Pancake and Waffle (Part V)

“What do you mean ‘They’re gone’?”, I said, upon receiving the report that the morning feeding didn’t go as expected.

I got up, inspected the cage thoroughly and determined that Pancake and Waffle had indeed somehow freed themselves from the “cage that was totally ok perfectly fine 100% super awesome for dwarf hamsters”. 

As I stared at the abandoned critter prison a quote from a book I read a while back came to mind: “You see I believe in freedom. Not many people do, although they will of course protest otherwise. And no practical definition of freedom would be complete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based.”

I mulled this over for a bit.  “Freedom” in this instance included the freedom to be seriously injured from a fall off the desk, the freedom to starve to death in a remote corner of the house, the freedom to discover that the question “Who’s a good kitty?” is hugely rhetorical…

 After a bit I realized my wife and son were staring at me in that hopeful, expectant way that those of us who have earned their “Dad Merit Badge” immediately recognize.  “Please make this not be happening,” their looks said.  And, like all dads everywhere I did not say “Well, what the [insert expletive here] do you expect me to do about it?  Whip out my trusty ol’ Cosmic CTRL-Z Button and magically poof them back into there?  Then what?  Call my boss and say I need to blow off that client meeting and take a personal day to escape-proof a [insert similar expletive here] hamster cage? Cuz that would go over well…”

Instead… Ok… Suppressing mentally exhausted sigh… Glancing around the room… Placing arms akimbo in expected heroic-dad fashion… Engaging upbeat tone of voice… Aaannnnnd “ACTION!”

“Ok, here’s what we are going to do.  We are going to put the cage on the floor with the door ramp wide open.  Re-attach the wheel to the side of the cage, make sure the food dish is full, and make sure the water bottle is accessible.  After work, I will get some of those humane mouse traps that don’t hurt or poison mice.   They shouldn’t have gone very far.”

No one questioned the lack of promise of a happy ending.  No one questioned the difference between “immediate action” and “clear progress toward a goal”.  No one considered the phrase “They shouldn’t have gone very far” was worded with absolute precision and did not mean “They couldn’t have gotten very far”.

Hopeful smiles all around. This was the right answer. 

After work I went to the PetSmart where we bought the hamsters and their “cage”.  I told the manager what had happened, and she just stared at me for a bit.  What she did not say was “Well, what the [insert expletive here] do you expect me to do about it?  Whip out my trusty ol’ Cosmic CTRL-Z Button and magically poof them back into there?” 

My goal in going there was that, since these people have probably heard the “my small creature is lost” thing about a billion times, they probably have a way of catching them safely.  I have never worked at a pet store but it is not out of the realm of my imagination that somewhere, sometime, some lizards or mice or hamsters maybe got dropped by a salesperson or a skittish customer, ran behind a six-foot high pallet of Chihuahua Num Nums or whatever and had to be extricated somehow.  Maybe they had some sort of fast-acting bait/pheromone/vacuum cleaner attachment or something.  I dunno.  Something…

I want to make this bit perfectly clear.  My goal going in there was NOT any of the following:

• To request a refund
• To demand a refund
•  To threaten them with a bad review on social media
• To threaten them with a $200,000 lawsuit because of the unbearable trauma our family has suffered (this is 2020, after all…)
• To see the salesclerks immediately rend their garments, don black armbands, lower the store’s flag to half-mast, organize a candle-light vigil, and rename Aisle Six to the “Pancake and Waffle Memorial Aisle of Cage Fluff and Hamster Treats”

I just wanted to see if they had humane small critter traps.  They did not.  I mean, wow!  Talk about a missed opportunity!  They could even price them on a sliding scale directly proportional to how distraught the customer’s children were!  Pfft!  That’s just leaving money on the table in my opinion, but there you go.

So, with the misguided hopefulness of a three-year-old trying to communicate effectively with a Chucky Cheese animatronic, I gave the cage make and model to the manager in case the store wanted to have the info and re-assess their previous claim that it was suitable for Robos so other people don’t lose their pets in the future.  

She just nodded at me. Or at least toward me... 

Ok, then…

I went to another pet store and a Home Depot before finally finding what I needed at a local Lowes.  I bought four of the traps and returned home to begin Operation I Sure Hope This Works.

(To be Continued...)

Pancake and Waffle (Part IV)

Where was I…  Oh, yes.

We got them (Pancake and Waffle) home uneventfully and placed them in their cage on the boy’s desk.  They ran around excitedly, sniffing at everything and exploring every square inch of the cage crawling up and down the tubes, acting shocked when they saw each other, dashing around some more, scaring each other again, and finally settling on the food dish as the most interesting thing in their new home.

After several dozen milliseconds passed, they grew bored with simply consuming the food, so they entertained themselves by pushing a chunk of hamster nibbles (or whatever it is they eat) around and around the food dish.  Wheee!

The treadmill on the second floor of the cage was re-inspected and, seeing that it was neither edible nor another hamster they hadn’t seen in, like, thirty-seven seconds, Pancake/Waffle (I don’t know.  Ask Schrodinger which is which, I guess.  You collapse the waveform...  I’m busy.) got on and ran.

He ran as far and as fast as his little legs could take him for about 10 seconds and decided he needed a break.  Dwarf hamsters weigh much, much less than a plastic circular treadmill and have no concept of “inertia” or “centripetal force”, so stepping gracefully off the side of the rapidly spinning wheel wasn’t in its top one hundred things to accomplish that moment.

A few rotations later, gravity took over and the little guy caromed off the axle and he ka-thunked onto the bottom of the wheel to the absolute joy of his audience.  Whether it was fun for him, too, or just your standard, run-of-the-mill brain damage he got on again and did the same thing.  And again. And again.

After a bit, the other guy competed his circumambulation of the Holy Food Dish and went to go see what the rumbly hubbub on the second deck was all about.  “Hey, that looks like fun!” he thought… maybe.  I’ll admit that it was equally likely that he thought [insert absolute silence here].  Anyway, he hopped on.

In case you haven’t run into this at your local gym, there is a reason they have a “one person on the treadmill at a time” policy.  Wait...  Are you telling me that don’t have a sign like that at your gym?!    Well, believe me the rules here are very, very, very clear.

They began to squabble and nip and bite and scratch at each other just like that old lady at my local gym.  Unlike Abuelita Grumpy-Pants, though, they eventually made peace with the fact that they could both technically fit on the exercise machine at the same time and didn’t go hobbling off to narc on me to the manager. 

For those of you that are unfamiliar with the term, a “zero sum game” is one where there is a definite winner (+1) and a definite loser (-1).  Those scores add up to zero, hence the name.  I’m sure you have conversations with “co”-workers or “loved” ones that are like that.

All the time…

Please tell me I’m not alone…

Sooo… watching the complete lack of teamwork involved when two Robos try to spin a wheel together really showcased the fact that zero plus zero is also zero.  It would be helpful if they ran at the same speed… or at least started and stopped at the same time… or tried to run in the same direction.  I think maybe they achieved three-fifths of a revolution once. 

Did I mention the wheel came free with the cage?  You get what you pay for.

 

At first it was like the soft rumbling of a distant thunderstorm… but not really.  It reminded me of when the people next to us in our old neighborhood bought their 13-year-old a drum set.  Then it reminded me of when he turned 18 and started playing with his band… Still ok, but a bit timesome at times… Then it reminded me of when he turned 23.  His band had long since broken up but, since he was still living at home, he no longer had alcohol restrictions or a bedtime or a job…

After maybe a week of these guys violating the heck out of the treadmill’s warranty, the plastic-on-plastic bearings went bad.  It got louder and louder and louder.  Eventually, it got so bad that we had to unmount the wheel from the side of the cage so the boy could get to sleep.  Nocturnal animals (admittedly passable drummers) couldn’t care less about your stupid school (work) schedule. 

They would have to find some other way to entertain themselves.

In the morning, they were gone.

(To be continued...)

Pancake and Waffle (Part III)

When the boy first brought up the topic of owning hamsters he made sure to let us know that they needed to be “Roborovski dwarf hamsters” or just Dwarf hamsters for short… or just Robos for even shorter.  He informed us of this roughly twelve hundred times a week because, you know, grown-ups forget stuff.

He’s helpful like that.

A couple of weeks before Christmas I bought him a book on the care and feeding of these critters so he would know what to do before he earned them by completing his guitar challenge.  I know, I know… I mean, a whole book? Pfft.  Everyone knows that the right and proper  way of learning how to do anything is to feast upon the vast cornucopia of bite-sized, sugar-coated chunks of online how-to!  That way you can become an insufferable expert in a hyper-specific field of your choice right away without being bothered with things like “depth”, “historical background”, or “storing things in long-term memory for future use”.

(Note to self: sign up for anger management class after telling those kids to get off my lawn.)

The book I got him is well written and is filled with a lot of interesting facts about these amazing creatures.  What they eat, how much space they need, social interactions (both with people and with other hamsters) – good stuff.  

If I were to write a book like on this topic it wouldn’t be nearly as useful:

You can tell the difference between a real Roborovski dwarf hamster and a randomly-wind-blown wad of dryer lint in the following ways

• Robo hamsters cost about $12 each.  Dryer lint is usually less expensive.
• Robo hamsters have large active eyes that make them trick you into thinking they are much, much smarter than the dryer lint.  Balls of dryer lint lack such affectations.   
• Chunks of dryer lint eat much less sloppily and noisily than Robos.
• Cats enjoy playing with Robos waaaaayyy more than they do playing with wads of dryer lint (more on that later).
• While both wads of dryer lint and Robos prefer dark, hidden places over open, well-lit ones, only the Robos are known for hitting the treadmill in the middle of the night.  Like, a lot.  And they are really bad at it… Probably because of the previously discussed lack of smartness.

You get the idea…

The cage at PetSmart came with a “starter kit” that included food, fluff, some translucent tubes, a water bottle, and a treadmill.  How convenient!  “And this cage is good for Robos?” we asked. “Oh, yes!” cheerfully lied the lying salesperson, referencing us to the lie that was printed on the box. Ok.  Great!  We took the $70 minimum-security prison home, set it up on the boy’s desk in his room and returned to the store to get the twelve-dollar hamsters.

We saw a bunch of Robos had haphazardly stacked themselves in a far corner of one of the displays.  They were awake and docile.  Five tiny pairs of eyes stared at us, warily.

“Which one do you want,” asked the salesperson.

“Actually I want to get two.  The book I have says that they are territorial and they might fight each other. I would get one but I don’t want it to be lonely… these ones seems to get along”, he said, pointing to the pile in the shadows. “Will that be ok?” “As long as they are from the same litter and have plenty of space to move around, they usually get along fine,” the salesperson responded.  “If they start hurting each other you can bring them back.”

“Ok.  I’ll take… that one,” said the boy, pointing to the pile.  “This one?” asked the salesperson, also pointing.  “Yes!” said the boy.  The wife and I looked at each other and shrugged.  It was clear that our son and the clerk had connected on some sort of a cosmic level well beyond the normal human range of senses because, to us, they were all precisely the same.

The clerk slowly reached in…

Aaaannnnddd… cue “Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance”… ACTION!

The peace was shattered, and the hamsters immediately went all multi-ball, racing around and frantically leaping over each other in a desperate attempt to evade the fleshy claw machine slowly descending from above. Picture a less organized and way more adorable and clumsier “running from Godzilla” crowd scene from a 1950’s monster movie. 

Yeah… That’s about right.

I was thinking “No way is she going to grab the right one” when “the right one” dashed inside of a translucent hunk of plastic tubing and hunkered down, knowing for sure he was safe in there.  The salesperson deftly grabbed the tube and gently deposited the little guy into a container about the size of a Happy Meal box.  The second “right one” was captured in exactly the same way because he didn’t pay attention before, and he didn’t have time to look up the “How to Escape a Human Who is Slowly Reaching for You” video on YouTube that had the most “likes”.

The box was closed, we paid the bill, and we happily headed home.

(To be continued...)

Pancake and Waffle (Part II)

He was really hoping to earn the hamsters before Christmas, and it was already November, so he started practicing.  He was frustrated at first – his fingers didn’t seem to want to go where his brain was commanding them to go and hitting the correct string without looking down was “impossible”. 

But he stuck with it.

After a while he became a bored with playing the two games (he managed to get 500k in String Skip Saloon and about 1 million in Ducks Redux) so he started playing a couple of the easier songs.  “Next Girl” (Black Keys) and “Angela” (Jarvis Cocker) were slow and simple enough, but he was only scoring in the mid-30-percents for proficiency for each.  I encouraged him to practice parts he was having a problem with using the Riff Repeater tool – a feature of the software that allows you to gradually improve on sections of a song you are having trouble with. It didn’t seem to be helping at all.

And then it happened: the “click”.

We’ve all experienced the “click” at one time or another.  It’s when you are struggling with some seemingly impossible task when, suddenly, the light switch is thrown, the scales drop off your eyes, and the third metaphor you are looking for to tie up the end of a run-on sentence presents itself suddenly.

He quickly climbed up past 90% on both songs.  Since he, like his mother, has music “in his bones” I wasn’t all that surprised.  I, on the other hand, have to “fake the funk” pretty much constantly and often quite literally.  Nothing really sticks.  I just don’t “get it” on the same level as real musicians do.

He started playing “Satisfaction” (Rolling Stones) and wasn’t doing all that great – even on a ¾ size guitar his hands are too small to keep them in one place that high up the neck of a guitar.  In mid-December he went back to playing the games and managed to get 7 million in String Skip Saloon and a whopping 19 million in Ducks Redux.  For reference, you get a special achievement in both games for scores above 10 million… so, you know… not bad.

He got the hang of switching between easy chords by playing Dawn of the Chordead and Star Chords but he hated (still hates?) both of those games.  I guess it was a “too much, too soon” thing.  I dunno.  Regardless, that practice seemed to help him switch between phrases fast enough to start to do really well on it – routinely hitting in the low to mid 80%’s.

Christmas came and went hamster-free (bummer) but he was still on Winter Break so he practiced – he wanted to tell his classmates he got them when he returned to school. He went back to his easier songs and was able to hit Master Mode for a large portion of both. 

Master Mode?  Oh… It’s when you have nailed a phrase or phrases in a song well enough for the on-screen notes to gradually fade to nothing, forcing you off the crutch of visual cues and making you rely on your ear and you memory. He scored above 100% on one of the songs, but I can’t remember which.  It was pretty cool to see those notes disappear like that.

He decided to end the night with one more go at Satisfaction.  The pic on the left shows the result.

He smiled hugely and then stopped.  “Wait,” he said.  “You guys are both here.  I just got through playing my other songs above 90%.  I just got above 90% on this one.  Does that mean I get my hamsters?”

My wife looked at me and I looked at her.  She grimaced lightly.  I shrugged and smiled.  “Yes,” I said. “A deal’s a deal. Congratulations!” 

It was Saturday evening, January 4^th.

To be continued...

Pancake and Waffle (Part 1)

Oh! It’s-ah… Pancake and Waffle! Pancake and Waffle! Hamster services! [record halt sound] Wait… that’s not right.  Let me start over.

I think I described in the past that I wrote a Book of Challenges for my son.  In case I didn’t mention it, the book is a list of accomplishments (outside of the usual “make your bed” or “get good grades” or “please for the love of God clean the toothpaste off your sink – the hammer and chisel are in the usual place”) that he could do in order to earn rewards of some kind. 

Picture earning a merit badge except usually much harder and/or more time consuming.  The harder the challenge the larger the reward. A one-star challenge would earn something fairly cheap while a five-star challenge would have a more substantial payout.

Examples?  Sure.  Back when he was five he wanted Minecraft because the older kids at school were playing it.  In order to earn that one he had to be able to ride his bike well enough to circumnavigate the church twice without stopping – this involved transitioning from his usual comfort zone of freshly paved roads and cul-du-sacs to dealing with hills, grass, mole-holes, sand, and gravel. Thusly, Minecraft poofed into existence on the Xbox.  Other challenges have included solo-riding a fairly intense rollercoaster, earning various colored belts in karate, sinking 50 free-throws in a single basketball practice session,  and running a mile fast enough to earn the Presidential certification at school.

Get it? Got it.  Good.

One day this past fall he asked if he could get some hamsters for Christmas.  I groaned a little and struggled to come up with a way of saying “Pfft. Nope.” that resulted in no follow-up questions or begging. I was moderately against it just because I figured it would be a hassle. The wife immediately started publishing a highly pejorative and unnecessarily foul-mouthed Anti-Hamster newsletter which she then distributed to the neighbors while getting them all to sign a “NIMBY” petition against any future rodent ownership by my son.  She was just about to take out a full-page ad in the local paper railing against quote plague-ridden stink-bags unquote when I said “Look, let’s just make this a challenge – if he earns them he earns them.”  She tentatively agreed.

Since he hadn’t touched his guitar in years I gave him the challenge of completing three Rocksmith 2014 songs of his choosing at a 90% or higher level.  Once he learned them to that level of goodness he would then have to play them all in one night (a mini concert for me and the wife) while hitting 90% on all of them.

Up until that point the only thing he had experience with on that game were two practice arcade games.  “String Skip Saloon” teaches you to hit different strings (no fretting) in order to shoot banditos coming to wreck up your bar, and “Ducks Redux” is a game where you play the right notes order to shoot electronic ducks.  But, like I said, that was a couple of years ago. I told him not to jump into the songs right away.  Create a new account and start from scratch.

(To be continued...)

A Really Good Book

So…  Nice to see you again…  You’ve aged well.

My plan for this blog was to slap a big ol’ ABANDON IN PLACE notification on it and just walk away.  Which I did.  Later, my son, then nine years old, started reading it.  I can’t remember the exact circumstances of “how” of “why”, but I seem to remember showing him a few things like maybe his old drawings from when he was two or three. He says he thinks he started reading it after telling him about how he used to play with his Noah’s Ark playset when he was a toddler.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter. 

He liked to go to the site occasionally and read (or re-read) about himself as a baby and about him growing up through the years.  He shared the articles with his classmates and with his teachers and they all got a good laugh.  Makes me smile to think about that.

After a while he asked if I could start writing again.  I said “Maybe… I don’t know.  There’s a lot of other things I’d rather be doing.”  He understood but he would still occasionally ask if I was going to ever write any more articles. My response was always semi-positive but non-committal.  The maybe-est maybe I could muster without implying “no” (because I just didn’t know) or giving false hope (because I just didn’t know).

So nearly three years of maybe-driven non-writing pass.

The night before Christmas 2019 my son hands me a gift to open.  It is large and heavy.  Hmmm. Clearly a hardcover book.  I open the wrappings and see the pic there on the left.

He had somehow found out that you could turn someone’s blog into an actual book.  It is over 400 pages long and covers the period from August 2007 through December 2012, which is why it says “The 36th Lock Volume 1” on the cover.  The binding is solid, the pages are glossy, and the print quality is superb.  It is really amazing to feel “time” made solid as I riffle back and forth through the pages.

But that’s not the best part.  Not by a longshot.

The best part is the Dedication:

The signatures are those of his classmates and of his current teacher.

Feels, little dude.  Feels.

It is 12:03PM Sunday, January 26th, the Year of Our Lord 2020.  It is 49 degrees and sunny.  I am listening to my wife talk with the 11-year-old as they sit together on the sofa downstairs. He coughs occasionally (some sort of bug going around at his school, we guess). The low rumble of a hamster wheel is just audible from a room off to my left. And I am writing.

This is awesome.

Are... Are You Breaking Up With Me?

Still haven't finished Paleo post, so I figured I'd have Siri ghost-write something for me to put up today. All I did was stick with certain patterns (1,2,3,1,2,3 or 1,3,1,3, etc) using the auto-fill feature on my phone to generate the first paragraph. I then ran that paragraph through Google Translate going from English to whatever then back each time. (Yep, it's all been done before but it is Groundhog Day after all!)

What starts out as disjointed, semi-amusing gibberish somehow morphs into a dark, sordid confession of betrayal and hopelessness. Umm… Enjoy!

Original Siri-Generated Text
I guess that's what the kids are talking bout.  The best thing to be is the best of your friends. You can play the game but I don't know what it to do. You are the one I love and I am so far off the way it was made. The wife of four and four are also the one who has no interest at any other time. I guess I should be a good one to be a nice person. You are my best and best part about this game I have no idea how much you will try it.

Then English to Korean and back to English:
I think it's a bout for kids. The best thing is the best of friends. You can play but I do not know what to do. You are the one I love, and I am far from the way it is made. Four and four wives are not interested in other times. I must be a good person and be a good person. You are my best and best part of this game. I do not know how to try.

Then English to Arabic and back to English:
 I think it's a fit for children. The best thing is the best of friends. I can play but I do not know what to do. I'm the one I love, and I am far from the way it is done. Four and four wives is not interested in other times. I must be a good person and a good person. You are the dearest and the best part of this game. I do not know how to try.

Then English to Japanese and back to English:
I think it is a fit for children. The best is the best friend. I can play but I do not know what to do. I am a person I love, and I am far from the way it is done. Four and four wives are not interested in other times. I must be a good person and a nice person. You are the most important part of this game. I do not know how to try it.

Then English to Latin and back to English:
I think it suitable for children. Best friend. But I do not know what to do I can not deal with it. I am that I am far from the only way. Do not ask, which are four, and the four other wives. And the good man must be nice. You are the most important part of the game. I do not know how to try.

And finally from English to Hebrew and back to English:
I think it's appropriate for children. best friend. But I do not know what to do I can not handle it. I am that I am far from the only way. Do not ask, they are four, and four other women. And the good man must be nice. You are the most important part of the game. I do not know how to try.

Well, friends, I... I guess that’s that.  I just hope that Siri and I can work out some sort of joint custody thing…

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...