The Sketch Artist

Scene:  Pre-dawn Christmas morning. A quiet, snow-covered street is gently illuminated by the sodium lamps in front of the 14th Precinct Police Station. The silence is shattered when a thirty-ish lady dashes in, panicked and out of breath.  Disoriented, she staggers up to the desk of the Duty Officer.

Lady: Officer, officer!  I need to report a crime!

Duty Officer: (looking up from his paperwork) Calm down, miss. Calm down. Have a seat. Can I get you some cocoa?

L: (sits) No, no thank you, I just want to report a hit-and-run... Or maybe it was a mugging... Oh, it just happened all so fast...

DO: Are you missing any items that you are aware of? Are you injured?

L: No... No, I don't believe so. I heard a bunch of clippity-clop noises then I was knocked down then he was gone as quickly as he came.

DO: (grabbing a sketch pad)  Hmm. Ok. Try to remember any details you can about your attacker. 

L: I... I don't know if you are going to believe me.

DO: Trust me - I have seen it all. Nothing shocks me anymore.

L: Well... It wasn't human, but it sang incessantly. It looked like a giant albino dog with huge eyes. 

DO: (shows her pad) Eyes like this, you mean?

L: No. Bigger. And vacant. Irises that were basically pinpoints. 

DO: Like this?

L: Yes!  Just like that!  He had a large spherical red nose that glowed very, very brightly. A fang was growing out of it and his tongue was sticking out. 

DO: (Still sketching). Go on...

L: Oh, yes, he had one front leg and three back legs, all different lengths. On the end of three of his legs he had hooves, and on the back right one I think he was wearing a tube sock.

DO: (showing her the pad). Is this your attacker, miss?

L: No, he was at least fifty percent more mangled-looking than that.  He had one ear and one antler.  His skull and spine were severely misshapen. Also, I think he was pooping.

DO: Gotcha. (Hands her the pad) How about now?

L: That's him! That's the guy! Do you know who he is?

DO:  I do. The nose is a dead giveaway. Unfortunately, that is the only constant about this individual. Sometimes he has four legs, last year he had two... one time he had at least thirty. One day he would be standing there, the size of a bicycle, the next day his size rivaled that of the tallest tree in Mostly Treetrunk Forest.  I have to be honest with you, we are probably not going to find him. Besides, based on your description he was probably nearly blind and severely off balance. It might have been an accident. 

L: (sighs heavily) You know, when I first saw that my company had a job opening here in Childsdrawington, I jumped at the chance.  I thought it would be all happy suns and cute little backwards letter S's. 

DO:  (Nods) We all did...

L: I mean, the never ending string of dinosaur attacks and volcano eruptions would probably be semi-tolerable if it weren't for the constant racket of spaceship battles overhead.  It's almost impossible to get any sleep. 

DO: Yeah... You do get used to it, though. Even those giant potato-people don't freak me out like they did when I came here four years ago. 

L: Potato people?  Oh, you mean those huge grinning heads with spaghetti-thin arms and legs growing out of their necks (shudders)

DO: Yeah, them. My neighbors are potato-people. Nice enough folks, but I just wish they wouldn't walk around naked all the time do something about the fifty foot high daisies growing between our houses. I guess I should cut them some slack, though. I guess I wouldn't do very much yard work or fool around with zippers or buttons if I only had three spindly fingers jutting out of each wrist. 

L: I guess you're right. Well, officer, thanks for your time, and thanks for listening. 

DO: It's what I'm here for. Be safe out there.  

I Ate What?

I remember when I was little being enamored with the super-fancy little silver spheres that some relatives put on Christmas cookies.  I also remember being really annoyed that they wouldn't just let me have some to eat (no matter how much I begged) at cookie decorating time.   "They're for the cookies," they said. 

Now it's a few decades later and we have some in the house and I am free to eat the whole damn jar if I wanted to. Heck, I could go from grocery store to grocery store buying them out and later sit down with a cereal bowl filled with them, happily munching away while watching Scooby-Doo reruns on Boomerang.  

As a matter of fact, I think I will do just that. I'll show you, thirty-year old apparently traumatic memory of super-mean cookie-making relatives. Then maybe the voices in my head will be appeased... at least for a while. Before I grab my car keys and head out let me just check the label, here, to see what these things are actually called. 

Le'see... Silver Sugar Spheres. Hmph... Makes sense. Boy these things sure are shiny. I wonder how they do it. Maybe the ingredients will shed some light on this. 

Ok, 98.6% sugar - no shock there. Starch, glucose syrup - both wheat-based. Ok. Good to know especially if allergies are a concern.  Aluminum...

Whoa... Aluminum?  Like, the metal? No way. You know, other than Goldschlager, I don't think I have ever ingested something I could straight up find on a Periodic Table of the Elements.  I mean, even nutritional supplements like zinc come in compound form - it's not like you're eating the core of a penny or anything. 

Looking at the French list of ingredients gives E173 as the colorant, which Google confirms is, in fact, aluminum. There is also a warning  "Not for children less than three years old".  Well, that’s not a good sign...

Looking into it a little further you can find that the FDA qualifies these “silver dragées” as  confectionary and, since they contain a non-nutritive substance (aluminum, I guess), they may be considered “adulterated foods”.  Here is the pertinent part (of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (Section 402(d)(3)): Feel free to skip over this, btw.

A food shall be deemed to be adulterated... If it is confectionery, and... bears or contains any nonnutritive substance, except that this subparagraph shall not apply to a safe nonnutritive substance which is in or on confectionery by reason of its use for some practical functional purpose in the manufacture, packaging, or storage of such confectionery if the use of the substance does not promote deception of the consumer or otherwise result in adulteration or misbranding in violation of any provision of this chapter, except that the Secretary may, for the purpose of avoiding or resolving uncertainty as to the application of this subparagraph, issue regulations allowing or prohibiting the use of particular nonnutritive substances.

Yawn... So... are these French imports illegal in the U.S. or aren’t they?

Digging a little deeper we find that they are legal for sale in 49 of the 50 U.S. states.  California, it turns out, criminalized the sale of these on food unless the food is labeled “not for human consumption” thanks largely to a lawsuit from an environmental lawyer in 2003.

Amazon won’t even ship them there.  Wow.  Well, they will coordinate the shipment from companies outside the U.S. apparently but try as I might (I looked for a whole ten minutes) I could not find what the punishment would be for shipping a bottle of these or a box of cookies covered in these to a friend in California...

Now I know that eating silver is bad for you, but don’t we take in just a tiny, tiny bit of aluminum every time we crack open a soda or beer? Are these "candies" as bad or worse than that?  The FDA seems to have an issue with "silver" or "silver-colored" food additives of imports (Section 801(a)(3) of the code, in case you are interested).  

I am pretty confused.  Any lawyers or doctors (or both) out there that could clear this up for me?  I would be fascinated to know how the fine/jail time compares with other crimes like drug possession or driving without a license.

And to think I was going to end this article with some sort of comment on the rest of the ingredients (pig gelatin and carnauba wax)...

What a world.

Merry Christmas!

A very merry Christmas from all of us to all of you!

Man... And I Just Washed My Car, Too...

I have said it before, but it bears saying again: I am soooo not looking forward to future arguments with my son that contain the words "Shut up, old man!  Like, wasn't your generation the one that thought the world was gonna end every other Thursday or something?"

Have a good weekend, everyone.

Maybe Captain Queeg Had a Point...

When an unexpected gift box shows up on your doorstep covered in condensation it’s probably a good idea to check out its contents before jamming it under the tree and awaiting the Big Day.  Boy, I am glad we did.

Tonight, the UPS guy brought us a box of gourmet strawberries from Shari’s Berries, a company that specializes in hand-dipped berries, cookies, and cakes. That’s the pic there.

They are as delicious as they look, and, since they are fruit, I assume they are very, very healthy so eating the whole lot as rapidly as humanly possible is probably a good thing.  Actually, according to the slip of paper that shipped with these little chunks of solid “awesome”, they are best enjoyed within 48 hours of receipt.

Wait...

Hours?  Hours?!  Pfft, oh, yeah, like they are gonna last “hours”...  As a matter of fact, why am I wasting my time talking with you people while I have these in front of me?

Thanks for the gift, Agmorion and Siun-Kelan!  Have a Merry Christmas!

Insanely Hard Christmas Trivia

If you are like me, you have a high-def television, Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer on the DVR, your finger on the PAUSE/PLAY button, and all the time in the whole wide world.  It's trivia time!

How well do you know this 1964 classic?  Sure, you've viewed it upwards of seven hundred times, but have you actually seen it?  I mean, paid attention to it to the point where die-hard Trekkies would tell you to give it a rest, already?  Let's find out:

1. Yukon Cornelius has a dog sled.  How many and what type of dogs haul him around?
2. He carries three items on his belt.  Name them.
3. One of the items the narrator owns seems to be broken.  What is it and why is it probably non-functional?
4. On what day does the global storm that threatens to cancel Christmas start?  What year, apparently?
5. Approximately how long is Rudolf out on his own according to the narrator? How long is he gone if you take into account how long “night” and “day” are at the North Pole?
6. What time is the Elf foreman's dentist appointment?
7. What is the population of the Island of Misfit Toys on Christmas Day (probably)?
8. At one point, Mrs. Claus is goading her husband to eat.  What does she serve him? ( a general description is acceptable here)
9. Name three reindeer that live at the North Pole that do not pull Santa's sleigh.  (Actual names, please.  Not just "Rudolf's mom" or what have you...)
10. How many female elves are on Herbie's work shift?  How about in the choir?

Extra Super Impossible Bonus Question: 

Someone appears to have had their status upgraded from “dead” to “sick” during the course of the show.  Name him. (Hint: No, its not the Bumble or Yukon Cornelius, and you gotta be quick with the old pause button to catch it.)

Have a guess on one or more of the above?  Leave a comment to show people how awesome you are.  Otherwise, you will all have to wait for Christmas morning for the answers.

Enjoy!

I'm Some Sort of Elf, Apparently

Short “I am still alive” post...  Here goes:

I was slammed at work this week but I did manage to find some time this weekend to fix the microwave, replace a shower door gasket, repair a shattered clay ornament, re-attach wheels to two broken toy cars, and start construction on some Christmas gifts for friends and relatives.  

Let’s talk about the last thing.  No spoilers here since both of these folks know what they are getting, anyway.

The first is a chalkboard for mom-in-law.  It is made from oak plyboard and barnwood.  The barnwood is 75-year-old reclaimed lumber taken from a dilapidated corn-crib on the parents-in-laws’ farm.

Here is the frame pre-sealant:

Here it is post-sealant:

This is one of the reasons I like working with this stuff.  I did not stain the frame at all - all I did was apply a clear poly satin finish. The decades-old wood really soaks up whatever you throw at it and brings out all sorts of detail, like the original saw-mill marks you can see in the pic above.

Here it is nearly done:

The next item is a desk caddy for the wife.  The stackable in-box thing she has now is too small and doesn’t really go with the faux-aged desk.  This is my first experiment with a dado blade and she thinks it is coming out great.  The back and shelves are made from oak plyboard and the body is made from leftover material from when I built my shop workbenches.

Now it’s just a matter of deciding on a color scheme (stained vs. painted and stained).  Personally, I am for painted-and-stained, but we will see what she decides.  I will post the final pics when it is done.

BTW, I have also been prepping material for the next batch of Geocache trinkets.  I am pretty psyched about these, and I hope to begin putting them out this upcoming weekend.  Ahh, what the heck... here’s a sneak-peek of the prototype (ultimately there will be 43 of these):

Talk to you soon.

Backwords

For the love of all that is holy, can’t a guy go a few days without people (or the voices in my head... Hard to say what’s real anymore what with all the drinkin’ and all) clamoring for a new blog post?!  What are you, the Blog Update Enforcer Pursuivant, or something?

What, “pursuivant”? Hey, it’s my English degree, I will do with it what I please.  Ok, it isn’t as much of an English degree as it is a Word-of-the-Day calendar.  Ok, fine, it was a Blackadder episode. Happy?!

Speaking of words...  In the upper left corner of this blog is a snippet of a drawing the four-year-old did at school today.  It says “Hulk Smash”. 

What?  Yes, we watched “The Avengers” together... I also taught him the “Stop Copying Me” game recently and let him listen to “Jingle Snake” enough times to where I was sure he had it down well enough for him to teach his friends at school, so what of it?!

Anyway...  Note he is not 100% constrained (yet) by society’s rules that English is typically written left to right, up to down.

That belief is further showcased with another drawing from today:  

Start above the stencil-tracing of the gingerbread man. That’s the word “you”.  He knows that there is a “yuh” sound in there and that’s sometimes what the letter “u” sounds like.  He also knows there is an “o” in there, but is not sure where or why.  

Then read, left to right, the sentence above that.  Then, get a mirror, and read the last sentence.

Throwing it all together, you can probably deduce that the whole thing says “You can’t catch me, I am the Gingerbread Man”.  

This is typical of the stuff he is creating lately. But it is also extremely mentally taxing for the audience.  Sort of like being forced to do a cryptogram without a pencil... and at gunpoint.
  

The hilarious part here is the look he gets when you are reading what he writes. He filled with pride and expectant glee yet is totally confused as to why it is taking you so damn long to puzzle out his flawless narrative.  

Oh, mind you, he is appreciative - to a ridiculous degree - of the accolades once you (finally) finish, but you definitely get a sense he is thinking “What took you so long... moron?” while you are telling him how proud you are of his efforts.

More Geocache Swag

I gave away the last of the little cars my boy and I made a while back (see sidebar) so I was scrambling for stuff to trade for last weekend's Geocache outing.  I had some leftover glow-sticks from Halloween so I shoved those into my daypack and off I went.

I really didn't have a destination in mind but I figured I would start with some city caches in Newport News and see where I ended up.

Well, let's say I ended up learning the lesson that certain city caches that have an advertised difficulty rating of two stars (Careful! There might be some Muggles!) should have a difficulty level closer to five stars (Careful!  You are most likely going to be mugged, so bring a gun.  Parking is available on the North side of the hobo encampment, but expect your vehicle to suffer multiple break-ins and possibly be aflame once you finish pawing through litter-strewn shrubbery for a tupperware dish that may or may not have been used for a potty).

After a couple of those I headed to a safer part of town and looked for a few caches there but I really wasn't feeling it. 

So it goes.

As a side-effect to all this, though, I ended up being in an area where I managed to knock out 95% of my Christmas shopping so that's cool.  I even found what you see in the picture on the left in an import store in the area.  I haven't seen a bottle of Pop Shoppe soda in about 30 years so, even though root beer isn't my favorite thing in the world, I snapped it up.  Definitely a win, there.

This week I had a little time to build a new set of tradable items but I really didn't want to make anything with moving parts - the last couple I did like that took too long.  I cut the cubes you see in the upper left of this post out of a leftover piece of furring strip with the intention of just making some big ol' dice but that seemed weak.  What to do...

While we were decorating the tree, it occurred to me to turn them into little Christmas ornaments.  The process is below - as with the little cars, the four-year-old helped out a lot.

After painting:

After adding ribbons:

All done:

Start to finish I would say this took about three hours which is more along the lines of what I am willing to spend doing stuff like this - much longer than that and I start to get bored.  I hope to start Johnny Appleseeding these things around the area tomorrow.

Oh, in case you are interested, the next set of trinkets will be puzzle-based... sort of like the Jefferson Cipher Disks but a lot more awesome (copper, basswood, and oak instead of poplar, pine, and steel) if they come out like I hope they will.  

  

Oh, "Easy to Buy For", Am I?

Look, just because I let my myriad, near-random wants and desires be known at a volume and frequency that makes my four-year-old roll his eyes in embarrassed disgust doesn't mean you can just get me anything for Christmas and call it good.  After all, my attention span is little better than that of a six-week old kitten so what brings me to tears and doubles me over with paroxysms of joy right now is most likely going to bore me to death ten minutes from now, so good luck hitting that moving target.

For example, at the top of my list is now a high quality t-shirt that has this name compilation on the front:

And this one on the back:

As far as I know, this product doesn't exist, but with a little effort you can change all that.  Make it tasteful, and make it so.  Go!

Or... like me writing this post, you can just phone it in and get me a new Mouse sander and hope for the best. A card would be nice, too.  Or a text.  You know... Whatever.

P.S. I'm sort of in the middle of a project so not much time to write, but wanted to throw something out there anyway.  Waiting for paint to dry as we speak.  More later.

By Jove, I Think He's 35% Got It!

More stuff to throw up on The Fridge!  

This time, he actually wrote something instead of just drawing something and explaining it after the fact. This was done last night.  It’s a story about him riding around the circle on his bike.

For those of you who are not well versed in kid-speak, here is a guide to let you translate from his four-year-old mind to yours.  It’s up to you, though, to do the heavy lifting and figure out what sentences below go with what parts of the drawing.  

1. “Please let me ride my bike!”
2. “Ethan, watch out for cracks!”
3. “Ethan, be careful on your bike!”
4. “Ethan, don’t forget your magazine!”

Enjoy!

Well, The Cake Might Be a Lie, But The Pie Sure Isn’t...

Dude, seriously... You need to try this pie.  My wife made it.  It’s apple.  Go ‘head.  Take a bite.  It’s her first go at making one...

Is it like my mom’s?  Um.  No.

See, I used to think that the taste of mom’s apple pie was something special, something sacrosanct, something beyond judgement. Now I realize that memory is horribly, horribly flawed.  Like, flawed to the point where, if I were to simply refer to my wife’s apple pie as “delicious”, then, by relative measure, I would have to refer to my mother’s as “holy God what is this a dead animal wrapped in a turd or something quick get me something, ANYTHING, to drink oh God I’m gonna be sick”.

When I was first watching my wife construct this amazing confection I immediately rejected what I was seeing.  “This can’t possibly be right,” I thought (and muttered). As it baked in the oven, though, it smelled right but I was still very, very suspicious.

I took the first bite and I knew it was all wrong.  The texture was weird and certain parts of my tongue were dormant or non-plussed... Yet others were going “Saayyyy...  Let’s try a little more...” I took the second bite and the sourness of the fresh green apples and the complex sweetness of the caramelized sugar and the saltiness and flakiness of the hand-made crust hit me all at once and I thought I was going to pass out.

I eventually heard her trying to communicate with me.  Her voice was only coming through in waves... Her lips moved, but I couldn’t hear what she say... Uh, I mean, said.  

“Do you wan’t whipped cream?” she asked me.  

I looked at her, horrified and defensive, as though she just asked me if I would rather be eating a raw infant. “N...N... Noooo. No, of course not! What the hell is the matter with you?!”, I said.  I scooted the plate a little closer to me in case she tried to pull something funny.

She let me finish.  I was even allowed to have another piece because I think that she thought I was just trying to spare her feelings.  After she saw I finished the second portion and she noticed my pupils were reduced to pinpoints and I was sweating endorphins I think she started to really believe that I wasn’t fooling around here.

I wasn’t allowed a third. 

I briefly considered taking a hostage to turn the tables in my favor, but my options on that front were limited so I just thanked her and sobbed a little instead.

I’m sorry, but I have to go now.  I fear I am seriously risking violating the warranty of this laptop by drooling into it so much.  I hope everyone out there has had as wonderful a Thanksgiving as I have had. 

Now to set my alarm for three A.M... For an early “breakfast”, you understand...

Hey, Pal, Don’t You Tell ME to “Enjoy!”

I really don’t eat very much in the morning - maybe a breakfast bar or a handful of animal crackers.  Lunch during the work week is pretty much the same way.  For that meal, I try to pick stuff that meets these requirements: 

1. 350 calories or less 
2. 1/3 or less of the calories from fat
3. Must take 4 minutes or less in the microwave
4. Must take as few steps as possible to put together

The first two are important for health reasons.  I mean, I pretty much sit at a desk all day - it’s not like I’m out lumberjacking up the forest or free-running at first light or whatever.  Sometimes I press CTRL-ALT-DELETE but that’s about all of the exercise I get during the workday.  I just don’t need the calories.  

The third is important because I don’t want to sit in the break-room making apologetic smalltalk with the folks in line for the microwave while I wait for my Lean Cuisine Sweet Potatoes au Potato avec Potatoes meal to make the sudden switch from “starch-cicle” to “fusion ignition temperature” somewhere between eight minutes and eight minutes and three seconds after I press COOK.  You have four minutes to “wow” me, heavily processed food items.

And the fourth requirement is inspired by a few pantry meals I have tried recently that advertise “Ready in 3 Minutes!” but actually contain more subcomponents than, say, a car.  Unless I am missing the part in the instructions where it tells you to “slip into Bullet Time” before opening and mixing packets 1 through 137 then adding 2 teaspoons of water I am pretty sure you will have burned through the allotted 180 seconds well before chucking one of these Rube Goldberg-y science experiments into the oven.  

And that’s it.  Please note that “Must be delicious. Nay, it must be a veritable ambrosia for all the senses.  In fact, if it is not easily the best meal I have ever had I will consider my lunch, and, by extension, my life up until that point, to be a colossal failure” is not on the list.  

Lunch is fuel.  It doesn’t need to be tasty.  It just needs to be digestible over a reasonable period of time.  I make up for “tasty” at dinner.  Most of the time I sleepily grab something out of the pantry or the freezer and throw it into my lunchbag in the semi-dark of morning without fully realizing what it is I grabbed.  Since my wife usually does the grocery shopping I am often surprised.  I am never disappointed.

Now that I have explained to you exactly how low the bar is for my lunchtime repast, here are the items in this box you see up above listed in the order I would eat them if I found myself starting at this container at 11:30 AM some future workday from now: 

1. The fruit - dried pineapple and cranberries, lightly sugared - Pretty good!
2. The crackers - Meh, they’re crackers.  Hey, whaddaya want?
3. The toffee thing - Ok, I guess, but has a worryingly greasy aftertaste for some reason
4. The “turkey” “pepperoni” “slices” - These taste like they were constructed with an industrial 3-D printer loaded with food coloring, sawdust, and the leftover contents of recycled Denny’s margarin packets.  Not a flavor or texture I could readily identify, even after my eyes repeatedly assured me of what my mouth refused to believe.
5. The little wooden stick they give you for spreading the “cheese” - Pine, I believe.
6. The cardboard box itself - You know, I really think I could keep this down.
7. The Asiago Cheese Spread - Dude, “Cheddar cheese” is NOT an ingredient in “Asiago Cheese” (see pic on left)!   And don’t insult me by trying to educate me about the differences between “cheese spread” and “cheese”.  The only thing this opaque, antique-white gelatin has in common with Asiago cheese is that it is approximately the same color.  In fact, I think a semi-liquified black-and-white photograph of a piece of Asiago cheese would taste more like Asiago cheese than this “gourmet”... stuff.  You know, that would be a much more honest and accurate name: Stuff.  Just relabel the box and the little container “STUFF” or, better yet “CAUTION: STUFF” and I think you would be on track to setting things right, here.
8. The plastic everything came wrapped in - I admit, it would probably be better for me to eat the cheese spread.

All in all, I would rate this about a D-minus.  I have had worse and, honestly, I did feel full even after dumping the spread into the trashcan. If these things were on sale for, like twenty-five cents each or something I would buy them out and pretend I was eating 1980’s MREs until I suffered from organ failure (pick one). 

Little Cars and Lionel Richie

I gave away the last of my Jefferson Cipher Wheels (see sidebar) a little quicker than I expected to so I didn’t have any stuff to trade when I found swag-containing geocaches on Monday.  With the help of my son together we painted and put together fourteen (very simple) wooden cars for that purpose.  

There is really nothing to them - just a cut and drilled pine body, poplar axles, and oak plyboard wheels.  When I originally thought about creating little cars I was going to use different shades of wood stain to make the different parts stand out, not paint them.  Also, I thought I might use the wood burning kit and maybe tack on some brass or bronze pieces to fancy-up the units.  

Nope.  Wasn’t to be.  But, hey, doing it the way you see in the pics not only shortened the length of the project significantly (allowing me to use the cars for trade this past weekend) it allowed me and the boy to work together on a project, which is always awesome.   Here's a few pics showing some of the process.

One side...

Then the other...

All Done:

Oh, yeah... the label:

Most of the time that I find caches - whether they are deep within with woods of a park and thirty feet up in a tree or whether they are in the city and are like what you see in the pic on the left (that whole thing is held there by magnets) - the items inside (if any) are usually nothing to jump up and down about.  Sometimes, though, you find cool or interesting stuff like working mini-flashlights or carabiners or Dollar Store toys still in the package.

But whoever left this in one of the caches I found this weekend wins the prize for “Most Awesome Geocache Swag Item of All Time”.  It was so awesome, in fact, I found myself unworthy to do anything other than take the pic you see here.

It wasn't just the tape, it's how it was left behind.  It wasn't merely tossed into the camouflaged ammo box unceremoniously and without thought.  Oh, no.  It was carefully wrapped in a baggie as to protect it from dirt and moisture and to keep it as "mint" as possible for those who found it later.

Well done, Lionel Richie cassette tape leaver. I tip my cap to you, sir or ma'am.

Hey! That's Kind of What I Said!!!

This is a test the dictation feature on my Apple so permanent have to say it’s pretty much flawless.

So this’ll be my first blog post done entirely in dictation mode. By the way I have a cold so should be pretty challenging for the voice recognition software to do it’s job.

Apparently it isn’t.

Only a few problems are there with work permit the first paragraph... And obviously the last sentence is pretty hosed to.  I will leave all the misspellings and misinterpreted words but I will go back and punctuate or necessary.

How about if we sing a little song: “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious...” Oh, you got to be kidding me and knows the word “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” but it couldn’t you couldn’t get the other stuff right?!

How about a little something for our 16th president:

“From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some transatlantic giant step the earth and process in a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe and Asia could not find norms take a drink from the hell River land track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of 1000 years.  The distraction Gareloch we must ourselves Buttes author and finisher as a nation of freemen we will live forever or die by suicide.”

I met a lot of those errors her mind and my imperfect memory I don’t think I ever said the word Gerlach imputes... Buttes! Buttes!

Overall, not bad. I read resume cover letters that were much worse than this.  

Hey, leave me alone it’s my writer’s block and I’ll do with it what I want...

Green Eggs and Booze

Short space-filler post since I have nothing to say.  Well... What I mean is that I don’t have a dozen or more paragraphs of nothing to say prepared for editing this evening.  

I quit smoking two years ago this week, so that’s something.  Thanks, I feel great.

Hmmm...  Oh, yeah.  A friend of mine gave me the bottle of TyKu sake you see there in the pic.  The triangular bottle has an LED in the bottom that lights when you pick it up.  It is delicious and the coolness of the bottle is undeniable, but I can’t imagine the kind of food this citrus liqueur would pair with (outside of a Dr. Seuss book, that is)...

Nah, I’m just joshin’.  Like St. Germaine’s, Sweet Mountain Laurel, or any ice wine you care to name, it’s best enjoyed cold and with something sweet like strawberries or cheesecake.

Of course, slugging it back all by itself works, too.

Happy Birthday, dude.  Now get to posting something yourself, wouldja?

I Have Run Out of Yo-Yos

That’s right... I have run out of yo-yos.  Perhaps an explanation is in order...

I found my 30th Geocache today [Editor’s Note: I intended on posting this last night, but never did.  I am actually up to 39 now].  I was pretty beat from all the hiking this morning - getting to number 29 was a much longer walk than I expected but well worth it (pic is there in the upper left).  I wanted to end the day on a nice round number and give away the last of my yo-yos so I revisited an area I had failed to find one in before to give it another go.

I am glad I did.  I was harassed by swarms of mosquitos and ran face-first into more spiderwebs than I care to recall last time. Since it was in the low 50s today, though, the bog-like conditions in the forest created by Hurricane Sandy were the only thing I had to contend with.  After a five minute hunt I stumbled upon something suspicious near the base of a tree and was rewarded with an extremely satisfying “ah-HA moment” for my curiosity.  I left the last of the yo-yos I made and went home.  

I’m not surprised that the last time the thing had been found was August 28th.  I got really lucky.  By all rights, number thirty should have been a micro-cache near the same park as number 29, but it was not to be. A modern-day Sisyphus was cleaning up pine straw out of a parking lot surrounded by pine trees (by hand!) right next to the cache so I figured I’d come back after he (or the trees, I guess) quit in disgust.  

I’m guessing tomorrow... [Editor’s Note: Yep. Knocked this one out today.]

So, since I like (well, for now... my attention span isn’t all that great) to create hand-made stuff to drop off in these caches I decided to build some simple Jefferson Wheel Cyphers.   They are primarily poplar, pine, and steel.                       

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here’s three grand worth:

Prototype Phase:

Assembled and Drying:

Done:

        

Each one encodes a simple saying burned into the discs - lines of poetry, lines from books, movies, TV shows, songs... You know, as much of a pain as it was to make these things (project took about six hours start to finish - way too long), the hardest part was to find 10 different quotes that fit on a 40-character encoding machine without being overly short, sounding overly pretentious, seeming overly hipster, needing a huge number of nulls, etc.  

In fact, I ended up having to write a small piece of software to help optimize the distribution of nulls so the difficulty level for these things wasn’t so high.  To further make things a little more straightforward, I made it fairly obvious how the discs align once the discoverer figures out what they are holding. 

I had fun making these but since the project took entirely too much time I doubt I will make any more like this without having access to a lathe.

                                           

BTW, in case the coastalgypsies are reading this, thanks for the nice compliment regarding one of the little wooden GPS’s I left behind a while back.  Happy caching!

Storm Update

Hurricane Sandy passed by pretty much uneventfully.  No flooding, no trees down, no power loss - not even a flicker.  The weekly summer storms we had this past season were much, much worse than this in terms of straight line wind speed and rate of rainfall. 

Considering the 33+ families in the U.S. that will have one less place setting to manage this Thanksgiving because of this event, the discovery that my lower door jamb in my garage is slightly rotten and lets in a dribble of water when it rains for two days straight merits no mention whatsoever.  

Our hearts and prayers go out to the ones truly affected by the storm.

Nothing to See Here. Move Along.

This is a scan of one of the pages of a flyer that came with one of my kid’s Lego sets.  As I look upon this scene one question comes to mind: “What the heck kind of community is this modeled after, anyway?”

What am I talking about?  Well, let’s look at all of the obvious criminal activity (simultaneously!) going on in broad daylight within one block of a police station:

• One guy overturning a trashcan on the street
• Two guys breaking into an ATM
• One guy breaking out of prison (or trying to break someone else out with a crowbar)
• One guy who has just stolen something (maybe gold) fleeing an officer by driving on the wrong side of the road (either that or he has decided to park his car on the wrong side of the road next to a fire hydrant in front of a police station)
• One guy mugging a lady
• One guy on a moped who has just stolen something (probably money) fleeing an officer 
• One arrest in progress on the street
• One guy stripping a sportscar in the distance (I don’t think he is just changing a flat based on the way he is dressed)
• Two (or three, its hard to tell if the guy holding the money is a gang member or a cop) guys being arrested on a distant rooftop as two more guys zipline down to their comrades.

Smiling cops (one of which appears to be dressed in riot gear and waving a gold brick) block the roads and K-9 units and multiple command centers have been dispatched.  Meanwhile, an officer with a bullhorn shouts something to the chaos surrounding him -  perhaps he’s asking if anyone remembered to bring their firearm in to work today...

I wonder what life is like two whole blocks away from the police station.  Frankly, based on what I am seeing here, I half-expect Snake Blitzkin to be living there.  I have no idea what is going on in this neighborhood of Lego City but it seems that an airstrike is long overdue.

If this is what life is like around the Police Station, I can only imagine how bad things are around the Firehouse...