LaurenandLloyd.com

where our wasted time becomes your wasted time

Lloyd

Family Tree

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About a decade ago we went to the Nebraska Sommerer’s family reunion. We only knew two people there before hand, but we met a lot of nice people, including Jordan Larson‘s mom, Kae. It’s nice to be related to someone famous other than Lauren. We’ve since gone back to the reunion several times, and each time we meet new people, and afterwards, in true Sommerer form, my parents and I argue about how they are all related.

This led to several hand drawn family trees where we tried to sort it all out. Eventually that led me to look for something better than drawing boxes and lines out by hand. After off and on searching for a few years, I started putting some information into FamilyEcho. I picked it because it was free, online –so I could show it to people from anywhere–, and it allowed other people to work on a family tree together. Oh, and it looks nice too.

I worked on adding information to this family tree off and on for the last year and a half. Then I found out something that FamilyEcho didn’t do very well. It didn’t print large family trees nicely. I tried anyway, but I had to cut pages and tape them together, and the text was pretty small anyway.

I finally ended up buying Family Tree Maker. It’s a nice program, but you can’t work on it from different computers, or show people from your phone, or work together with others. But it does print nicely. So working in FamilyEcho, exporting and printing from Family Tree Maker seems like a win.

Except for one stupid problem: PDF documents can not be larger than 16.8 feet long (200 inches actually). Doesn’t that seem like an odd limitation?

“Who could possibly need to print something over 200 inches?”

–someone who works at Adobe

That limit probably turned out for the best, because I had to think a little more creatively about the family tree. If it wasn’t for that limitation, I would have had to print something that was about 5 feet tall and 24 feet wide, and that’s a little on the big side. Instead, I split the tree into 5 sections and moved them around until they pretty well fit on a 3 feet by 16.8 feet piece of paper. Office Depot wanted $195.00 to print it.

I eventually found some guys online who print blueprints. They wanted about $50 to print it, so I ordered 3 of them. They came pretty quickly, and Lauren helped me reinforce the edges and every so often in the middle with tape. I thought about laminating it, but I’m sure there are any number of errors on it. I’ll let everyone make corrections at the family reunion before I commit to something like that.

There are almost 600 people in the family tree right now. There are huge sections that are incomplete. My great grandparents and down should be pretty complete, but after that it gets pretty iffy. I didn’t do hardly any genealogy work on this. Other people did that. I just put it in a format that would print nicely (more or less).

The cats were very interested in their heritage.

I inconvenienced a deer

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Wednesday morning, right outside of Seward, by the parade of flags, I noticed a deer on the other side of the road headed away from me. I let up on the gas and then noticed the other deer on the shoulder moving toward me. I did two things next, and I think one of them was wrong. I slammed on the brakes and slammed on the horn both at the same time.

The second deer had time to get to my lane and then spent too much time wondering what I was honking about.

I hit the deer.

But not too hard.

I pulled off the road to check out the damage. I’d seen lots of cars that had hit deer and wasn’t looking forward to seeing the front of the car. But it was surprisingly mild.

I spent a lot of the rest of the drive in to Lincoln trying to put those 1 or 2 seconds in some sort of order in my mind. I think I was going about 50 mph when I saw the first dear. I think I had my foot off the gas for maybe half a second before I hit the brakes and maybe a half second of braking before I hit the deer at maybe 35-40 mph. It could have been slower. I don’t think I could have been going much faster with that little damage.

The deer didn’t go over the car or up on the windshield or anything. There was no blood. The deer walked away. I think it gave me a dirty look for honking.

Rock in a Box

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We still occasionally find odd little treasures in the boxes of Marxhausen donation. A box that mostly had old pipe organ pipes might also contain a little metal sculpture. A box of mosaic tiles could also have a little bit of poetry.

A matchbox turned up last week. I noticed that it had a little scrap of paper in it, so I put it off to the side. I wish I would have seen it earlier. This would have made a good Halloween post.

The Rock from the Rock in a Box is either long gone, or waiting to turn up in some other unsuspecting place, but the parable inside the box remains. You can read it for yourself below.

Okay, maybe that picture is a bit too small. Honestly, the paper is ridiculously tiny. See that quarter for scale? The text on the paper is a forth the size of “In God We trust”. Grab a quarter and see how small that is. Where do you have something like this printed in 1970?

Lauren made me fish tacos

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Well, the way it actually went down was that sometime during the early afternoon hours, Lauren remembered that there was really only enough left over Squartyblin (not, and here I am just assuming, it’s real name) for one person. Lauren had made the Squartyblin a couple of nights before. She said it was a new thing that the interwebs were raving about. It was very, very good.

So good, in fact that even though I had completely misheard her when she said, “Put the left over Squartyblin in the refrigerator so Wally doesn’t mess with it”, and thought she said, “Put the left over Squartyblin in the oven so Wally doesn’t mess with it”, we still ate it the next day. It had only been sitting in the oven for about 10 hours. Anyway, we’re in the middle of a pandemic, and you can’t waste food in a pandemic. Anyway, did I mention that it was very, very good?

Well, Lauren realized sooner than I did that there would only be enough left overs on day three of the Squartyblin for one of us. So she preemptively texted me and suggested that “we” could have fish tacos if I would pickup just a couple of items from the store on my way home from our volleyball team winning their first round game in the State Volleyball Tournament –Go Warriors.

Needless to say, I did not recall the Squartyblin situation and was ecstatic at the possibility of fish tacos. I should probably point out here that, apart from the eponymous fish, I really didn’t know what went into fish tacos. But I do really like them. I first had them with Brad –thanks Brad– and later had them without brad and they were not as good (also, they were in a bar in Nebraska), and the third time I had them with Brad again and they were good. Finally I discovered that you can have them without Brad –sorry Brad– and they could still be good. Anyway, I was excited.

I got home with the fish taco supplies, and chopped up enough for two people. Then Lauren said that she wasn’t having fish tacos, and I knew I had been played. The fish tacos were very, very good. But we might not ever have Squartyblin ever again.

Clean at last

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Well, for years now, Lauren has been coming home and saying that, “Our house smells like an old house.” Personally, I don’t smell it, but I have a pretty poor sense of smell. A poor sense of smell comes in handy when you teach middle school, but isn’t much use in diagnosing OHS.

Now, there are only so many years of hearing Lauren express a desire for something that I can take before I feel that it is my duty to do something about it. And so, about 2 months ago, I began to research air purifiers intensely.

The research took about a month, and the conclusion I came to was that the amount of money that it would cost to buy an air purifier that would have even a remote chance of doing anywhere near the job that Lauren wanted was way out of her price range. Not so much out of her price range in the, “I can’t afford that” sense. More out of her price range in the, “No way I’m going to pay that much” sense.

But I also learned that basically all we needed was a ordinary pre-filter to catch the dust and cat hair, a HEPA filter to catch basically anything down to your medium size bacteria and an activated charcoal filter to catch any remaining smelly molecules. Okay, the real reason for the activated charcoal filter is to make people say, “Dang, Lloyd, that thing has three filters.” I decided that we could do without any negatively charged ions fields or ultraviolet light nonsense.

The basic design was going to be 2 inch prefilter -> boxfan -> 6 inch HEPA filter -> box fan -> 4 inch charcoal filter. Naturally, the filters and the box fans are 20 inches by 20 inches, which would give me a 20x20x20 cube of air purifying goodness.

So I ordered my charcoal filter and my custom made HEPA filter online and figured we could pick up the pre-filter anywhere. In fact, we picked it up a week or so ago at a thrift store. My charcoal filter had arrived after about 2 weeks, but I hadn’t seen the HEPA filter yet and we were going on a month of waiting.

Now, as cruel fate would have it, there were a couple of air purifiers at an auction I went to last weekend. They were nice, but they were going to be the last thing to sell and I couldn’t stay until the end. So I asked my auction buddy Matthew if he would bid on them for me. I told Matthew to bid up to $250 and I would like to get at least one air purifier and one of the replacement filters. Matthew called me three hours later and said I got 2 of them for $50.

With a little help from Sam, I got them home and in place without Lauren seeing them. I present you, as I presented Lauren, with the RxAir 3000 Air Purifier:

“Rx3000 is used in over 400 hospitals and is FDA-cleared as a Class II Medical Device. Priced at less than $5,000 per unit to service a 1,500 – 3,000 sq. ft. area, Rx3000 is very cost effective… The Rx3000 combines powerful germicidal ultraviolet (UV) light with a patented 5-stage HEPA filtration proven in independent EPA- and FDA-certified laboratory testing to destroy on first pass over 99.97% of airborne viruses, bacteria and other contaminants.  

Needless to say, Lauren was absolutely thrilled –once she learned that they were only $25 each. I believe that in less than a month, our house will go from smelling like an old house to smelling like a hospital.

Oh, and my 6 inch HEPA filter arrived today. Does anyone need a HEPA filter?

Dance from the Past

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Beth and Tim came over yesterday. Beth dropped off a present for Lauren earlier in the day and stopped by to see it in action. But that’s a story for another time.

While the girls were trying it out, it was making a sound like this: tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick. Tim and I started dancing to the driving techno beat.

That reminded me of the last time I saw Tim dancing to a driving techno beat. So I felt like I had to share.

Unfortunately, he isn’t dancing to Russell Mosemann’s driving techno beat anymore. I couldn’t get Russ’ tunes to play automatically, so I had to punt. But if you can still listen to it.

Note: well, it looks like the audio doesn’t autoplay in all browsers. If you are using Safari or Firefox, you’ll probably have to click play. Sorry for the inconvenience.