Being typical kids, Tim and I were always doing things with stones and rocks. We had more than ample opportunities since our whole farm is infested with them! The following accounts of our rock experiences will exclude all the “thousands” of times we threw rocks both at each other and other people. The first “rock” account was related to us when we were older by our grandmother “Ollie,” since oddly enough, neither Tim nor I remember it. Since we had (and have) so many rocks in our fields, every year we picked them up, usually after the spring plowing and preparation, since the frost would heave them up every winter. We had a wooden structure like a sled that was pulled with a tractor and a chain. They called it the “Stone Bolt.” That’s what we kid’s thought it was called, until years later when it occurred to us that it was called a “Stone Boat”! It was made with thick oak planks and 3 logs on the bottom and was very low to the ground so big rocks could be more easily rolled on it.  There are numerous examples of mispronunciations of many other things that I will cover in a future account. They would load the rocks on the “Stone BOAT” and drag them up to the sides of the barn ramp (see pic) and unload them there.  We used to love to ride on it among the piles of rocks. One time when we were VERY small, we were riding on it on the way to the field to pick up rocks and our dad looked back to check on us, and we had fallen underneath it with just our heads sticking out of the front! We weren’t injured they said since it was empty! At least that’s the story we always heard, and, knowing us, it sure sounds feasible to me! All during our “kid years,” we played with the rocks along the barn ramp. We made rock forts quit a lot. In fact, if we look very carefully at the “ruins,” we can still see traces of small vestiges of some of our larger rock forts by the foundation of lined up rocks! Other times it was fun to just throw rocks and have them ricochet off each other with the dull “thud” sound and the subsequent rock dust. This also served us quite well as “ricochets-just-like-in-the-cowboy-movies,” especially when the rock dust flying was accompanied by an imitative “kid sound effect” yell of a pistol or rifle shot with the accompanying “PEEEEOOOOOOOW” ricochet sound!  Another thing we used to do quite a bit with rocks is to hit big boulders with a sledgehammer. We had no particular reason to do this; we just thought it was fun. The biggest problem was that most of the time we would get small pieces of rock particles in our eyes each time the hammer would strike the surface. This really stung our eyes by getting hit by small particles probably flying at mach 2 or more! We never thought to wear any kind of protective goggles, etc. since this would both “take the fun out of it” and take the “spur of the moment” aura out of it as well! This also would violate “Mike’s Law of Kid Fun”, which is based on the theory that 93.491% of ALL young boy’s fun consists of “spur of the moment, not thinking or planning, but just doing it”. Of course, in our case, it was more like 100% of the time!