Geocache Destruction!

Wow!  What a difference twenty months can make, especially to geocaches made largely of non-treated lumber. 

Recently, I got a couple of alerts letting me know that some folks visited a pair of caches of mine.  One of the cachers recommended that one of the hides be archived (permanently taken off-line). Another wished he or she could have seen the other cache “in its prime”.  I temporarily delisted the caches and went out to check up on them.

I think a series of “before” and “after” pics is a good way to describe what I found.

Here is Mate in One on the day it was placed (whoever found the cache would lift the white queen to reveal the plastic cache container).

And here is what I found today (I piled up the scattered detritus for this pic):

Only some treated and cedar chunks survived.  I am guessing the parts that did not rot away were swept down the slope and into the nearby swamp - probably what happened to the cache container, too.  So, yeah, I archived this one.

Here is what the second one looked like in my garage a couple of days before I put it out there:

Here is what it looked like on its first day:

Here are some pics of what it looks like now:

Although the severely weather-beaten map looks amazing, it is extremely fragile.  The actual cache container and the frame are holding up surprisingly well.  I re-enabled the listing for this one this morning.  I figure this guy has a couple more months left in him before he needs to be archived, too. 

While I’m at it, I might as well post the cache description.  Enjoy!

Geocache Description:

South of Tower
You stand at the end of a gravel roadway near the base of a large, nearly-featureless tower which looms above the surrounding forest.  The tower is surrounded by a tall barricade with a gate in the center of the structure.  Accompanying the birdsong, you can make out the drone of some sort of machine operating at the base of the tower.

>open gate
The gate is locked and you do not have a key.

>i
You are carrying:
A pen
A navigational device
Some trinkets

>north

Forest Path
You walk along the barricade and discover a slight break in the foliage to the east of the fence.  The break opens up to a leaf-strewn pathway of sorts extending north and south.  The fence and tower base are still visible through the trees and the mechanical hum is slightly louder here.  Although it is noticeably cooler in the shade, the mosquitos have taken notice of you and light on you occasionally to snack.

>north
Forest Path
You walk down the path and past the perimeter of the fence where you reach a number of fallen trees of various types and sizes which mark the end of the trail.  Animal burrows are evident here and there and you are careful not to turn an ankle with a clumsy misstep.

>search trees
You find nothing but piles of decaying leaves.

>count leaves
There are 69,105 leaves here.

>examine trees
There is nothing notable about the fallen trees other than they appear passable if you are the adventurous type.

>north
North of Tower
You scramble over the decaying logs to discover the forest opens up a little slightly to the west of the forest path and becomes a small clearing.  You immediately notice that it would have been easier to simply walk around the fallen trees instead of climbing over them, but that is exactly what hindsight is for.  Although the machinery is still audible here, the tower itself is nearly completely hidden from view.  The mosquitos seem to have picked up their pace.

There is an ancient map and a brass lantern here.

>look at map

As best as you can make out, the weather-beaten, ancient map describes a world which no longer exists except in the memories of the elders.  You recall them spinning tales of a vast underground world where voracious creatures lurked in the darkness, where pictures did not exist, and where seemingly innocent mistakes were brutally punished.  You thought the stories were the stuff of campfire fiction meant to impress the young, but here is proof otherwise right before your eyes.

>get all
ancient map: The map is fragile and would probably fall to bits if you moved it.  You decide to leave it alone.
brass lantern: Taken

>turn on lantern
Sadly, the lantern, another relic of a bygone era, does not function.  As you move it you can hear something rattle around inside.

>open lantern

One Red Brick

Another quick post to get something out there while the boy and I get our video/music project off the ground.  I hope to finish a write up of my 40-Day Paleo Experiment and get that out by Monday. We’ll see. I just got news that one or more of my geocaches didn’t survive the winter so I might need to deal with that instead.

A while back I wrote about a scavenger hunt I created for four of the kids in my son’s class. We all had fun and the dads and I discussed what we were going to do next. We discussed a staged “dad-napping” with video clues for the kids on the rescue team, but we never moved on from the “wouldn't it be neat if” stage of the project.

Some time later I was told that one of the kids really wanted to do another scavenger hunt.   I built this brick as part of a mini-quest with the intention of hiding it at their school, but there was no way to not include everyone. It's hard enough to coordinate four kids for something like this, never mind 15. Including only a small group was likely to end in hurt feelings no matter how I thought about it. The school thing was out.    The venue and theme was changed to the church, since three of the four original Mystery Solvers attended (well… highly asynchronously attended) there anyway.

The plan was to have a small black felt bag “appear” in the four kids’ backpacks at school (or somewhere. Each bag had an origami bird with the words TOP SECRET on it, along with wooden cross with the acronym of the church on it. When unfolded, the four birds revealed a message that they could decode using the guide on the back of the badges they won from the first scavenger hunt.

The four encrypted messages each comprised a line of a poem:

Look for a new poster in the place where we break bread.
Then go to the place marked by letters of red.
When you arrive there soon you will see,
A brick sitting there where a brick shouldn't be.

So they would have to work out that they needed to go to the cafeteria at a particular church, look for a poster with red letters (the red letters on the poster spelled “PLAYGROUND”) go to the playground out back, and find the brick. Inside the brick was four packs of Pokémon cards.

All of the props were easy to make (or cheap to buy, in the case of the bags). Infinitely less easy was getting all of the kids together on the same Sunday (the max was three – exactly the wrong number for lots of reasons), so this stuff sat in the garage for months. 

Eventually, I decided to just let the boy find these bags scattered around his room and do the mini-hunt himself as a reward for something or other he did... I can't remember what. All I had to do was place the brick and put up the poster. I made sure the timing was such that no one else would disrupt or discover them. He was happy to get the cards (and the brick), but he was a little bummed he wasn't allowed to tell his friends about the quest.

Hopefully, the dads and I can finally get the dad-napping thing going so we can include everyone by the time the weather warms up. Hmm… Now that I read what I just wrote it looks like I've got some long overdue texts to send out...

A Bunch of Wands

A quick project post just to get something out there. I've been doing video/audio editing work for/with the boy and it's a hugely time consuming process. 

It is really easy to make a wand - it's just a stick or a hunk of dowel, after all. Every once in a while I am commissioned to make a new one. I really don't care where the old ones go. After a recent toy cleanup (donating now-too-babyish ones, etc) I was a little surprised to notice how many he had commissioned over the years – there's a few there on the left.

They have auctions at his school every so often where kids bring in crafts or baked goods to “sell”. The “money” to buy the stuff is earned throughout the semester as a reward for good behavior, so they end up swapping this money around quite a bit – additional money is printed as needed. I try not to question it too much, because when I do stir that pot, (admittedly Scotch-fueled) phrases like “serious currency devaluation issue” and “socialist agenda” and “some sort of Ponzi Scheme, I'll betcha anything” come bubbling to the surface. Anyway, I had made other things to sell before so I figured this time “Why not magic wands?”

And like so many other simple projects I think up it quickly snowballed from “let's quickly cut and sand a handful of sticks and call it a day” to “let’s recreate Olivander’s because that's exactly what a completely sane person would think and do”.   That “stretch goal” was never met, probably cuz those squirrels ain’t gonna chase themselves, you know.  Oh, wait.  They do. 

What was I talking about?

Ah… Using one 2x4 lauan plyboard sheet and some pine scrap, I found I could make 12 lidded wand boxes, as long as the overall wand length was kept to 10“and the width and depth of each box was kept to about 2”.

Twenty-four square 1 ½ (well… nearly) blocks were cut from scrap ¾” pine for the box ends. I dadoed slots into the box sides at just the right height where the lids could slide into place. I was a little nervous about that part –the thin flexible plyboard might shatter, could I get the depth right, etc. it turned out ok.

Why the “nearly” above?  To keep cuts and assembly as simple as possible all lids, bottoms, and sides were cut to the same dimensions (about 2”x12”).  Taking into account the number of cuts needed and the width of the blade itself was important to maximize yield. This made the box widths slightly smaller than 2”.  Only the lids needed to be “post processed” to get them to slide in. This required twelve more cuts that shaved their widths down just enough so they could slide into the slots after assembly.

With the help of a staple gun, assembly was a snap. By gluing and stapling the box ends to one of the sides, the bottom and the other side could be quickly attached in the same way – no measuring or marking necessary and I didn’t need infinity-minus-one wood clamps to do the work.  While the glue dried I trimmed the lids and slid them into place.  After the glue dried I removed the staples and sanded and stained the pieces and parts to give everything an aged look.

I wanted to line the inside of the box with felt but I knew that properly cutting and gluing material was not going to end well regardless of the amount of time I took to do it. I ended up wrapping scrap ¾ “plyboard pieces in blue craft felt and hot- gluing this bit to the box bottoms. This method brought the wand closer to the lid and gave the boxes some heft as a nice plus. I still felt like something was missing so I added the little labels you see there.

A dozen new wands were created under the boy’s expert instruction. I threw together the little jig you see below to make things a little easier for when I was carving, sanding, staining, and painting these things. (Yep… I made a wand stand.  Shut up!  It could be used for other things I’m pretty sure!)

Overall, I would say I put about $10-$12 into the entire project, and I now know how to make boxes with slide-out lids. I think that these could go for ten fake dollars each... seriously upsetting the already precarious economic balance in the classroom if they all sold... laying the groundwork for violent revolution.

Man… It's a good thing these things don't actually function...

Member Candy?

A few days ago my brother sent me a text asking me what my favorite flavor of Original New York Seltzer was.  I was a little surprised since I hadn’t seen any of that awesome stuff on store shelves for several decades – I assumed it was a Western New York thing and was probably not made anymore anyway.  I answered “black cherry”, remembering the feel of the bottles and the “peely-ness” of the Styrofoam labels more than the taste of the beverage.  He sent me a pic so now I wanted some.

Quickly, to the Internet!

Although I could get it shipped at an absolutely glorious markup from a number of places online I was curious to see if I could get it locally.  Using the “store locator” at the company’s website, I discovered that this exotic import can only be purchased at two places within 25 miles of me, both of which are World Markets.  I searched around my brother’s area expecting to see dozens of red markers within that same radius, in preps for writing up my “I’m so jealous” paragraph for this post.  Nope.  I had to expand the circle out to 200 miles for the website to start marking up the map – the closest location to him was a truck stop 2 ½ hours away.
 
So, not too sure where he got it.  It’s likely the company’s site’s map is not quite up to date.  On the bright side, maybe they sell it closer to me than a 30-minute drive!  Woo hoo!  On the other hand, maybe they don’t sell it at all…

Great, now I’m all sad.

That pic got the conversation rolling between my brother, sister, and I about candies we enjoyed as kids.  Of course, ZotZ came up but they are all over the place now.  But what I remember having was a ZotZ-like candy but it was hard to describe.  Picture just the stuff inside ZotZ, but compressed into little irregular white sticks.  They sorta kinda looked like tiny albino Cheetos.  Not a lot of info to do a Google Search on.

My brother said he vaguely remembered them and said the bag might be black, with an astronaut on it.  I said YES! to the black bag part, but a wasn’t sure about the astronaut part.  Since we had a little more to go on we searched around and discovered that yes, there was a candy from that era that met that package description but that was just a Pop Rocks equivalent.  The trail went cold for a bit but one of the side paths I wandered down brought me to this:

Oh, yeah, I ‘member!  I ‘member that eating that stuff was like snorting Tang mixed with the ground-up innards of a triple-A battery.  Good times…

My sister asked if the package had a white or light border and I said YES!  She then sent this pic (from collectingcandy.com):

The brother confirmed that have a match!  So… it was a ZotZ thing after all.  It doesn’t look like they are still made but it does look like there are quite a few folks out there that make their own ZotZ-like candies at home.  Maybe I can reproduce this... Definitely gotta give that a try soon for a rainy day family project!

Teach a Man to Fish. Seriously. Do It.

I’m not a fisherman.  Before this past summer, the last time I had been fishing I think I was five.  I caught a sunfish and an eel and I think I remember thinking it was cool.  For whatever reason, though, fishing never became part of my life.

I mentioned in a post long, long ago that one of my goals for that year was to “catch and eat a fish”.  That never happened.  It’s not like I didn’t have the time, cash, or opportunity – I had a full year to pull that off, after all.  I didn’t have the interest or motivation… but mainly I didn’t have the wisdom, and I didn’t know where to get it.
 
Fishing is more than baiting a hook, waiting, and yanking up a catch.  It’s about where and when to go.  It’s about casting and knot tying and knowing what each of the parts of a modern reel do and untangling tangled lines.  It’s about identifying what you just caught, how to not slice your hands to ribbons on its spines while removing it from a hook, and how to deal with it afterwards.  Throw it back?  Put it in a bucket, on a stringer, on ice, or what?  And, assuming this thing is edible, I cut this up how, exactly?

Yep, all these things, individually, are two-minute YouTube searches.  I mean, it’s “the future”, after all, so what isn’t?  But, without the tactile stuff and years of exposure, it’s just knowledge, not wisdom.  You may as well be trying to learn to rebuild a car engine without ever actually having held a socket wrench before.   So that resolution, like most, faded in importance and this gap in my “man-knowledge” (or whatever you want to call it) remained unfilled.

As the years relentlessly scream by I try to cram as much information as I can into my son’s head.  How to ride a bike, sure, but also how to pump up (or change) its tires, adjust the brakes, and grease the chain.  How to use a hammer, a screwdriver, a wrench, a saw, and a sanding block.  How to throw and catch baseballs and footballs and Frisbees, how to hold a tennis racket and how to dribble a basketball on the run.   How to read, how to bake bread, how to hold a guitar, how to find North on a cloudy day, how to play Ode to Joy and Still Alive on the piano, how redstone works in Minecraft, and why it’s so important to own the middle of a chessboard.

And about ten thousand other things.

But not how to fish.

Claiming that the 10,000 plus things should count for something instantly turns a giant paragraph of humblebrag into the weakest strawman in the universe the moment your kid asks “Dad, will you take me fishing?”  Saying “I’m real busy right now, maybe later” is obviously completely unacceptable, unless you enjoy hearing Harry Chapin play on continuous loop in your head.  And it’s not like we live in a desert or in a middle of a large city or anything– we are literally (well… littoral-y, I guess) surrounded by water. Saying “Dude, I have no idea how to do that,” is in direct violation of the Parents’ 1st Commandment “Thou shalt always, always fake the funk”.

There was no more “later”.  I told him “Sure!  I’ll find out where some good spots are and I’ll let you know.”
 
Panicked, I talked with a guy I knew at a church barbeque and asked him about the yearly Kiwanis fishing clinic I knew was coming up soon.  I asked how I could sign the boy up. He gave me the info and I agreed to come help at the pre-event preparations.

See, I figured I could find something that involved heavy lifting or moving chairs or whatever to “pay” for the boy’s admission into the event.  When the wife and I arrived, though, we were pointed to some disassembled fishing rods and were cheerfully told to “set them up”.  No other instructions were given – after all, everyone knows how to “set up” a fishing rod.  What could be simpler?

The forty or so other folks that were there were chatting away, busy with their tasks. We looked at each other and took a seat next to some folks who looked friendly and we attempted to copy what they were doing.  After about five minutes of doing our best “monkey dealing with a Rubik’s Cube” impressions the wife asked the man next to her what we needed to do. 

He (super friendly dude, btw) rapidly walked her though the explanation that (at the time) I was pretty sure included terms that he was making up as he went.  I listened as carefully as I could but it still sounded like he was reciting some weird mashup of Huck Finn and Jabberwocky to me.  We mimicked the motions well enough but when it came time for knot tying we again asked for assistance.   Short story, here: the knots were tested by the guy at the end of the assembly line.  The wife’s knots all held; most of mine failed and needed to be redone.

After an hour or so we thanked everyone and took off, a little smarter than when we had arrived.

At the event there were all sorts of displays and tables with different types of fish and kids were running everywhere.  It was all very well done and all very educational.  After a while we were allowed on the pier with all the other folks and given a rod and a small amount of bait.  Putting the crab chunks on the hook was no problem.  Lowering the hook into the water and waiting was also no problem.

After a bit, some of the kids around were pulling up fish.  Others were coming up to me asking me questions about stuff - I was wearing a “volunteer” shirt and was over the age of 12, after all.  Most of the time I just helped them find someone else that could help them (you may commence the ticker-tape parade for me at your leisure).

Meanwhile, the boy was catching nothing.  He got some nibbles and more than once the bait was gone but that’s it.  After about 90 minutes, about two-thirds of the kids there caught something.  He didn’t.  I prepped him for that possibility but he was understandably disappointed when we left for the day.

I told a highly abridged version of this story to a co-worker a month or so later (I’m not sure why fishing came up – I guess it doesn’t matter) and he invited us to his place to fish off of the pier in his neighborhood.  I said sure.

A couple of weeks later we were there at the pier and he patiently went through the basics with the boy.  There was very little to explain.  It was just a cane pole – a hollow pole, some string, a bobber, some weights, and a hook.  I baited his hook and he plopped it into the water.

Less than forty-five seconds later he saw the bobber get yanked under and he pulled on the rod as instructed.  His first fish!!!  He was amped, I was amped… Anything that happened from that moment on was pure gravy.  I (following the instruction of the coworker) removed the fish without getting stabbed too badly and threw it back.  Meh… at least I know now what it feels like to do it wrong and what to avoid in the future.

He tried again, and this time it took him twice as long to catch another one (same size as the first) and plopped another baited hook into the water.  So the kid now has caught two and the adults have caught nothing.  Just as he was grinning and saying “Dad, why haven’t you caught…” I felt a nibble and pulled up my catch.

Now, I am not kidding here when I say it was no bigger than a business card.  They both laughed hugely and I knew I was going to hear about this forever at work, especially when the phone was brought out.  But, as sometimes happens, my friend had put the camera on “video” instead of “photo”. The footage started and after about one second of his accidentally filming the boy started yelling “Help!  Help!”

We looked over to see him struggling with his pole. It looked like he snagged the pier or something and was completely overreacting but when we saw how bowed the pole was we ran over and helped him pull.  Up came this five-pound largemouth bass.

After the excitement died down the friend grabbed his phone to take some pics and I released my catch then grabbed my phone as well.  It was then he realized he had been in video mode all this time.  He set it to the right mode and got some great pictures but here’s the gist of the video: about 15 frames of a camera swinging up to nearly focus on my pathetic fish, overlayed with a boy screaming “Help, help!”, and then the video goes all Blair Witch and the phone cover snaps shut.  The video is totally black from that point on but you can hear a bunch of overlapping voices yelling  “OH MY GOSH!  DAD DAD LOOK LOOK! WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT?! HOLY COW!” followed by unintelligible, excited conversation.  For all the world it looks and sounds like “found footage” from a spacecraft landing or a yeti sighting or something.

I next fish I caught was respectably sized (as were the three that followed), my friend caught seven (he, too, caught a bass, nearly as large as the boy’s… nearly).  The boy caught eleven total.  We were there about an hour and a half.

So, basically, the boy confirmed that everything that he had ever knew about fishing was 100% true.  The littlest guy catches the biggest and/or most fish.  The biggest guy catches the smallest and/or fewest fish.  It takes no longer than sixty seconds to land a fish.  You know… because we live in a cartoon.

It was a good day.

A couple of months later we went again, this time with his grandfather.  The lake near the house we rented was active (rings in the water now and then) but grandpa correctly predicted that the fish wouldn’t bite very much because of how cold it was. I caught one and the boy caught one – both small.  One huge upside to this go-around was that I now can tie the “mystery knot” I had failed at so many times during the volunteer thing I described earlier.  Grandpa was very patient and, in the end, the knot is a trivial thing for even me to remember.  He’s a good teacher and I can now pass this bit of wisdom on to the boy.

So why all the preamble here?  Why not just show off the giant fish, drop the microphone, and walk off stage?  Well, because part of the purpose of this blog is to “remember things I don’t want to forget” (see upper right of sidebar).  If I don’t write this down, the months and years erode away the negative specifics and all I’m left with is a feel-good, Facebook-y “highlights reel”.  But I don’t just write this for “future me”.  I’m writing it for “future him”.  Oh, the boy will always remember the giant fish – no worries there. 

Eventually, though, he’ll be old enough to stumble across this post (it will exist in some form or another… maybe not here, but somewhere) and I hope that when he does he will realize that this isn’t really an article about fishing at all.

I love you, buddy.  Good luck.

How Long is a Cheeto?

(TL;DR Summary: The average length of a Cheddar Jalapeño Cheeto is 1.68 inches.  Feel free to scroll down to the bottom for the graph).

My favorite snack is Cheddar Jalapeño Cheetos.  The fact that these things are only sold in 8.5 ounce bags or smaller in this area is a constant source of sadness for me.  Is the option to purchase a sack the size of a largish bean-bag chair too much to ask for, Frito Lay?  You know what? Forget the bags.  I should be able to call someone up and get this stuff dumped in my driveway in the same way you can have mulch delivered.

The back of the latest bag I wolfed down had this pic on the back:

So the claim here is that Cheetos are two inches long.  Being a connoisseur of sorts I knew that not all of these things are the same and, in fact, their sizes varied widely. Maybe they meant the average size of a Cheeto was two inches… Only one way to find out – I gots tuh get me another bag.  Woo hoo!

I called my wife, and she was nice enough to pick up another bag without saying “Ummm… weren’t you just eating a fresh bag of those when I left for the grocery store ten minutes ago?”, but there was a pause on the other end of the line exactly long enough to squeeze that sentence in.  She just said “Okay.”  I told her why, and she said “Will do.”  I’m pretty sure I heard the punctuation at the end of her reply, which is weird, right?  I’m… I’m sure it’s fine.

I opened the brand new bag this morning.  I fetched a notepad, a pen, the food scale, some parchment paper, a couple of bowls, a ruler and I got to work.

First, I weighed the bowls then filled them with the Cheetos, being as careful as I could not to break any – some would, of course, be broken in the bag already.  More on that later.  The front of the bag claimed 8 ½ ounces, or 240.9 grams.  The measured mass of the food in the bag was 241 grams, and the empty bag itself came in at 5 grams.  (FWIW: My food scale has a precision of 1g.  I have no idea what its accuracy is.  I’m betting it’s good enough, especially for this.)

Next, the fun part: counting and measuring, like, a billion Cheetos which is totally gonna take forever, right?  Actually, this part only took about 45 minutes.  I was super surprised by that.  There aren’t as may Cheetos in a bag as you might guess.

I made up a little chart and decided that measuring things to the nearest quarter-inch would be fine.  (Yep, I’m gonna mix English and Metric units here like a complete sociopath.  Make peace with that.)  I decided that anything below one inch would be considered a “crumble” and wouldn’t be measured by length, just mass, cuz the line has to be drawn somewhere. 

So this:

Was 1.75 inches and this:

Was 2 inches. 

So, yeah, only the overall lengths were measured, not the “path lengths” or “arc lengths” or what have you.   These things are twisty, turny chunks of uniquely shaped deliciousness and I wasn’t going to 3-D scan them.  Besides, if you are going to use these snacks to measure someone’s height like it says on the bag it’s not like you can straighten them out or anything.  It is what it is.

Here is the count:

Length   Number
1                30
1.25           43
1.5             45
1.75           35
2                40
2.25           26
2.5             20

The total number of Cheetos in the bag was 239, and the mass of the crumbles came in at 24 grams (10.0% of the total food mass).  Looking at these numbers, I wasn’t too surprised by the wide spread, but I was a little surprised at the high percentage of intact pieces.  I also expected the numbers to drop off more gradually on the high end.  I’m sure that there is such a thing as a three-inch Cheeto.  There has to be… there just has to.   I mean, what kind of God would create a world without the promise of them to comfort us in times of sorrow?

Here’s the breakdown:

Mean                       1.68
Median                    1.75
Mode                       1.50
Standard Deviation  0.46
Range                       1.50
Minimum                 1.00
Maximum                2.50
Sum                          401
Count                        239

And here we are, looking at an average length of 1.68 inches, not the solid two inches claimed on the bag.  The bag should say “21 Cheetos Crunchy Snacks = 2.94 +/- .80 feet end to end”, or, alternatively, “Between 20 and 34 Cheetos Crunchy Snacks = 3.5 feet end to end, with 25 or so being the most likely”.   Sure, the error bars are pretty big, these changes would make the bag virtually unreadable, and I’m being super unfair about the curvy-twisty thing, but, as everyone knows, cold hard data is at the heart of every tasty snack treat.

But the 1.68” thing is just on raw count.  I looked at the numbers a couple of different ways and got this:

While only 36% of the Cheetos were two inches and over, you can see that nearly half (47%) of the overall length consisted of the larger pieces.  What does that mean?  Well, it means that if you blindfold yourself and reached into the bag, you would have about a 1-in-3 chance of grabbing a 2” or bigger snack.  If you were to line them up end-to-end, though, and pointed to a random spot (not Cheeto…) in the line of Cheetos, there is about a 1-in-2 chance you would be pointing at a 2” or bigger piece.

By the way, the end-to-end length of all the Cheetos in this bag was about 33.5 feet (36 feet if you add the crumbles).

The grey columns show the distribution by mass instead of length, and that tells another story altogether.  The average (intact) Cheeto weighs about 0.91 grams, so my +/-1g scale was unsuited to measuring them individually.  I could, though, make some “first order” assumptions and proceed from there.  Assumption one – Cheetos can be modeled as cylinders and have a consistent length-to-width ratio.  Assumption two – all Cheetos have the same density.  These are “correct enough”.

Using these as guides I came up with the grey columns without needing to weigh a whole bag of Cheetos one by one, like I have time for that nonsense.  That data shows (fine… show… like that sounds right) that over two-thirds (67%) of the mass of the food in the bag consists of pieces two inches or greater.  Nice!

I eagerly await my Master’s Degree in Statistics from Frito Lay University.  It should come in the mail any day now.

Two Labels

On the SE7ENth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me... AHHHHHHHHH!

"C'mon... Buck up, Little Steam Cleaner!  It's not all that bad!  What if I tilt you like this... Is that better?  No? How about this?  Nothing?  Not even a little smile, Mr. Grumpy Face?"

Two Staffs. (Staves? Really? That Sounds Weird...)

A very long time ago the boy and the wife were out hiking.  The boy found a big oak branch that he used to help himself trek around the winding trail. He brought it home and asked me if he could put it in my wood bin in the garage. I said sure.

I immediately noticed its potential to become a truly beautiful walking stick but I was terrified to touch it. It was already very nice looking and, except for the mushroomed end, it really needed no modification.  Even the cracked area near what I thought of as the top looked pretty cool, if splintery.

Eventually I got brave enough to saw off the bottom six or so inches of the branch and I began to smooth out the hand-shredding gap near the top with a Dremmel. After a bit, I was pleased with the look but I decided that I needed to put pins in it to keep it from splitting any further.  Four three-eighth inch holes were drilled and were fitted with dowels. After the glue dried I sanded that area and I noticed that if I was careful I could get the splotched pattern you see here.

I rounded off the end, applied the lightest stain I had, then hand rubbed in several coats of semi-gloss poly. After the walking stick was dry I burned the boy’s initials into the top and re-sealed that area.

We think it turned out pretty nice.

Sometime after that project was done the eight-year-old was at school where he found a fairly straight branch he wanted me to turn into a walking stick like the first one.

Well, this one is a lot thinner and I think is sweetgum and is pretty much everything you don't want in a hiking staff. I would have said “no” if it weren't for two things:

The first is he told one of his buddies that his dad could turn this into a great hiking stick and he would sell it to him for $5 after it was done in a couple of days. Nice. Way to channel your inner middle-manager, there, buddy. You freaking nailed it.

I mean… Committing resources he didn't have any control over to perform a task he had no clue about while simultaneously ignoring schedule constraints and grossly underestimating the labor cost?  I'm sorry, everyone... I don't mean to brag. I'm just so damn proud…

Anyway, the second thing only happened because I had to pick him up from school that day. If mom picked him up instead, I would have never known about it. As I entered, one of the after-care ladies called to him in her “I shouldn't have smoked so much during WWII” voice, saying “Your dad’s here. Don't forget your… stick.” 

I wish I could express in text the absolute distaste she had in her voice as she said the word “stick”.  I guess if you replaced the word “stick” with “trash bag filled with dirty diapers” you might come close. Even the pause she used reminded me of a line from Life, the Universe, and Everything:

…After what it had calculated to ten significant decimal places as being the precise length of pause most likely to convey a general contempt for all things matressy…

So now I’m all like “Oh, no, she d’dn’t”! I loudly praised the boy for his choice of raw materials for our new project (I’d like to thank the Academy…) and we left for the day.

Like I said, among its other shortcomings, the branch was too thin. A simple handle of some sort needed to be crafted. To the Scrapbin, Boy Wonder!

A chunk of pine furring strip was selected, drilled out, and shaped. The handle looked ok but I wanted to give it some contrast so I hit it with some ebony stain. Now I had the tint I was going for but the whole thing was still kinda “meh”.

Besides, the asymmetry of the branch meant there was a gap where it met the handle so that needed to be covered up or filled somehow (I don't own a lathe. Or have the space for one. Or the money for one. Or know how to use one properly. Oh, like you're so great…).

I addressed both of those problems by epoxying suede lacing around the handle and the base. This provided a nice two-fer of covering up the gap and giving the handle a bit of interest.

So, it didn't end up looking too bad.

It’s strong enough to augment a child’s efforts on slightly hilly or muddy terrain but I wouldn’t want to have to rely on this thing to help ford a fast moving stream or anything. If you are ever hanging off the edge of a cliff by your fingertips and your hiking buddy says “Quick! Grab this! I'll pull you up!”, rest assured that the last thing you hear before your terrified screams drown out the sound of the wind rushing by your ears as the earth rises up to meet you will be KA-SNAP!!!

Jeebus. I just gave myself goosebumps. I'm also thinking the boy might have gotten the price estimate right on this thing after all.

Daneson Toothpick Review

So it’s come to this…  I’m reviewing gourmet toothpicks.  But, hey, since writing this is several orders of magnitude more interesting than the stuff I should be doing right now, let’s stow the complaining and dive right in!

A buddy of mine rules at finding the coolest, most original Xmas gifts ever. Not only that, he garnishes the gifts with a heartfelt, extremely insulting letter I am instructed to read in front of the whole family each year.  I dutifully do this to the delight of all.  Often, the letters themselves are suitable for framing.

More often, though, I’d be embarrassed to stick them on the fridge next to my eight-year-old’s Social Studies quizzes, fearing that visiting neighbors would deduce that our son must have a half-brother (Sloth from the Goonies, say) caged in our attic somewhere.  So this year I won’t bore you with his poorly spelled, grammatically experimental missive that somehow manages to concretely weave drunken slurring into the paragraph structure.  Instead, I will get right to the point and review these toothpicks which I assume he afforded by (finally!) landing a day job through the tireless efforts of the Make-a-Wish Foundation.

Oh, don’t worry.  He won’t read this far…  His ADD caused him to wander off in the middle of the second paragraph to Google “garnishes” so he is now smudging up his monitor while futilely attempting to pick up an image of a mini crabcake.   It’s all good.

Anyhow, this year he got me a couple of phials of Daneson Toothpicks. That’s a pic of them there in the upper left.  Each gorgeous tinted glass container (types #16 and #22) contains 12 flavored wooden toothpicks.  The toothpicks are solid, uniform, functional, and are carefully charred on one end.  They are beautiful.

These are the very definition of artisanal toothpicks.

I visited the website a few minutes ago to get more information and I found out that they will plant one hundred trees in return for every tree they use!  That’s awesome!  Since one cord of wood can produce six to nine million toothpicks I reckon they would need to move 3.5 million dollars’ worth of these beauties before needing to pick up a shovel.

Also, they sell leather carrying cases for the phials.  One that holds six will run you $360.  Like the bottles and the toothpicks, the cases are undeniably elegant.  Please visit their site and read the description, because I have no words.

I think I will end this post by nodding approvingly and slow-clapping for about five solid minutes.

Nicely done, Daneson.  Nicely done.

Home of the Free?

Hey, Busch Gardens!  Yeah, I'm talking to you!  I come here to have a nice relaxing Saturday with my family and just after I see this:

I see this:

Pants?  All of a sudden I'm required to wear pants?  What makes this ride so darn fancy?   Is the Pope running it or something?  Maybe before people pay good money for their tickets you warn folks that they are walking into Nazi Germany!  I'm telling you... this freaking country...

Some Trivets and a Corkboard

I was cleaning the cobwebs out of the sidebar of this blog when I noticed I still had “coasters and corkboards” in the To-Do list.  The fact that these items were in the list wasn’t surprising – things often molder there for years at a time.   I was a little surprised, though, that I could legitimately cross this project out.

While I was building the Christmas-gift clocks I figured I’d build a corkboard.  I had the corks and the lumber and corkboards are super-quick, so hey, another present for someone knocked out.  Awesome.  There it is in the upper left of this post.  It is 20” x 20” and contains 200 corks. 

A couple of months ago a co-worker approached me and asked if he could “commission a work”.  I thought he was razzing me but it turned out he was being legit.  He showed me some ceramic tiles he had been carrying from place to place for four decades – they were from the kitchen of his and his wife’s original house – and asked me if I could make a trivet for him as a surprise for his wife.

Trivets are cake but, since the tiles were special to him, I was super nervous about taking on the task.  I brought in the project as it progressed so he could “sign off” on the design decisions as I went (type of wood, border size, overall size, stain color, bevel angle, etc.).  The final product is below.

I was happy with it and he was delighted as well.  The tiles were the star of the show, they come just a hair above the border, and the trivet is a lot heavier than it looks.  Remarkably, (for me) it was level and not “rocky”.  I told him I didn’t want any money for it and I was happy to do the project.

My wife saw it while it was a work in progress and asked if she could have one. Since I had one square foot of unused tumbled tile (from the prototype phase of this project) and I have a tile cutter I made these two 8” trivets. 

One of these went to the wife and one went to her sister.

After the holidays my co-worker reported that his wife was extremely happy with her trivet.   He said he had to give me something, and paid me a dollar which he said had to go to my son:

An 1890-S Morgan.  Nice! 

The boy thought it was great and he put it in his Special Coin Book.  So, while the trivets aren’t technically “coasters” I’m gonna call this a big win and add a couple of new things to the list.

First Snow Day of 2017

I probably could have written the following sentence Thursday after it became apparent that the area was getting snow:

The eight-year-old has no school today and I am off from work.

That became official as I am writing this Sunday afternoon (I'm setting this to auto-post Monday morning).

Last night sometime (Sat. PM or Sun. AM) VDOT sent out their fleet of Zambonis to eradicate the grooves and furrows that more adventurous folks trail blazed into the ten inches of snow that fell.  Since the crews didn’t bother putting down sand, salt, or gravel the local roads are now half-mile-long stretches of ice snaking through many of the neighborhoods. So, since the neighborhoods are filled with folks that think “pickup truck” means this:

You end up with this:

On Sunday the wife and I were outside having coffee and watching over the kids building forts in the cul du sac when a white Chevy, travelling straight but wayyyy too fast for the road conditions, spun 270 degrees and got stuck in the middle of the street.  Predictably, the guy put it in reverse and gunned the engine.  After spinning the rear wheels for a few seconds he put it into drive, slowly bumped over the curb, and gracelessly arced his vehicle back onto the road.  The Pee-Wee Herman like “I meant to do that” look he had on his face as he drove off in the direction he came from was awesome. 

Don’t worry - the kids were nowhere near where that guy spun out, although we did take that opportunity to remind them to stay far away from the main road.  Also, I should mention here that he is not the one that took out the mailbox – we discovered that damage later on a trek out of the neighborhood to assess road conditions.

So Monday morning I think the boy and I will walk on over to the people with the damaged mailbox and offer to repair it for them.  But not too early in the morning.  It is a Snow Day after all.