Kids and I built a giant lego tower this week. From the table it stands 68 inches tall and comes just a millimeter from touching the ceiling. From the ground it stands 96 inches. It includes a working motorized windmill (cause you see those on real skyscrapers all the time) and an observation deck. This one should make quite a mess when it gets knocked down.
Kids and I did some geocaching yesterday. Failed at our first one but it’s at a park we visit often so we’ll have plenty of opportunities to figure that one out later. Did a bunch of hiking around in the woods on one and came across a homeless man sleeping. Tiptoed around him and continued on.
In picture #1 you’ll see that I left a pink cell phone with stickers all over it. Picture #2 shows a cool find I got from that same cache – a Geocaching sticker which I placed on my car. And picture #3 is one of the more interesting “hides” I’ve ever seen. They spray painted a tin box (Sucrets? Altoids?) black and attached it to the side of a lamp post with magnets. It’s in a park in full view of the hundreds of people that must walk by there each day, yet no one ever notices it since it looks like it’s a part of the post. Payton spotted it immediately.
Today I cleaned my keyboard! It’s pretty goddamn gross in there. Three years of dust, hair, food, etc. Most of the keys had a pretty thick layer of dust around them which was visible without popping the keys out. So I took off every single key, polished them individually with Pledge and used Q-tips to clean out the base part of the keyboard. It’s all pretty now. AND I’m high as nuts from this Pledge smell.
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Reminds me of the Nate & Di episode where they were scrounging under the keys of their computer keyboard for pot.
Also reminds me of typing class in high school where I’d sit at a different keyboard each day and pop off keys and rearrange them. They’d last for weeks without anybody noticing. My friend Tim actually pulled off every single key on a keyboard and moved it one space to the right. I bet people flunked that class because of us. And I bet some people are still not as efficient at the keyboard as they could be if we hadn’t screwed up the keyboards in high school.
Fun fact: I was consistently THE fastest typer in the class yet I still got an F. Not a D, but an F. Hey, I wonder if maybe it was supposed to be a D but since I screwed up the keyboards, it came out as F instead.
So Spessa Inc. left my house about an hour ago for the all-day drive back home. The past week and 2 days has been just insane. But it sure is nice to be wandering around the house with no pants on again.
We didn’t do much yesterday during the day, the kids all just hung around the house all day. My kids went back to Colleen’s at 5pm but then Emily called a few hours later and asked if they could come back and spend the night since Spessa’s kids were there. Clohe and I drove to pick them up and stopped by Taco Bell to search for groundhogs. There was ONE out there so I snapped a couple of pictures that didn’t come out very good.
After the sun went down we began constructing UFOs again. We managed to launch 2 more of them successfully. They went in more or less the same direction as the ones the previous night until they disappeared over the trees. Apparently there was a small group of women in the cafe parking lot next door because they saw the first successful launch go right over their heads. It was still close enough to the ground for them to be able to tell what it was and they all seemed to have a really good laugh over it. I’d say the two successful ones easily went over a mile before we lost sight of them.
Most of our unsuccessful launches were scary. With one, it seemed to be going up okay so we let it go, only for it to go straight down into the neighbor’s patio. They keep their gate locked so there was no way to go in and get it. We were all panicked and watching it from outside the fence as it hovered all over their patio. Inside their window I could see the lady that lives there sitting at her kitchen table. If she would have happened to glance out the window she would have seen fire hovering around. Luckily it didn’t crash. It finally went up again on it’s own and it would have been a good launch but it got wrapped around that neighbor’s electric lines. The candles immediately went out and it hung there for the rest of the night.
Another time the launch was going well and it got wrapped around the power lines of the cafe. Only the candles didn’t go out. They kept burning and dropping bits of fire to the ground below. Eventually the straws started burning too but it finally all went out on it’s own. That bag is still stuck up there, right above their back door.
Another we attempted to launch from my patio area. It was going fine but then, as it approached the top of my apartment, the roof seemed to suck it away from us. I have a flat roof and we never did see where it went. We ran to the front of the house to see if it landed out on the street but we saw nothing. We waited around to see if my roof would burst into flames but that never happened.
For me, that was the end of UFOs for the night. But The Spessas did one last launch around 2am and it also got sucked onto the roof, never to be seen again. Also, around that time Spessa noticed some teenage girls toilet papering the trees of the house across the street. So we threw open the windows in the living room and yelled at them a bunch, scaring them away. Check out how unambitious they were – they TP’ed the smallest tree in their yard:
Between all the UFO launches, Taco Bell signs, crazy teenage anarchist girls, Target antics and other stuff I’m afraid to mention on a public forum, we also made a crazy amount of prank calls this week. I guess I can’t really say much about those either, but they were damn funny. The kids were up until about 2am too, talking and laughing in their room. Usually we yell at them to be quiet but last night we kept going in there and yelling at them to be louder. I ordered them to all scream on the count of 3. And Spessa went in there once when they all seemed to be asleep and yelled at them to all wake up and start talking to each other.
Now I’ve got the next two days completely free of all human contact. I’m going to be bored!
My girlfriend is cool. She wrote a review of Ozzfest that was published on a bazillion or so radio station websites.
Yesterday…did laundry with Spessa. Hung around the house all day. My kids left for Colleen’s at 6pm. Then the Spessas, me and their kids went to Pizza King for supper and karaoke night. Spessa won me a Crash Bandicoot plush from the crane machine. Took her only 3 tries to get it. Then we walked to Hasty Freeze for ice cream. Then launched UFOs.
Earlier in the day I went to Target and bought UFO making supplies. While there I noticed that my custom-made racy buttons were gone from the rack. I bought straws, needles and birthday candles. I also got 20 dry cleaning bags from Heath Laundry. I think we did a total of 6 launches after dark. Three of them went beautifully. The balloon went way up into the sky and seemed to go really far into town. It looked like an large orange dot in the sky. The last one we did we saw bits of fire falling from it near the end. During the 2nd successful flight we got in the car and chased it for about 6 blocks.
We’ll probably try and do some more tonight if the wind isn’t too bad. Maybe we’ll do them a little earler so more people will notice them. I’m going to try and read up on designs of these things some more today so maybe I’ll learn some cool tips that will make them last longer in the air. Here are a few good links for making your own UFOs:
http://www.overflite.com/scooter.html
http://www.kickthefog.com/ufo.htm
Oh yeah, about the unsuccessful flights…2 of them didn’t even make it off the ground. They were too heavy. Another would have gone great but the wind blew it into a power line where it stayed for several hours. Luckily the candles in it went out and it didn’t go up in flames. Our launch after that almost met the same fate, but the 4 foot tall bag actually went in between 2 power lines, just barely missing them both. Tonight is supposed to be windy too so we might have problems again. It’d be best if we could launch these from a more open area but I’m pretty sure this has got to be illegal to do. Here’s a couple of pictures…
Was at Walgreens this morning and noticed some handheld fans that had a strip of LEDs built into one of the blades to display messages. This normally wouldn’t be that big of a deal except that these things were only $3.99 each. So I bought one, resisting the urge to buy one for each of the kids too. I immediately put it to good use by making it display PLAish things.
I’m sure I’ll think of some kind of evil use for this thing. I was thinking of putting it in my back car window with a button on the dash to make it display messages to drivers behind me. I could cause all kinds of road rage with it! Or maybe it could just display messages from my living room window. Anyone have any ideas for it?
Cellular reception in the mountains of Idaho was a real bitch, but some antenna hax0ring fixed things right up. I’m back in Oregon now after 6 fun-filled days of Idaho.
Today I went to the post office to find a nice surprise – my Oregon license plates! After about 10 months of living here, I’m finally an official resident. Now people on the road won’t be able to yell, “Hey moron, go back to Illinois and learn how to drive!!!” anymore. They’ll have to stick to generic obscene hand gestures and stuff.
Not only did I get license plates in the mail, but I also got new checks for my checking account. I never bothered getting new ones since I only use checks to pay bills and rent and they never seem to care if I have an Illinois address on them. But a couple weeks ago they ran out so I had to order more and I put my new address on them. I’m feeling really Oregonianish today.
In sadder news, my bike was stolen a couple weeks ago. Right from my fenced in patio. I’m pretty sure kcochran did it since he let it slip that he’s been stalking around my house lately. I want it back, kcochran.
I’m now officially averaging one stolen bike per year. Last summer someone stole my bike from our deck. I didn’t really care too much about that one since I didn’t want to lug it to Oregon anyway. Plus I’d owned that one for 5 or 6 years. This one I’ve only owned for maybe 5 months. Luckily it was a very cheap bike so it’s not a huge loss. But it’s annoying that I have to DRIVE to the post office and everywhere else now.
And I can’t believe it got stolen from my patio when I never lock it up anywhere in public. I leave it sitting in front of the mall, at convenience stores, at Wendy’s, the bank, the post office, etc. I never lock it up. But the one place it finally gets stolen from is my fenced-in patio. At least they didn’t take off with the kids’ bikes. I’ve been padlocking the gate since that happened. Next time I’m going to buy a crappy old used bike from a thrift store instead of a clearance bike from Target. That is, unless kcocran decides to return it before I get around to buying a new one.
I’ve used Yahoo email for about 8 years now. And I’ve noticed that when I’m actually using their email a lot, I get tons of spam. Hundreds of messages per day. All addressed to brad_the_carter at yahoo, not to the few email addresses that I have forwarded or check via POP3.
But then when I stop using Yahoo and start using another email service, like I’ve done recently, suddenly I don’t get much spam in my Yahoo account anymore. Today I’ve gotten about 25. That’s quite a drop from the usual 200 – 400 per day. It all goes directly into the bulk folder. And it’s all addressed to my Yahoo address.
Kind of makes me wonder if Yahoo just sends everyone tons of bulk email, based on how much their account is used. Maybe to make it look like their bulk filters are really useful? I noticed this last year too, when I used Outlook for about a year instead of Yahoo.