Please Mean His Eyes... Please Mean His Eyes...

"Them?"  Yeah... I'm gonna need a little more to go on than that, Coloring Book.

Wandering Aimlessly With High Precision

While I was at the park with the family last week I found myself waiting for the boy to get off the jungle gym, so I decided to kill some time by downloading and playing with a geocaching app by Groundspeak. A friend of mine told me about geocaching a while back but I had never really considered it - too many other things to do, I guess.  

If you don’t know, here is geocaching in a nutshell.  You get some GPS coordinates that direct you to the approximate area of a hidden container (cache) and you go and find it.  The sizes vary, but they usually contain a log for you to sign to prove that you were there, and sometimes there are neat little (read: worthless but interesting) trinkets you can trade, assuming you have something of equal or greater value with you to leave.  

Some people refer to Geocaching as “using a multi-billion dollar satellite system to find Tupperware in the woods”.  Also a fair summary.

Around the world there are over 1.8 million hidden caches, so chances are there are several near you. For example, there are two in my neighborhood, one in a baseball field about 600 feet from Agmorion’s house, one in an old vineyard close to a sister of mine, and one in a tree about a third of a mile from Jimmydunes.

No, you’re creepy...

I started up the app, not really knowing what to expect and lo and behold there were about a dozen in the very park I was in, the closest being a mere 230 feet from where I was standing!  Neat!  

I told the boy what we were going to do next because what could be more exciting to a four-year-old than looking for hidden treasure in the woods with his family?  Nothing, probably!  On the other side of that coin, what could be a bigger letdown than failing to find a plastic box filled with trinkets in a mosquito-filled woods after searching for what seemed like forever?  Nothing, probably.

Firmly on “the other side of the coin”, we gave up after “forever” had passed (roughly five minutes).  I told him we would find it the next time we were there.  He seemed cool with that.

Later, I noticed that there were two in our neighborhood, one near a park.  Surely, the boy and I could find that one, right?  Nope.  Same deal.  Dad says “let’s go look for treasure in the woods”, kid says “Ok”, kid walks away dirty, scraped up, and harboring the feeling that his father comes up with the stupidest games to play, ever.

I guess I could hide behind excuses like “I had no concrete idea of the size of what I was looking for” or “my GPS in my phone isn’t really great in trees” or “I was limited by my kid’s lack of desire to walk through the mud and headlong into a row of thorn bushes” but it really came down to the fact I had no idea what I was doing.  I needed advice.

That advice came from a geocaching co-worker who agreed to go and look for an allegedly easy one near where we work.  It took the entire lunch hour but we did it - he nearly lost his security badge, but we found it.  It was a waterproof container about half the size of my thumb.  Signing the tiny log inside felt awesome.  

Armed with the tips and pointers I picked up during this hunt I headed back to the park near my neighborhood with the family in tow.  This time, the wife would watch the boy, I would search to my heart’s content, find it, sign the log,  put the cache back, rejoin the family, then “find” it with the boy.  Redemption, here we come!

A quick aside here.  Non-geocachers are called “Muggles” after the non-wizarding folk in the Harry Potter series.  You need to be kind of stealthy regarding them because nothing quite raises the alarm in folks in this post 9/11 world than watching some dude circle a tree (or a fire hydrant or a fencepost or whatever) for fifteen minutes then place a mysterious package nearby and leave.  Also, part of the game is to keep the caches in good shape and that includes not inadvertently turning them into an “attractive nuisance” to curious passersby.

The wife runs into a mom and her kid in the park, she becomes best buddies with the woman in that way my wife has, and the kids go off to play in the sand near the swings while the grownups chat.  After a while, the third kid (me) traipses off into the ditch behind the park to give the cache a second go.  It took me fifteen minutes, but I found it!  Sweet!  I signed the damp-but-usable log, noted the little chain-restaurant-vestibule-coin-machine trinkets inside, and closed the box.  

Just then two ten-year-old girls appeared on bicycles and started orbiting the basketball court near the cache.  I couldn’t put the box away without risking that my first solo find would be “Muggled”.  So I had to wait.  After about five minutes standing there in the ditch half-hidden by trees, not moving as to not attract attention to myself, wondering why my wife has not at least come over to see if I was ok, and wondering how long it took to contract Lyme disease, I hear one of the girls pipe up in alarm and say “Oh my God, there’s somebody back there!”

Well, that’s just super.  Now I’m the creepy guy in the ditch behind the fence in the park.  Any number of horror movies start off this way...  I can’t run away, and I sure as hell can’t approach.  My wife is just behind the jungle gym - from her vantage point she can see the boy, but she can’t see me.  I can’t see her, but I can kind of hear her talking to her new friend.   But, hey, no worries.  I can just call the boy over and all will be well.  Out of my mouth I hear the following horrifying words boom toward the park:  “HEY, BIG GUY!  WHERE’S YOUR MOMMY?”  

He stops playing in the sand, looks over in my direction and says... nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  Then he went on playing “I Said Stop Destroying My Sandcastle!” with his new playmate.

At this point I was pretty sure I was going to jail.  

“Well, enough of this,” I thought, “Time to take action.”

I approached the fence and yelled louder, figuring if I did so with enough confidence that  it might make me look less serial-killer-y.   This time the wife heard me and yelled back across the park the third worst thing she could have (the first being “Stranger Danger!”, and the second being “My husband is unarmed, can’t fight, and has twelve-hundred dollars in his wallet!”): 

“DID YOU FIND IT?!!?!”

The girls stopped and stared at me and at the wife.  I paused for a while, not sure what to do.  Maybe if I don’t say anything she will get the hint and...

“DID YOU FIND IT?!!” she repeated.

“Yes!” I yelled as quietly as I could while hiding the box behind my back.  

“WHAT’S INSIDE OF IT?!!”

“Ummm.  I’d rather not say!” I yelled with as much please-understand-my-tone-I’m-begging-you as I could muster.  At this point, I was told later, the new friend (who had never heard of Geocaching) asked my wife if there was something unsavory in the box (like drugs or a human head, I guess) and that’s why I didn’t want to say what it was in front of everyone.  

Well, that’s me all over: Super Awesome First Impression Man.

The girls took off at a slightly higher speed than was absolutely necessary and I was able to return the cache to it’s hiding spot.  I went over and explained things to the friend.  She was courteous but clearly non-plussed. 

Meh... At least I didn’t get maced.  I’ll chalk that up as a “W”.

After the woman and her kid left we all went to the pavilion and I told my son I found the hidden box.  He looked up from his chalk drawing with what appeared to be interest but said nothing.  I asked him if he wanted to go and see it - it had some cool toys in it, I told him.

“No.  No thanks,” he said, going back to his work.  Now, I know that “no thanks” reads all cute and polite but, trust me, it was sooooo dripping with “Fool me once, Old Man, fool me once...” - I totally can’t blame him.

After the park it was time to head home but I wanted to try my hand at another cache a little over a half-mile away in the opposite direction from home, apparently because I lack any sort of pattern recognition or short-term memory.  After whining at the wife for a while she agreed to pick me up in thirty minutes near that area.  I got there and found the cache (an easy one badly covered by branches near the base of a tree) just before the setting sun made things too hard to see.  This find was mercifully uneventful.

During the car ride back I made peace with the fact that I was hooked on this new hobby.  It’s free (well, the app was ten bucks, but it’s a one-time thing), it’s excellent exercise, and may or may not be fun for the whole family.  

So just remember: If you see a guy repeatedly wandering up and down the treeline behind the Wal-Mart with a confused look on his face, he may not necessarily be a meth addict looking for a place to crash for the night.  He might just be a dude harmlessly searching for a plastic sandwich container full of toys to sign so he can prove to other people that he can find a plastic sandwich container filled with toys armed with nothing more than his wits, a three-hundred-dollar smartphone, and several billion dollars worth of military technology.  

You know... you might want to call the cops, all the same.

Shenanigans, Indeed!

I went to Busch Gardens this weekend with the wife, the boy, and some friends.  A buddy and I broke off from the group to ride some rides while the wife and the rest caught an animal show:

Close but no cigar, there, Auto-Correct.  Hmmm... that would explain that weird $250 charge to my credit card that day, though...

Corkboards and Chalkboards and Workbenches (Oh My!)

Well, the last project update was for kid stuff.  This one is for the other stuff I have built since we moved into the new place.  Here goes...

This is the third corkboard I have built using real wine corks collected from family, friends, and taken from our own personal stash.  The first I made a puzzle out of and is hanging in the kitchen.  The second was a half-corkboard, half-chalkboard I made for a friend for a Christmas gift.  

The most recent one hangs in my wife's office.  A very long time ago Agmorion gave me a frame building jig which I never used until I did this project.  My reluctance was mainly due to laziness and fear of the unknown.  It is a great little tool.  It was easy to set up and it aligned the corners of the frame perfectly.  I will be using it a lot in the future.

As with the other corkboards I made this one out of mainly reclaimed materials.  The cedar frame was made from leftover wood from a mailbox project.  The backing was made from spare pegboard leftover from the garage refurbishment.  It is 19 inches wide, 30 inches tall, and has 280 natural corks. The wife loves it. 

I made this chalkboard from cedar recovered from my son's playset at the old place from the useless (to a two-year-old) monkey bar part of the structure.   The oak backing was made from leftover paneling from a cap I made for our entertainment center.  The writing surface is Valspar 203261 Black chalkboard paint. That stuff is like magic. The end product is 22 inches wide by 37 inches high and hangs in my garage/shop.

When we moved out of the old place, all of my workbenches, shelving, and even a huge roll-around cabinet I made (actually, Jimmydunes helped me build one of the old workbenches and the wife helped me with another...) conveyed with the place, as did the shed out back.  Not only did the new place not have an out-of-the-way place for garden tools, etc, the new place had no workbenches. 

Obviously things were extremely tight in the garage for a while. The first order of business was to catalog and dispose of all the old paint in the new garage. Some of that stuff was eight years old.  I'm glad I took the time to record the old paints - that list came in handy when the contractors came by to fix stuff caught during the inspection.  Next came moving some of the larger stuff like wire shelving, the wood holder, the tool chest, and the table saw into their final homes.

Finally it was time to put in some benches. I wanted them to be nicer looking than the old ones and I really had a lot of things on my plate so I figured I would just buy some this time. I found out that for the size that I wanted I would have ended up paying between $250 and $300 per bench! No way.  Plus, each one would need to be custom anyway to get the maximum usage from my limited space. 

Time to build.

The first one (the one on the right) needed to be tall to allow for adequate storage of larger things and to later have a shelf for smaller tools like Skil-Saws and cordless drills.  The top (like all the other benches) is made from a paint-grade pine panel 2 feet wide and 6 feet long. The legs and cross members are spruce 2x4s and the shelving is just low grade yellow pine board.  The bench is 46" high, which is a good height for me for using the drill press. 

The second one (middle) is basically a carbon copy of the first, except ten niches shorter and with an integrated power strip on the front. The third one (there on the left) is basically a carbon copy of the second except it is four feet long, has casters, pegboard sides and back, and has doors made from the same material as the top.  I use it to store all of my electronics parts and other stuff I don't feel like looking at. 

Each of the benches cost less than $100 in materials and all three took about eight hours total to build.  Well worth the effort.

All my yard tools now hang on the wall, as does some pegboard, the ladders, and additional shelving so my once extremely cluttered new garage has nearly been transformed into a borderline respectable shop. The only thing left to do now is build a large cedar toy chest for storing all of our son's outdoor toys and park it in an area I have picked out off the back porch and I think I will have maximized the space.   

The next tasks I want to tackle out there is to add more lighting and to seal the floor, but those things will need to wait for spring.  In the meantime it seems I have a display case and another chalkboard to build...

Yep, That About Sums It Up.

Sometimes a couple of pictures express way more than any number of rage- and booze-fueled blog posts could possibly hope to say.  This is one of those times.

Sorry for the quality of this one but I had to snap it quick.  In case you can't make it out, the warning on the truck on the left says "KEEP BACK 100 FEET.  NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR BROKEN WINDSHIELDS"  The one on the right says "KEEP BACK 200 FEET.  NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR BROKEN WINDSHIELDS".

Here is the next.  I took this outside a candy shop in Virginia Beach.  It speaks for itself.

I don't know about you, but I think these two pics together answer the question "What is wrong with this country?" nearly completely.

Wait... You Want To Rent How Many Donkeys?

You know how you are always supposed to tell your kid they can be whatever they want to be when they get older?  Yeah... That doesn’t always work. 

Six or seven months ago at the stoplight outside of one of the local Chuck E Cheese restaurants, our (then) three-year-old son declared that he no longer wanted to be an astronaut.  “Fair enough,” I said, “You can be whatever you want, buddy.  What do you want to be instead?”

“I think I want to be Jesus when I grow up,” he said.

The wife and I looked at each other   She shrugged, deferring to my greater “spinning a line of B.S. on a moment’s notice” ability.  Just super.

“Well,” I said after the light had turned green, “They already have one of those, big guy”.

“Well,” he immediately volleyed, “If there were two Jesuses, then maybe we could help more people.”  

Ahh, I see.  The boy thinks that the Cosmos is pretty much like a badly run Wal-Mart where the lines wouldn’t be so long if someone would just open up another damn register. Well, we’ve all been there in our darkest hours, I suppose... All in all, an admirable career choice.  Not really a lot of room for advancement, though, but admirable nonetheless... Hmm.  I haven’t said anything in a while. Next Sunday I should really ask the pastor what...

He continued excitedly “What if there were ninety Jesuses?  Then we could help whole bunches of people!”

I thought: Look, dude, Jesus’s aren’t like shopping mall Santas.  You don’t just slap a beard on some wino and call him the Savior of Mankind. There’s kind of a tough vetting process involved, and don’t even ask about the exit interview...

Ninety Jesuses, indeed.  No wonder there was no room at the inn.

Aside from Leonardo da Vinci needing roughly half a mile of canvas to depict it, the Last Supper would probably be less known for it’s austere messages and holy symbolism as it would be for the story of the eleven hundred or so dudes who crammed themselves into the Upper Room for dinner, violated the heck out of ancient Jerusalem’s very strict fire code and noise ordinances, and obviously didn’t get their security deposit back.

I mean, with ninety main participants, the Stations of the Cross would turn into a complete farce scored by Spike Jones or something - Station 9: The Jesus’s Fall for the One Hundred and Eighty First Through Two Hundred and Seventieth Times”.  

Ridiculous.

I could go on and on about lepers being accidentally vaporized from overdoses of healing magic and sightless beggars being alternately healed and re-blinded until everyone in the parade has had a turn, but I won’t.  Also, I will hold my tongue regarding a thought I just had about Roman soldiers singing a horrifically modified version of “Ninety Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall”...

All I could do in the end is agree with him and just be thankful that he didn’t say he wanted to be a bank robber or something.

Wait... 

Actually, how cool would it be to plan and pull off a high-stakes heist with your son?  Damn straight, it would be the most awesome thing ever...  Excuse me, I need to go talk to the Lego folks about an idea I have for an “Ocean’s Eleven” themed play set...

Man, You Say Red a Lot...

Aside from the day-to-day Mr. Fix-It stuff I have been doing since we moved into the new place the boy and I cranked out a few projects together.

The first is a Red Toolbox Classic Toolbox Woodworking Kit from Lowe's.  We actually put this together at the old place but for one reason or another it never got painted properly.  I didn't have any red paint so I figured I would just bop on down to the local True Value and get me a pint.  

No dice - no cans of pre-made red of any shade that was not spray paint.

I was annoyed but I wasn’t really surprised. Based on my experience there attempting to rent the Emperor's New Garden Tiller and failing to buy other “of course they will have it” type things I am now wondering if this ginormous place isn’t really a Mafia front or just a movie set or something.  Hmm... Next time I’m in there I’ll check and see if they have Red Apple Cigarettes...

I ended up going to Lowe’s and getting a sample size container of a dark, traditional red.  (Valspar Posh Red 1011-4, if you must know).  The result is there on the left.  It works just fine.

The second project we worked on was refurbishing an old cedar birdhouse.  This birdhouse was at the old place when we moved there long ago.  I rescued it from the tree it was attached to after that tree was felled by Hurricane Isabel.  The “before” pic is there on the left. 

The boy and I were going to hang it up as is but he asked where the food would go.  Good question.  Let’s make it into a bird feeder, instead.

I cut the parts for the dish and roof extension out of some spare cedar from my recent mailbox refurbishment project and cut the a perch from a poplar dowel I had for leftover from some other forgotten thing I probably half-did long ago.  I used a hole-saw on the door to make a nice neat circle and to enlarge the entryway a little.  The boy enjoyed using the drill, cordless screwdriver, and hammer to put the parts together.  

It was painted red and white and we hung it together where we could see it from his bedroom window.  The squirrels and the cardinals love it.  

The last project: finally painting some bookends Grandpa bought a long time ago.  Like the toolbox project it was started at the old place but the paints that came with it were mostly bad-in-the-box - only the metallic blue was usable.  Last week it got bumped up to the top of the queue and we painted it and bedazzled the living buh-jeebus out of it with glitter from his craft box.    It sits on his desk now and holds a few books of his choosing.  He is very proud of it.

Three fun projects, each with their own “lessons learned” - some for him and some for me.  First, I learned to stop counting on the local True Value to “stock things” and “provide services” and just make peace with the fact I will most likely be driving 15 miles to Lowe’s whenever I need something. The second, the boy’s lesson, is that not all red birds are robins, and not even all robins are red. The third we learned together - although mixing yellow and red poster paint does make a different color, doing so in a one-to-one ratio makes a pretty crummy orange.

Meet the New Hovel; Same as the Old Hovel (Conclusion)

(Continued from Part I)

One day before we moved in the wife called the PODS folks to make sure that our two trailers full of furniture and outdoor equipment were going to be delivered on time.  The movers we used are in high demand and work by the hour - we only had a small window of opportunity, see.  

Also, it’s the year 2012 and, since the world has gone all Atlas Shrugged and no one knows how to do anything correctly from beginning to end anymore, only the truly foolish think “Well, I’m sure everything will be just fine”.  It's always best to check.

The guy at the other end of the line said “Yes, ma’am, your trailer will be delivered Saturday at 9”.  Trailer?  Not trailers, plural?  Uh, oh...

After about half an hour of shouting the PODS delivery folks found the other trailer but said it was scheduled to be delivered a week later.  Also, they couldn’t tell us which one had our furniture and which one had our lawnmowers and other garage stuff in it. This would have been great to know before we were forced to play Sophie’s Choice with our stuff, thereby risking being huddled together at night on the Husqvarna instead of our beds for a week.

Eventually they agreed to deliver both our trailers on the promised day at the promised time... for an additional fifty dollars, of course, since we were “changing” the delivery date and time.  We said, “Fine”.  We will pay the fifty dollar Mafia-like shakedown fee to make sure our furniture “doesn’t suffer an unfortunate accident” or whatever your game is.

It’s times like this where one of my wife’s hidden talents really shines through.  She is normally calm and composed - the paragon of self-control in crisis situations, in fact.  She can juggle nineteen different things and still be around for friends in need.  She is a great cook, a great mom, and she’s even kind of cute.  

But, brother,  if you try and screw her out of a single copper ha’penny she will come down on you and your organization like the Fist of God and she will not stop until she has lain waste to everything as far as the eye can see, collateral damage be damned.  I usually try to not be around when she shifts into that mode... I... I think I once heard her get so angry she started using Klingon swear words and began peppering her fury-driven invectives with “Thee's" and “Thou's" like an Old Testament prophet...

By the end of the "conversation" they agreed to get all our stuff to us on time.  We didn’t have to pay the fee.  

The next day I got to say a phrase I don’t think anyone has ever said before: “The POD people are here - thank God!”  The movers did a great job.

A week after we moved in, all the furniture (well, all the furniture we owned at that time, anyway) was in and all the boxes were emptied.  The boy was playing with his Legos in the living room when the realtor (finally) came by to get the FOR SALE sign out of my garage.  Remember how I said the living-in-a-hotel-slash-house-hunting adventure was over for him?  Well, seeing her, he nearly lost his tiny, three-year-old mind.  He shook his head and in a clearly panicked voice he repeatedly told her “We... we live here now!  We live here now!”  We assured him she was just there to visit and he calmed down somewhat but he was visibly on edge until she left.  

Poor little dude.

The new house officially became “home” about a month ago when we hosted our first party.  We called it a soiree, but I am pretty sure the neighbors thought it was closer to a hootenanny, what with all the cars lined up and down the street and the overly loud and underly talented guitar-playing blasting from the room above the garage.  Eh, let’s split the difference and call it a shindig. We had a blast.

And, other than a lot to say about the weather here, that’s about all there is to the moving-to-a-new-place story.  We are happy to be here and we look forward to many years of enjoying our new home.

Meet the New Hovel; Same as the Old Hovel

As you know we lived in a one bedroom efficiency for six weeks while we were in-between places. You would think that would be all kinds of awful but actually it was just fine. It was sort of like living on the set of The Honeymooners, except instead of Ed and Trixie as neighbors, we had a revolving cast of rejects from Jersey Shore walking around bellowing their opinions of things at one in the morning. I think maybe Marriott should change their slogan from “Live Like You” to “Live Like You, You Drunken, Shirtless, Hallway-Wandering Weirdo”. 

The boy dealt with living in a hotel for that long like a champ, sometimes sleeping in the bed, sometimes sleeping on the floor (his choice).  We ate out a lot and took advantage of fun stuff in the area but by the end the adventure had obviously run its course, and you could sort of tell that he wasn't necessarily buying the whole "you will eventually get all your toys back" line his folks were feeding him anymore.

Months before we moved, we (well, mostly my wife) started the process of packing up all of the files and books and attic fodder we owned and we (well, mostly I) hauled it to The Least Secure Storage Facility in the Whole Wide World (more on that later).  Now, we consider ourselves very "flat surface" people - we don't see the need to cover every square inch of horizontal and vertical space with knick-knacks and bric-a-brac to the point where it looks like we are living inside a wedding cake decorated by unsupervised kindergarteners. That said, we still managed to fill 2,000 cubic feet of storage facility space with, like, forty-seven dollars worth of stuff in boxes. 

Ah, yes, the boxes. Friends of ours had finished moving recently and my awesome wife scored tons of free cardboard boxes from them.  She even did most of the packing because, not to put too fine a point on it, she is awesome.  I think, though, that the awesomeness is tainted with juuuust the smallest smidge of evil. 

Let me explain.

These boxes were used but clean and strong - not the flimsy, roach-infested treasures you can rescue from the back of your local liquor store.  Great, right? Well, not really.See, "used" here means "previously-labeled-and-sometimes-relabeled", so a box that might be Sharpie'd SERVING PLATTER - FRAGILE might actually contain ONE HUNDRED POUNDS OF BOOKS.  After the third time blowing most of my intestinal tract out my backside I learned my lesson.  I girded my loins appropriately, approached the next box like an Olympian dead-lifter, and nearly launched a box labeled BOOKS - actually containing FOUR WINE GLASSES - into the ceiling fans.

Serves me right, really.  I should have helped pack more...

(To Be Continued...)

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

Wow!  Finally, after three months, I am back to writing.  What can I say?  It has been a busy, busy time for us.  Let’s recap for now and we can get into details later.

The boy turned four recently.  He is enjoying being back at school with his friends and especially enjoying not being at the cold, antiseptic daycare he was stuck at over the summer.  He is getting the hang of swimming, riding a two-wheeler, reading and writing, and using swear words in context.  He is on a soccer team and he has his first game this week.  

He ditched me in favor of hanging out at a girl’s house for the first time yesterday. As I held the football and watched him dash off across the lawn and through the trees with her, I have to admit I had never been so happy/sad/proud before in my life...

We traded a house of sticks for a house of bricks.  The new place needed a lot of things done to it - nothing too major - but we hired a contractor for a lot of the larger jobs, like tree removal and repairing load-bearing masonry.  The smaller things occupy my somehow-always-thirty-item-long to-do list.  I can’t decide if I should track down the guy who lived here before and a) buy the guy a freaking hammer and an extensive instruction manual for it or b) thank him for being such a neglectful, lazy bonehead that it makes my day-to-day actions appear absolutely heroic by comparison.  Definitely more on that later.  Remind me to tell you about the chainsaw and the Pyrex dishes sometime...

I built three workbenches, modified a birdhouse, built some bookends, completed over 100 to-do list items so far from “hang paintings” to “replace broken deck board” to “re-stain desk for son”. I built a chalkboard, built a towel rack, and engraved our name on the mailbox in compliance with HOA regulation 425b-12, Section vii Paragraph 4 entitled “Resistance is Futile”.

I grilled out about 10 times, went to Busch Gardens twice, went to the pool a couple of times,  and went to the beach once.  I bought a sweeeet new guitar (yes, I am Level 9, now), too.

Oh, and once a saw a blimp...

More later.

Holy Blank, Indeed!

... And the award for "Long-Lost Object Least Likely to Be Found During a House Move or, In Fact, Ever" goes too... this Yoda Lego Minifig Head!

This head, lost sometime in January, was found a couple of days ago while moving a box containing a Nativity scene to the holiday section of the attic in the new house.  In retrospect, though, I guess we shouldn't be even the littlest bit surprised...