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.

New Chessboard Puzzle Hint

I got up this morning, worked out, put away the dishes, cleaned the letterbox, fed the cat, took out the trash, showered, got my lunch ready and now I'm bored.  Well, I guess you could say I was bored before, which is why a lot of that stuff got done in the first place.  

I've really got nothing specific to talk about right now except I that I type this waiting for my kid's school to open this morning after a two-hour-delay.  We had a very slight dusting last night.  The roads are bone dry.  Don't get me started.

So I went through the puzzles on the Secret Puzzle Page this morning and I was shocked to discover that I couldn't remember the encoding mechanism I used when I first posted this one over four years ago:

I eventually recalled it but, wow, I really need to write these down or something.  Here are all the hints in ROT-13 format to prevent spoilers:

Hint 1 (Posted 11/06/10): N pvepyr, ru?
Hint 2 (Posted 01/07/11): Gur svefg yrggre vf 'G'.
Hint 3[Posted 02/05/13]: Guvf fubhyq or rnfl nf pnxr.
Hint 4 (Posted 02/06/15): Rnfl nf cvr, V zrna.

All of the puzzles (and hints and links to the projects associated with the puzzles) can be found in the link in the sidebar on non-mobile devices and at the top of this page on mobile ones.

Think you have an answer?  Post a comment or send me an email.  Good Luck!

Looting the Radio Shack

In case you haven’t heard, many Radio Shacks are closing and the deals they are offering as they liquidate their inventory are incredible.  If you are a hobbyist, a DIYer, or both find out if the one near you is closing soon and check out what they have left in stock.

Most likely, everything having to do with TVs and cabling and is already gone if the stores near you serve the same demographics as the ones near me.  The upside is that you can get ceramic magnets, Arduino boards, robotics kits, solder, solar panels, lights, switches, buzzers, etc, etc, etc for pennies on the dollar.

Here’s my hoard so far:

They are even selling the cabinets and display racks, in case you are in the market. So stock up if you have the interest and the spare space.  Just remember to show a little sensitivity to the checkout personnel as you are having your Hefty Lawn and Leaf bags stuffed with zener diodes and alligator clips and whatever rung up - these guys are probably job hunting, you know.

Be cool and wish them luck.  

Phantom Zones 'R' Us

Hey!  New Toys 'R' Us catalog is here!  Sweet!

Lessee... Trampoline, Trampoline, Horrifying Prison, Trampoline...

Hey, I Know! Let’s Talk About Snow!

The latest round of snow started Tuesday afternoon.  I left work a little before my usual departure time to avoid the dodge’em mess the highways were likely to turn into and the wife did the same.

The swirling snow stuck to the roads and the already frozen roadways began to ice over.  I saw no accidents but my wife saw about half a dozen with some folks completely on their sides in ditches.   She left work only about a quarter hour after I did but it was a very important 15-minute window, it seems.

The most treacherous part was just a couple of miles from my house where the asphalt in a three-way intersection looked like it was carved out of a 100-yard long diamond. Even I skidded a little there.  We both made it home safely but neither one of us were surprised to see the message appear on our phones that school for the next day was cancelled.

Sigh.  Again.

By Wednesday at 10AM the roads were not only looking drivable, some patches even looked dry.  I checked out the situation and, other than a few neighborhood areas that are in the shadows of trees, everything was fine.  After snowball fights with neighbor kids were done we came inside to warm up.  I didn’t want to sit “trapped” at home again with the boy so we went and got my oil changed and my inspection rescheduled for that afternoon.

At the dealership we watched Tom and Jerry and Loony Tunes cartoons and ate movie theater-like popcorn while we waited.  Sounds weak, I know, but there was another dad there with his kid who likewise just wanted to get out of the house.  We (the dads) had fun trying to remember the details of these 65-year old shows “Oh, yeah, this is the one where Foghorn Leghorn paints the dog’s tongue green” and “Hey, I love this one!  Those two gophers mess with that actor dog and bounce him all over the place with magnets, right?”  The kids just embraced the old-school violence with total relish.

On the way back home I stopped by a Radio Shack that I knew was on the “closing soon” list and helped loot the place for electronics stuff at up to 50% off list.  Today the prices drop to 70% off list but they are closed because of last night’s snow (darn darn darny darn).

Ah, yes.  Last night’s snow. Nine inches of dense, wet, packy stuff.  This event closed school not just for today but for tomorrow as well.  It was heavy enough to bend shrubs to the ground and rip the sign off a Chinese restaurant in town.  I think as of two o’clock this afternoon the completed and half-built snowmen in my neighborhood outnumbered the actual people here.  The semi-igloo that was built last week is now basically an indestructible ice fortress thanks to the repeated freeze-warm-rain-freeze cycle it has gone through.

A few kids (ten-year-olds, I guess) had the ambitious idea of using the fairly untouched street snow to start their snowman.  They rolled it and rolled it and rolled it until they saw it was big enough - that is, they stopped when they could barely move it.  Their plan (which I overheard while I was out shoveling) was to roll it back to their place so they could build the next layer.  Their property was about 100 yards down the road.

You see where I am going with this, I think.  

Light dawned for them as well, and they decided that putting the thing on a sled and towing it there would solve their (quite literally) ever-growing problem.  They managed to get their three-foot-wide ball onto the sled but the ropes they were using simply weren't designed to pull 400-pound loads and kept either breaking or failing in some other way. Even with two kids pushing and one pulling they only made it about ten feet.

They had a small conference and walked up to me. I stopped shoveling and said “What’s up, guys?”  The spokesman for the group said “Um… Would you like a free giant snowball?”

I thought “Nicely done, kid.  Nicely done. I was dying to know what you were going to say.”

“Sure!” I said, brightly.  “Just push it into the yard so it’s not in the street.  I’ll get my son to help you.”  After about five minutes the four of them just barely managed to get it over the curb and park it in the grass.  I thanked them and they walked off as the boy and the girl next door took turns climbing it and arguing over what they should do with it.  I just hope it’s not sitting on a sprinkler head…  Meh.  I’m sure it’s fine.

The roads are now covered in untreated slush and the temperature is 32 degrees.  It will drop to the low twenties overnight and will not get above 32 until 11AM or so.  I hope they don’t plow.  If they do plow, though, I hope they put down salt and sand otherwise they are just resurfacing the ice rink, you know?

As tired of reading about barely newsworthy snow events as I am tired struggling to come up with something to say about them?  I feel for you, brother.  I mean, look at a satellite picture of North America right now - what else is there?

It’s 2015.  Screw the flying car.  Where’s my cloned mammoth?

A Small Diorama Project

Santa got the boy this Scene-A-Rama diorama set last Christmas. The school closings over the past week gave us the opportunity to play around with it. 

This is the first time I had ever put one together so Santa also got extra glue, grass, and rocks in case the kit was kind of crummy. He needn't have worried, it turns out. The kit is absolutely awesome. The instructions are very clear and kid/parent friendly.  The included materials are high-quality.  It is clearly marked that the base is sold separately, however, so Santa kind of dropped the ball there. 

No big deal.  A scrap piece of oak plyboard later and we were off to the races. 

Initially, the boy wanted to make a battlefield where dinosaurs fought toy soldiers. He changed his mind, though, while we were in the middle of making the trees. For some reason he suddenly switched gears and decided he just wanted a peaceful scene with a river. I think part of his thinking was that the little Dollar Store dinosaurs he had were kind of cheap-looking compared to the trees.

Totally understandable.

I was against adding the river because I was afraid I would screw up the base.  The instructions made it sound so darn simple I instantly switched to “high alert mode”. Nothing is that straightforward. I was glad to see that I was wrong and the procedure for how to scrape the surface of the matting were spot on and it was super easy to add the water feature you see here using paints he already had laying around.

During the construction phase of this project the river became a stream he wanted to span with a rock bridge. He didn't want to wait for me to cut some wood in the garage so we could arch the rocks above the streambed. Meh.  I wasn't going to micromanage the situation by forcing my vision of what a rock bridge should look like, and, besides, it was his kit, not mine. It turned out just fine.

Oh, btw, I was in charge of dabbing glue, cutting the plyboard, scraping the riverbed, and painting the water and the six-year-old was in charge of everything else.

Bushes, grasses, and other accents were added and here is the end result.  Not bad for a couple of first-timers over a couple of hours.  There is plenty of leftover material for a couple more projects. We would only need tree trunks and matting to create another little world.  

I highly recommend this kit (and this company’s series of products) to anyone out there needing to build a diorama for a school project or simply wanting to pass the time with their children doing something creative.  The possibilities are endless and there is very little of the “waiting around for stuff to dry” that sucks the fun and the magic out of the building process for kids.

I really hope the kid changes his mind about the dinosaur thing with the next diorama. That would be sweet.  See, I have some cool ideas for a volcano with lights and lava and stuff and oh my God I’m turning into one of those scale model train guys aren’t I?

Snowbound!

Well, no, not really. The boy’s school still isn’t open although work is, so poof goes a vacation day for me. The temperatures hit nearly forty yesterday before dropping overnight and today we won’t get out of the 20s.  Tomorrow we might hit a low of zero which is unheard of for this area.  Saturday will be 40 and rainy.

The primary roads are clear due to a combination of plowing and sanding the streets, above-freezing temperatures, and road traffic.  The secondary roads (about 80% of the roads in the area) are not.  The county does not treat the secondary roads but does “plow” them with what I can only assume are repurposed Zambonis. Not so great for people trying to navigate, you know, neighborhoods and stuff, but pretty decent if you own your own curling rocks.  Well done, VDOT!

I inspected the roads for drivability a couple of times over the last few days - just testing a couple of curvy, icy miles to the first treated street and back.  Crummy with a rear-wheel-drive vehicle like mine but not impossible if you know what you are doing.  The guy behind me on my last trip was riding my bumper while fishtailing his likewise-rear-wheel-drive truck all over the place.  He was close enough where I could get a good look at his face in my rearview mirror. The expression was an awesome combination of “C’mon, man, go! We gots thuh green flag, Yankee!” and “Holy [deleted]! ahm-uh gonna die!”  I wish him well and my prayers go out to his eventual victims.

Oh, on one of our walks (dragging the boy on the sled) we watched a lady throw handfuls of swimming pool salt onto the seven inches of snow and ice that covered her unshoveled sidewalk.  And you thought I was kidding earlier…

But enough with the grief.  When a three-day weekend becomes an unwilling six-day weekend you gotta fill the time somehow:

Built a snow fort.  It is big enough for three six-to-eight year olds to sit in comfortably.  It has a domed roof that is bolstered by a single 1x6.  Yes, that is cheating, and it is nowhere near the epic awesomeness of the ones my sister and her friends make.  Their igloos have wet bars!  I… I can’t compete with that…  But I gotta consider the safety of the end-users, here, you know?

Built a Lego scene.  Friction between the team members (me and my son) over the motif resulted in a compromise that somewhat disagrees with historical canon.  It’s fun to play with, though.

Solved some local puzzle-based Geocaches (Crop Circle [GC4HB71], The Red Herring [GC4JTE4], Puzzle Monster [GC4M67N], and Sudoku Challenge #1 [GC2QGRQ]). I have been avoiding these but I will officially sign my name to those logs when I head out this weekend.  You may start the ticker tape parade for me at your leisure.

Made some crayon cars using the Crayola Crayon Factory.  These are now in the boy’s geocaching bag for trading.

Discovered that letting kids use the dictation feature of this computer is a terrible, disturbing idea (autocorrect has not only been drinking but it seems it is a horrible potty mouth as well) but that is a topic for another post.

Did the diorama set Santa brought the boy for Christmas.  I think it will eventually be the scene of a dinosaur attack on a bunch of toy soldiers.  Again, another post.

Watching movies, playing Xbox games, practicing guitar, studying for a spelling test, and writing this post were some… wait… wait… I just got another text from the school.  They are cancelled again for Friday…

No. 

No no no no no no no no no.  Enough is enough. I’m calling shenanigans, here.  Mom!  Hey, mom!  It’s your turn.  You are officially tagged in.  

I’m going to work. 

Winter Doomwatch 2015 [Final Update]

It's morning!  We made it!  The local newscasters said no one would survive, but, through what I can only assume was Divine Providence, we made it!

Here is the devastation from the back window:

And here is an example showing how locals deal with "driving in a straight line in snow"(Flash required).

Last night they made the call to cancel work for today, so there is nothing for it than to have chat with an OCD neighbor who decided that 7AM sharp was a good time to spend 40 minutes convincing himself that a (I assume "rented") snow thrower is not some sort of magical vacuum cleaner before giving up and switching to a shovel.