Some Sort of Clip Show Post

Forgive the “writing this on the bus on the way into school” feel of this post.  Trying to bang this out during Super Bowl commercials, you see.

I Think I’m Blind... - A friend of mine was raving about being able to score some legit moonshine, so I asked him to get me some (I had no idea it was, like, $24 a jar... I owe you one, dude).  I won’t go into the history and flavor of it since he is waaaayy more capable of writing reviews of that sort, but what I will get into is how hard it is to pour this stuff out of a mason jar.  Based on several experiments the following methods have been considered and rejected:

• Pour like you would anything else, then use sponge or rag to sop up the 85% spillage you have.  Squeeze rag or sponge into glass.
• Use turkey baster to transfer liquid.
• Pour it into a large serving tray or baking pan then transfer to glass.
• Freeze the liquid solid, transfer to glass, wait, drink.

I decided in the end to just drink it out of the jar with a curly straw.  I thisnf theat is okk bed0acue is wokrdkma me 99sjdja mmee ddddddddjdjdjdjdd five dollars? geddoudahere...

Solar Power  The wife bought me a ReVIVE Solar ReStore XL 4000mAh External Battery Pack (plus two extra solar panels) for my routine Geocaching outings.  I put it through it’s paces charging and discharging and I would have to say works great.  My only wish is that it would charge itself and a plugged-in device simultaneously.  Some negative reviews out there complain about how slowly it charges.  They are wrong for lots of reasons, most of which seem to revolve around a misunderstanding of the definition of “direct sunlight” and the fact that the item doesn’t possess magical powers.  It works as advertised, which is just super.

Three Recent Quickie Projects -

Assembled a store-bought baseball display case but I replaced the baseball holder with a disk-shaped shelf and dowel standoff.  I hot-glued a bath toy to the shelf.  Click here to find out why this toy in particular was chosen.  It took me two years to figure out what to do with it, but now I have a constant reminder of a hilarious episode in our then-two-year-old’s life.

Finally finished this corkboard for my brother-in-law’s new desk.  The glue for the standoff is drying as I type this.  I think it will work out for him.

Built a shelf for my wife’s printer stand.  I built the stand a while back (the unstained one in the image in the link) out of “scrap” I had left over from building the desk I am currently at. 

Rain Rain Just Take My Wallet and Go Away - At 2AM Thursday morning, 50 mph winds with 70 mph gusts gave us a sample of what it was like to deal with Hurricane Isabel a while back.  As with Hurricane Sandy, we were glad we made the decision to get rid of the trees in the backyard when we did.  Other than a sleepless couple of hours and an absolutely terrifying 15 minutes, nothing happened aside from the high winds and heavy rain.  I took the lone branch that fell from a poplar tree to the dump today.

Geo-Junk Clock Update - I now have 223 caches under my belt and I have gathered some more stuff.  Here are the latest “before” and “after” pictures for the Geo-Junk Clock Project.  

 

Well, gotta go finish watching the super-close game.  More later.