I Amuse Myself

Post # 160   I was answering a friend's comment on my blog and said I amuse myself.  It is true, usually no matter what, unless I am in the depression hell hole, I can amuse myself pretty easily.  When I was a kid I loved to read.  My mother used to tell me that I read every book in the children's section of our libary.  We were a really poor family and I didn't own a book of my own until I was about twelve and my favorite aunt gave me a hard back book...The American Girl Book of Horse Stories (this was decades and decades before the American Girl books and dolls that little girls know now...not the same thing at all).  That I owned a hard back book was just a really big deal to me.   It was a collection of stories and I read them all a million times. I have a brother who is 16 years older than me.  I had wanted a set of encyclopedias for years and they were really out of the realm of possible for my parents. My brother got me a set when I was in the 6th grade.  I can not tell you what that meant to me.  I read that 1966 edition of The World Book Encyclopedia from cover to cover, volume to volume for years.  I kept them until the mid 90's and I was still reading them when i gave them away.  Since they were 30 years old when I got rid of them they were pretty dated but some things never change (like info about states).  One of the other ways I amused myself as a kid was that I read the phone book, the entire thing.  LOL! If i don't have something to read then I will read any thing!  I grew up in a town of about 5,000 people...Tucumcari, NM....so you can just imagine how thin the phone book was! Ok, even now, when the new phone book arrives I am compelled to read the yellow pages but now i just skim through unless it is a really interesting page.  I no longer read the white pages since our phone book in the big city is quite a big larger!  My very favorite thing of all time, hands down, though is reading a catalog.  Seriously, that was my all time favorite "toy" from as far back as I can remember as a little kid until I got my first digital camera not all that many years ago and that is now my favorite toy.  When I was a kid there were big catalogs from Sears Roebuck & Co.,  Montgomery Ward, and Spiegel.  Even better was when the Christmas catalogs came out.  LOL! As I said, I grew up in a financially challenged home and as a kid i really didn't understand that people could own all those things in the catalogs....that was just way beyond my comphrehension!!! I poured over those catalogs for hours every day.  I really miss those  catalogs.  Store websites are basically "a catalog" but it is no where near the same.  I still get some catalogs in the mail.....nothing at all like the Sears catalog that had absolutely everything in in but I love them still, even if they are skinny.  One of my favorites is Terry's Village.