"By the skin of your teeth" you "just squeaked by" whatever "close shave" confronted you.

"Good night, nurse!" when much startled (putting emphasis on "nurse" as described earlier) is one my Manitoba-born Grandmother also used.

"Wouldn't that frost you!" expressed Grandmother's frustration. Somehow I have an impression a long form might have existed, something like "Wouldn't that frost your grandmother's preserves" or her "eyebrows," but I think that version (or versions) came through someone else.

"Since Heck was a pup" meant an indefinite span of years. I asked Grandmother about it once, and she didn't know what "heck" meant here. Later I ran across this in a book of word and phrase origins which alleged that Hector was a common name given to big dogs (after the Greek hero, I assume).

My mother (the Northwest-coast/Irish-American side of the family) rarely used "a coon's age" to mean a long time. This still has a literal meaning, I guess. When I was a child, we planted corn in our garden, until the racoons discovered it to be edible. Then each year they would always knock it down long before the cobs matured. We had to give up growing it. We tried again a few years later, but no use. Maybe fifteen years later, other people started growing corn again nearby - with no problems! I suppose there were no living coons in the neighbourhood who knew how to exploit standing corn.

"When I was a boy" was used as a stereotyped phrase by my mother, "tongue in cheek" (i.e. jokingly).

"H-E-two-sticks" was her mother (my Grandma)'s euphemisim for the exclamation invoking regions infernal. Grandma also used the spoonerism "a mell of a Hess," but not as much after the embarrassing moment when she accidentally inverted it back to the original while speaking with a friend who did not use profanities.

"Were you born in a barn?" when a door was left open, was used on both sides of my family. I was startled to hear the same phrase, from my late husband's Newfoundland family, ending with "born in a boat."

"On [something or someone] like ducks on a June bug" describes a spontaneous pack attack.

"If it was a bear it would bite you." (I don't recall the grammatically correct "were" being used in this phrase, but my memory may be at fault.)

"If the good Lord's willin' and the creek don't rise"
"Slow as molasses in January"
"Old as Methuselah" [Biblical reference]
"That joke has whiskers on it."

A bad mess looked "like a dog's breakfast" or "like the wreck of the Hesperus" [Longfellow poem] to Grandmother
A very dishevelled person might also look like the wreck of the Hesperus, or "like the Witch of Endor." [Biblical reference]
"Happy as a clam (at high tide)": Mom made a song, "Sam the Clam" from this saying.
"Three sheets to the wind" was about as drunk as a person could get and still be ambulatory. I think I've heard it with "two sheets" once. "Tight as a boiled owl" is another I may have heard, or only read.

"A real gully-washer and trash-mover" (very heavy rain) is a phrase that just shouts of origins in a more arid landscape. Here on the rural Wet Coast, moist earth minimises surface runoff. Vegetation grows so fast that discarded trash gets grown over instead.

Chinook jargon and other loanwords, and popular song or other phrases, especially from Pogo (Walt Kelly's comic strip) also formed parts of my family's language. Rowrbazzle!