)
- my parents had a rule that we (kids) were never allowed to make phone calls to friends between 6pm and 8pm because that was typically times people would be eating dinner.
- before my parents would let me hang out with anyone, they had to meet their parents first. A phone call from their mom or dad was not good enough, they wanted to meet in person.....needless to say my social life when I was young sucked
- if I went over to a friend's on a Saturday/Sunday afternoon I had to be back home by 4:30pm. If I went to their house in the evening I had to be home by 8 then cleaned up and in bed by 8:30.
- this is the big killer......my dad was anal about ANYTHING. If we got new furniture or hung up shelves or whatever...he had to measure out the area and get everything dead-centered. He would spend hours measuring, making pencil marks on the wall or drawing it out on paper. We couldn't just get a picture and tack it on the wall.....a long process had to be executed before said picture was hung. When I was in college I got one of those "bookshelf" stereos. I asked him to help me hang 2 shelves up for it. The wall I wanted it on was between my closet door and bedroom door...and there was 52" of space to work with. It was 2 FREAKING HOURS before he even drilled the first hole in the wall!!!!
I am sure more memories are lurking but these are the strangest things I could remember........mostly my dad's doing...the rest of us had no choice but to comply.