What do I even have cats for if not for killing the spiders?
Hear that idiots? Kill the spiders. Don’t pat them or just stare at them.
Read the job description, dummies.
by Lauren 3 Comments
What do I even have cats for if not for killing the spiders?
Hear that idiots? Kill the spiders. Don’t pat them or just stare at them.
Read the job description, dummies.
by Lauren 2 Comments
Church was wonderful Sunday morning, and then we went over to Sam and Rachel’s for a delicious brunch. After that, it was time to go reinforce the fort!
Good old fort. It’s rather remarkable how well it’s holding up. We did some structural reinforcement, but for the most part we were just filling in holes. A well-booted team gathered a bunch of cattails from the stream and we wove them into part of the roof. This is a view from the inside:
We realized that it is really, really hard to work with dry, brittle sticks. If they were green, they’d be easier to weave. Plus, all this wood is really bug-eaten and crumbles easily. This is not the safest of structures.
Sam and Anna decided to climb a fallen tree nearby. I deeply regret that I didn’t get a photo from the other side. The lighting was all wrong for this. Brave climbing, though.
We were well-supplied with tools for this adventure. The Other Sommerers had a saw, two machetes and three sickles. Much hacking was done by the brave, and then some pirate play was had. Arrghhh!
Here’s a phone-quality quick video to show the grandeur of the place. We’re thinking of listing it on Zillow. “Open floor plan! Country setting! Well-ventilated!”
by Lauren 4 Comments
I forgot to say it earlier: Happy Easter!
I was very excited this week to learn that there would be a lunar eclipse this weekend. I thought Lloyd and I could go camping Friday night and catch it while we were there. The forecast was too cold to actually camp, so we did the next best thing: I made us drive to the lake at 5:30 Saturday morning to watch it.
We layered up for the cold, I packed up some equipment to make tea and coffee, we loaded the car and were off. On the way, the earth’s shadow was almost halfway across and we worried we might miss it, but we were fine.
We got to the lake around 6. I set up a quick campfire, poured some tea, and then we settled back to watch the moon in the freezing cold wind coming off the lake. Oh, and it was smokey. Really smokey. Lloyd cried from all the smoke.
It was still cool, though. The Blood Moon (when the moon goes full eclipse and looks red) was supposed to happen around 7. As the moon sank in the sky, it slowly disappeared more and more and was finally gone. The sky was getting so light, and we waited for the Blood Moon to appear… and waited…. 7:00 came and went and we waited…. and the sky kept getting lighter… and we waited….
Then we realized. We weren’t going to see it. The moon had set.
Dang it!!! We laughed pretty hard about it.
(It was supposed to be right there.)
by Lauren 2 Comments
The grass is green. Dang it.
by Lauren 3 Comments
I don’t dye Easter Eggs anymore. It’s a pity, because I actually enjoy it and there are all kinds of cool things to do: drip wax dots, er….. drip wax dots. Um, I think I just like dripping wax dots.
Anyway, I saw a thing about dying cracked eggs that looked fairly cool, and I had just enough energy to boil up three eggs and give it a go. I didn’t make dye, though, I used nature’s magenta stain: beet juice. You crack a hard-boiled egg and let it sit in your dye for a while mine was about ten minutes.
I had to eat four pickled beets to gain enough extra juice. Mmmmmm….. beets…… I also used a champagne flute so I could get by with my minimal juice. This method had pros and cons, all at the same time.
Dang it. No, wait: Awesome!
Let it sit then take off the shell. Here’s what it looks like when it’s peeled. For some reason I can’t get the camera to focus on it. Still cool, though.
With the second egg, I learned that dropping a hard-boiled egg into a champagne flute of beet juice results in a beet juice volcano that stains the refrigerator, counter, sink and shirt. Dang it. Not awesome.
by Lloyd 7 Comments
I should have posted this yesterday, so you could enjoy it, but I actually forgot about it until about 6:00 yesterday morning. Jonathon Swärdén wrote the JavaScript that replaces all of the images on a webpage with pictures of Nicholas Cage, Bill Murray, Vanilla Ice, Steven Sigal and kittens.
Our Executive Director texted me this morning:
We were talking about various Practical Jokes on the Nebraska Technology Coordinator’s email list yesterday and I posted the link to our website along with what our Executive Director said and got this reply back:
“Lloyd, what was on the webpage. We did not see it!!”
I went with:
“Hint: Nicholas Cage, Bill Murray, Steven Seagal, and Ice Tea haven’t gone to Lincoln Lutheran for years.”