All About Eggs

I challenge you to name a task that has a lower ratio of “This is gonna be awesome!” to “Man, I simply cannot wait until this is over…” than coloring Easter eggs.  “Reading this post” doesn't count, btw.  “Playing Monopoly” does, though.  Insert shameless plug for Zombieland here.

Let’s back up a bit.

There was an egg drop at my boy’s school this year.  You know… an egg drop.  Build a contraption that will save a raw egg from destruction when it is heaved from the roof of the school.  The rules were simple.  The device must be constructed (not pre-fab) and fit in a 20-cm (that’s about 8” for you Americans, Liberians, and Myanmarians out there) cube.  Also a parent could help.

Sweet.  Nice to be able to work a project with plenty of time to spare for a change.  I’m looking at you, Everything Else It Seems.

Here is the initial build-up, a cage within a cage, suspended there by rubber bands:

How much did the boy help? Meh… He did all the cutting of the materials and the spray-painting and came up with a method for glueing the pieces together without burning dad’s fingers or fusing the straws to the kitchen table.  The actual hot-glueing and “figuring out the math to build an icosahedron and grossly overestimating the tensile strength of a rubber band” was all me. Hooray, science!  BTW, teaching a six-year-old to spraypaint is super fun! Go fetch the “swear jar” and try it right now!  Wear white!

Anyway, the first build passed the test drop from a height of two feet onto a wooden table.  The test drop from five feet onto concrete was a horrible failure, unless your metric for success was “how big of a mess can I make” or “how much can you get a six-year-old to laugh at the mess in his dad’s garage”.  By those yardsticks, this contraption ruled.

After repairing the broken glue joints ad bolstering the inner cage with some sponge fragments we tested it again.  It passed the five-foot test.  Here is the result from the 20’ test (I let him chuck it from his bathroom window).  

Durn.  

Again, it’s all giggles and sunshine for the boy.  Unsung ground control hero of Apollo 13, he is not.

With one day left and and an ineffective and increasingly hard-to-clean device in hand, there was only time for repairs to the broken glue joints and one more addition - a few more sponge slices to cushion the pyramid inside. Testing at this point was moot.  It was either going to work the next day or die trying.  I gave it a 50/50 shot.

It worked.  I’ll be whatever-ed, it actually worked.

Fast forward to Saturday.  We got a kit to paint (not dye) the eggs, cuz the box looked awesome.  The package claimed that you could create these gorgeous, golden-toned, metallic looking eggs.  What it should have said was “INSTANT FAMILY ARGUMENT!  JUST ADD EGGS!”  Our result is in the pic in the upper left.  The less said the better, but next year we are going to go back to dying them or maybe just use my kid’s new-found spraypainting “skills” and be done in, like, forty seconds.  I was shocked to discover that the paint (or whatever it is that is included in this kit) seeps through the eggshell over the course of a couple days making tonight’s dinner of egg and lettuce salad way more festive-looking than it should have.

I’m sure I’ll be fine.

One last egg thing, and certainly not the least.  Today my wife and my boy and his aunt and his uncle participated in the Easter festivities at the White House.  Egg hunt, egg roll, football obstacle course, tennis lessons, story time, and lots of other stuff.  The pics are awesome.  I wish I could have been there, but, really, I couldn’t imagine a better team to lead this expedition than these folks.  Thanks,  aunt and uncle!  You rule!

To my wife and boy: I miss you guys.  Sleep well!  See you tomorrow!

That's a Good Sign.

Bad Sign: Cold.  Callous.  Rude. 

Good Sign (fifteen feet over from Bad Sign): Pointedly whimsical.  Delightfully threatening.  A promise of adventure.

Dusty Keyboard? Write Something Geocache-y!

Finally!  A break!  Ok.  Things have calmed down a bit so it is time to catch up on some stuff.  Let’s talk about some work on the geocaching front.

The family and I have been grinding our way through the 100-cache SNAP!!!-Land series.   This series has you driving around Suffolk, VA in a winding-but-fairly-connected path, jumping out of the car every once in a while to find a container, sign the log, and move on to the next one.  As long as you planned your route  ahead of time and you have a driver, a fetcher, and a signer you could probably knock this out in a day.  

We have been taking chunks out of this series for a couple of hours for a few weekends now (weather permitting - it actually snowed a bit last Saturday).  We have done about 75% of them so far, skipping over active construction sites and dicey neighborhoods, since our fetcher is six and is usually unarmed.

But it's not all park and grab - there are some cool things to see along the way.  The pic in the upper left of this post is a fallen tree that someone painted to look like a dragon.  I think that is near number 38 in the series...

As I reported earlier, the d20-shaped geocache I made is now officially "out there". About a week after it was placed the weather got really crummy.  Rain, snow, thaw, freezing rain, snow, thaw, freeze... Mother Nature was really taking a bat to that thing and I was concerned that it was now just a pile of pieces in the woods.  It turned out I was worried about nothing.  It survived just fine.

I built another geocache container.  Here is the progress of the build.

It is 20" x 20" x 5”, weighs a ton, and cost about eight dollars to make.  The squares are from a pine board I found in the hall closet of my old house, the trim is from another piece of pine, the chess pieces are scrap furring strip, and the sides are spruce 2 x 4.   Move the queen and the Tupperware-container cache is revealed.  I picked out a pretty good place in a nearby forest and I hope to put it out there this weekend. 

Then again, the other one sat in my garage for, what, like, a year-and-a-half before I did anything with it…  Time will tell.