Anyway, a few years ago he bought the first installment, and a few months ago on Woot they had another set. Quite independently, Brad purchased the set and I bought 10 extra bugs.

I really don’t know how to describe these things. Just a take a look…

I don’t know what has come over me, but I have been craving dessert at the end of a meal. I’ve never been a big fan of desserts, but lately when I’m done eating supper my stomach screams, “CAKE! Get some cake in here or we will kill you from the inside!” (I think it’s in cahoots with my intestines.)

I’ve tried eating a Starburst or two, but that just isn’t cutting it. I needed something chocolate-y, and aside from a slice of chocolate cake, chocolate pie is pretty great.

I tried making up a thing of chocolate pudding a couple of weeks ago and dolling it out into those wonderful little graham cracker crusts – one each night – but after three days the pudding in the bowl got a little gross.

Tupperware to the rescue!

I measured the bag of pudding mix, then divided by six. Then I asked Lloyd to check my math, so we would have less fist-shaking around here.

Hey! 30 grams is the same as 30ml, and there is a handy little line inside these cups. Awesome. I divided the bag amongst the cups, then struggled to put the lids on.

So, mix up one of these with a half cup of milk and put it in the fridge. In five minutes, I am ready for fresh chocolate pie!

So that’s that. I’m good for pie until next Monday.

In other news, I have lost one of those terrible-fitting lids. Have you seen it?

It’s not everyday you see a big ol’ package from Germany in your mailbox!

Gretchen sent along an adorable hedgehog cheese grater to join the Kitchen Gang! I even knew what ahead of time because it had to be declared on the front sticker. No more sneaking illegal items to me, Miss Gretchen. They’re onto us.

One beef I have with this unexpected bit of joy is that Gretchen is yet one more person I know with cool handwriting. I need to know more chicken-scratchers like me.

So, now I need to come up with some cool way to display all these animals. Maybe some sort of zoo on the wall?

I really wanted to get a wooden back. Lauren even thought it would be cool, so I looked for a place that I could order one. Unfortunately, the one place I found a nice walnut back didn’t ship to our zip-code (I know, what’s up with that?).

I did find a nice one for $16.38. It took all of three days to make it to our zip-code. It came with instructions and a screwdriver. It was easy to take the back off, and I looked around a bit.

But what is that stuff around the camera?

This calls for a closer look. Note: this is the first time that I have been glad that Lauren likes to have a microscope around the house.

There were lots of little hairs, and they were only present around the camera assembly. I wondered for a bit if they were Steve Jobs’ hairs that were put into iPhones so that he could one day be cloned, but decided they were not quite the right color.

So I got out a little brush and a tweezer and began the removal process.

Once the hair was removed, it was quite easy to put the new back on.

Tomorrow I’ll be convincing 7th graders that I’m testing a prototype for the new iPhone5 for Apple.

I lucked out on an endcap, though. This $30 popsicle maker was on sale for $10! I wasn’t sure if I should trust it – I once had an ice cream maker that was based on the same principle: freeze the entire base and then do your frozen confectionery thang.

This thing, though, this thing is golden!

Freeze the base, pour in your juice, wait ten minutes or so, and with the most satisfying ‘pop’ – out comes a beautiful popsicle.

Delirious Boy seemed to appreciate it, though he doesn’t smile anymore.

I was so sad it was after 7 p.m. when I made it, because I really want to try one.

….. maybe for breakfast.

These were 66.7% off, so I had to buy them.

There’s another part that’s not pictures. It plugs into an outlet and you plug whatever you want into the outlet. Then the switch turns it on and off from (and here I’m just guessing) up to 5 miles away. I’m going to hook one up to a flaky piece of equipment at school that needs to be reset about twice a week. When it gets flaky you just need to send it to time-out for a bit, but if you don’t have that much time, you can also turn the power off and turn it back on. The problem is that it’s not exactly in an easily accessible location.

But I can put the switch anywhere…

Lloyd: “See, if I can just get the protoromulator to spegork, then it will vortex at a greater speed.”

Lauren: “That’s awesome. Could you get me a soda?”

Lloyd (getting the soda): “Sure. All I need is to speborterate the hypergallum and – here’s your pop – then I can troom the glots.”

Lauren: “Chips?”

Anyway, part of this project with the albumin involves soldering some stuff together. We hit all the thrift stores, Harbor Freights and Radio Shacks in Lincoln on Saturday – looking for wire, switches and dials, but we really, really should have picked up more Band-Aids.

Soldering guns are hot.

Then, for some reason earlier this week I wanted to start messing with it. I knew I would need some more junk.

Some searching on the internet led me to believe that what I wanted were the things that fell out of boxes at the factory, were found under big machines and returned by other people. I figured that if I bought in bulk, I wouldn’t have to worry so much about buying the right thing. It turns out that someone sells just what I needed (actually, a lot of people like messing with this stuff, so it’s pretty easy to buy).

Anyway, a little explanation: the Arduino is that blue thing in the top picture with the USB cable coming out of it. It’s a microcontroler, a little computer that is good at interacting with the rest of the world. You hook it up to stuff and it either does things, or sends data to something else. I know that’s not a great explanation. Here are some examples: a touchpad, a display board, a laser controlled wireless automatic cat food dispenser.

I’ve got an idea that I want to try with this, but I’m not ready to share it yet.

I was hooked. Our footboard is practically screaming for a homemade version of this! I ‘built’ it several times mentally, and on Saturday I was ready to make it for real.

I went down to the basement and started to look for the pieces of wood needed to make this contraption: two narrow strips 20 inches long and a piece of thin plywood approximately 20 inches by 20 inches. I’d need to fashion a hook of some sort, and I’d need to get out the miter saw….

and look for some screws that were all the same size…..

I’d probably need sandpaper, too…..

and, um…..

I forgot to put on shoes and my feet were getting chilly……

Forget it. I grabbed a box instead.

Now, this was the point where I called Lloyd upstairs and told him what I was doing because I wanted some advice. He surprised me by not rolling his eyes and calling me crazy, but actually coming up with some ideas for a future, more-permanent installation. I told him to slow down – this was just a prototype. We decided on a ‘tunnel’ for a small fan instead of just a big hole for a bigger fan.

A little fan goes just under the tunnel. I made some channels inside to help direct the air.

The sheet goes over it, but here’s what it looks like from the bed side:

It’s a good thing it was so hot on Saturday because I tested it out for a bit. The air output is meager at best. I liked having air blow on my feet, but I’m pretty sure the BedFan probably has a better breeze.

Lloyd insists that his design will be better, but I’ve already told him, “I make prototypes once. On to the next thing!”

I was looking for some stuff at school and came across the last bit of the stripey contact paper that I love so very much. I initially drooled over it at Target in 2007, put it up in my entryway in 2008, and shortly thereafter put some up at school.

Well, now it’s on my laptop making it all new-looking and incredibly snazzy. Seriously, I can’t stop petting it – which is a little disconcerting. I am saddened that no photograph does this striped wonder justice. Trust me, it’s simply heavenly.

I’m of course excited because it’s so pretty, but mostly because I’ve looked at laptop stickers before and thought they were cool, but wasteful. This way I’ve used up something that needed using, not making new trash! Oh, and it was free!! (Something you purchased 3 1/2 years ago counts as ‘free’ now.)

Love,
Lauren the Stripe-Loving Nut Job.

One of the signs of Spring is the scratch-scratch-scratching of Lloyd eating a can of frozen fruit cocktail. It’s been his treat of choice since …… forever, and I think it’s pretty funny because the energy he exerts scraping outweighs the calories in the fruit. It’s like a diet snack.

Well, no more.

Lauren: “Hey, is there another can?”

Lloyd: warily “Yes.”

Lauren: over her shoulder running to the basement “Cool. I gotta go get something.”

I actually wound up smashing a fair amount of the fruit, but the shaved fruit was pronounced delicious and effort-free by Lloyd.

Apparently there is a way to fold a single sheet of paper into a mini-notebook, and you can do it by just using regular paper, but this PocketMod program allows you to customize your notebook by dragging-and-dropping lists, games, grids, calendars or whatever onto your pages. It’s nutty! (You can even include the directions for how to fold and cut, which I did.)

I may just have to say ‘goodbye’ to the little pieces of card stock I keep in my back pocket. This is awfully, awfully cool.

I was angry at his lack of rule following, so I bought the thing out of spite. Good-bye, forty dollars that I might have spent on something else.

I’m not sure how I feel about the chip. It works well – you take a picture and BAM! It’s on your computer. The downside is that it uses the internet to get it there. I don’t have mine programmed to go to any social/photo websites, but it still travels out to somewhere before it gets to my computer.

That is not entirely great.

The installation directions said ‘take a photo of yourself and it will appear on the screen!’ Well, the first picture I took of myself was most unflattering, and now it’s out there in cyber-space. Plus, I tend to take dozens of pictures of nothing around this place, and that’s just wasting cyberspace, isn’t it?

I just don’t know. Keep the chip or try and sell it on eBay? (Pause for deep belly laughter, since that has gone so well before.)

Side note: I still use the cracked camera for school photos, and after I was done being in the classroom I was downstairs loading photos to our website. (I take the xd card out and put it in the laptop.) I also happened to be eating the day’s snack – Cheez Its. An xd card is very similar in size to a Cheez It. Do you know what is possible to do with an xd card if you’re not paying attention?

(I stopped before it passed my lips.)

Many things were donated items that had to be weeded through, trash needed to be trashed, and some tables and desks were going to switch places. We bought Pepsi to provide strength!

I moved some desks around (the ones I’m standing on for the picture) and when they were away from the wall I saw something spooky.

Ladies and gentlmen, I would like to offer my first installment of a series I like to call: Is It A Dead Spider?

Is it?

What did you guess?
If you guessed “Not a spider, but a rolled-up twist tie”, then you win!

You’ll be able to continue playing this game in subsequent posts. It’s important to remember the spider bit for the next part of this long – and yet kind of pointless – story.

Lloyd was up on a ladder with his head in the ceiling so he could run some cable across the room. He called to me, “Hey, come up here. I want you to see something.”

“Is it a dead spider?” I asked.

He assured me that it wasn’t. I climbed the ladder and he said, “Look on top of the server.” I did and saw:

Lauren: It’s the frog that Beth gave you.
Lloyd: Not that. Look closer.
Lauren: (looking with trepidation) There is a spider up here, isn’t there?
Lloyd: No. Oh, maybe you’re not high enough. Go up a step.

I did and saw:

Hey! It’s Lloyd’s pocketknife that he lost months ago! It’s the CyberLloyd 2000, as we like to call it – with all kinds of tools on it for fixing computers. He was missing it for weeks and we finally just ordered a new one. Now he has two, isn’t that sweet?

And wasn’t this a long, drawn-out way to tell you, ‘Lloyd found his pocketknife on top of the server’?

Many weeks ago I spilled some pop while eating, and since I eat in front of the computer, some splashed on the keyboard. (The last time that happened we had an ancient computer and Lloyd just frowned at me, disconnected the keyboard, and told me to wash it off in the bathtub. I was aghast, but apparently it was fine once it dried. Either that or he just replaced it after I’d learned my lesson.)

Well, you can’t wash off a wireless keyboard. I’ve just lived with a sticky ’2′ and ‘Q’ for a while now, and it hasn’t been such a problem. Tonight, though, I thought I’d try to clean it. (Warning: this is very, very boring.)

I first watched this video, which is good, but shows the guy removing them from the bottom, since his is an iMac laptop. I learned (by kinda breaking my ’2′ key a little) that Mac wireless keys need to be removed from the top. Here are some photos:

First I tried a bamboo skewer, since that was the video showed. This is a re-enactment, though, since the first time I tried from the bottom, and I snapped apart an important little piece inside. It was fixable, though. (This is when Lloyd figured out that the key needed to be popped off from the top. He didn’t know what I was doing until I said, “Oops”, then he sighed heavily and came to my rescue.)

Instead, use a nail file. You can get under the key, lift it, then turn it until it pops off. Go slow.

Here’s what the underside of the key looks like. The bottom of the key is toward the left. The pieces on the right are what ‘pop’ when you twist the nail file, and the pieces on the left are hinged onto little pegs on the bottom of the mechanism under the key. It lifts right off.

Man, that is a weird close-up of my fingerprints.

I cleaned the pop residue off with alcohol on a cotton swab, and put it back on. (I was able to snap back together the part I broke. It’s like a little folding chair inside, and my ‘axle’ had popped apart.) Anyway, lift the top (my keyboard is upside-down) of the folding-chair thing so you can slip the bottom hinge on, then press down on the key.

Done and done.  They work much better, but I realized a bit ago THAT I ALSO NEED TO CLEAN UNDER THE CAPS LOCK KEY.

SORRY FOR THE BORING POST.

This contraption was there on Saturday, and I’ll just let you take a look at the photos and you see if you know what it is. I’ll post our incorrect guess, then our correct guess, then proof of the correctness. Good luck!

Ok, I changed my mind. The rules to Bossy Lauren’s Game now go: Make your guess in the comments, then come back and click here to see what it is. Or, do what you want – apparently I can’t control you, dang it.

Needless to say, there was much gushing.

As I’ve said before, the love of gadgets runs strong in my family, but I’m pleased to note that we don’t go super ga-ga over useless stuff, like a……. (insert useless gadget item here). No, no – functionality is key.*

My sister gave me a set of amazing key-style gadgets. The set of three had a bottle opener, a flat-head screwdriver, and – my personal Holy Grail of keychain gadgets – a philips-head screwdriver!!!! Seriously, I have wandered through many a hardware store trying to figure out how to hack something like this, because I’m always needing one. (Case in point: When I accosted that lady in TJMaxx, I used it to tighten the tuning pegs on her ukulele.)

I’ve decided to keep the other screwdriver and opener in my truck instead of my keyring, because my gadget-to-actual-keys ratio is getting dangerously high (1:1)

*Heh. I just got it. ‘Key’. My subconscious cracks me up.

Update for Brad:
Yes, there’s a USB drive. It’s one of those cute foldable things, but I don’t trust it very much. On some reviews it said that it ruined information. I don’t know if it’s worth keeping – it might be a killer.

How hard could it be?

Draw, draw. Fold, fold.

The first one was a disaster, but the second one was better.

I dug out our scanner from under the guest bed, plugged it in, opened it up to try out my slide tent and saw…..

Um. I have a slide scanner.

Good grief.

By the way, I tested my homemade doo-dad. It did not work. I really should start reading that pesky text.

Last night, though, I interrupted him for a moment to just look at it – so he could percolate on what might be the trouble and maybe work on it next week. He did some voodoo and said, “It’s a hardware problem, not a software problem. It might be time for a new computer.”

Now ordinarily I’d enjoy spending money on a gadget, but I do not enjoy spending money to replace a gadget that I already have just because it’s broken. Plus, it would take forever to get, because he’d have to order it from his technical people so he could get a great deal.

Then he said, “Wait,” and stuck it in the freezer – right next to my t.v. dinner and freezer-burnt ice cream.

Huh. It was fine. Apparently it has been overheating. I did a little googling and someone suggested the fan might be broken or gunky. Lloyd was still busy doing website stuff, so I opened it up to check.

Let me repeat that: I opened it up.

That was the scariest thing I’ve ever done. I took a piano apart once, but that was a crummy thrift store one and I didn’t care if it ever worked again when it was back together. This was my baby – my sweet little laptop. What if I killed it?

Well, God bless Dale Keller. He has a website with extremely detailed instructions and diagrams for how to take apart an Acer Apire One. Diagrams, people!!

I started way too late – 10:30 p.m. – and was tired and shaky while working, but luckily Lloyd was right there for when I had questions about pulling cable connectors and such.

Who are we kidding? I was essentially Lloyd’s hands for this project, much like I am when he is hungry. Hey….that’s probably why his nickname for me is ‘Hands’ – as in “Hands, make me a sandwich”.

Anyway, yes, the fan was super gunky, and there was a wad of lint underneath it that was preventing it from spinning and cooling the innards. I cleaned it out, and viola’! It works!!

Again, I love you, Dale Keller. You the man.