LaurenandLloyd.com

where our wasted time becomes your wasted time

Gadget

Lloyd’s experiment

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Well, it turns out that I’m not the only one with mad scientist tendencies around here.  I stayed up late reading Saturday night and forgot to drink a cup of coffee before church.  As a result, I was really sleepy during the service.  (I felt like Brad must feel all the time.)  We went for our usual after-church grocery shopping trip, and Lloyd had an ‘a-ha’ moment in the car.

Lloyd: What if….
Lauren: What?
Lloyd: I can’t tell you.  I have to show you.
Lauren: You know I hate that. Tell me now!
Lloyd:

We got home, unpacked the groceries, and I saw that Lloyd was going to make me a cup of coffee! If you knew how inept he was in the kitchen you’d appreciate this gesture. He got the coffee maker out, scooped in some coffee, then cracked open a Pepsi.

That ain’t right.

WHAT!?!?  After I freaked about about the possibility of sugar burning in the reservoir, I calmed down. (After all, that’d be a good reason to buy a new coffee maker, right?) He promised to rinse it out when he was done, so the experiment proceeded. You know the weird part? It was good. It smelled terrible – it reminded me of the video game room in the 7-11 store from my childhood – but it tasted sweet, sweet, sweet and guuuuuuuuuud.

Lloyd Sommerer. Coffee genius.

YOU DO NOT NEED THAT.

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First of all: Happy Belated Birthday to my nephew Jack!  September is just chock-full of birthdays, and we have terrible memories!

*sigh*  Lloyd has a problem.  Can someone please tell him that even if something is dirt cheap, if you don’t need it it is not a bargain.  We went to another surplus auction and I walked around with him at the beginning to look at the stuff.  We stopped at these two giant machines with rollers.

Lloyd: Hey! We had these at Metromail! (a college job where they packed junk mail) They’re for bundling things.  You put something in here and it automatically wraps it in strapping tape.
Lauren: I’m hungry.
Lloyd: I wonder if they work?
Lauren: I’m bored.
Lloyd: These are cool!
Lauren: I’m leaving.

I came back from shopping a couple of hours later to see this.

Two auction buddies.
Naturally I assumed that Lloyd was helping this guy learn how to use the guy’s new bundling machine. That Lloyd – so helpful. Then he turned around, saw me, and grinned a ‘you’re gonna kill me’ grin.

Lloyd: They were just two-fifty!
Lauren: I’m leaving.

Does anyone need Lloyd bundled and shipped to their house? I can do it automatically.

You’d think I’d learn

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First of all, Happy Birthday to my Dad!!!!!!

“Buy cheap, regret later.”  Every. single. time.  I wanted to buy a small voice recorder so I could more easily do observations of the children at school.  Usually I jot stuff down and then re-write it later, but I really, really hate writing by hand.  Especially twice.  So I looked online for a cheap, small voice recorder.  Overstock.com had one for the sweet price of $20!  Yippee!!!   Yeah, no.

Is that silver? No, it’s plastic.

Sure, it’s small, but it’s not as small as I thought it would be.  I really wanted something that looked like a necklace pendant so it would always be close at hand neck. This thing is too big for that, plus it’s an MP3 player, which I absolutely don’t need, plus you have to push a long combination of buttons to actually record anything.  I need something tiny that can stay on all the time, has a rechargable battery, and one button for record/don’t record. Oh, and costs twenty bucks.

(I went looking on the spy sites, and they have awesome things for heaps of cash.  One of Lloyd’s classmates and his wife work for insurance companies to spy on people committing insurance fraud.  That should SO be my job!!  I have a very strong sense of vengence justice.)

Wordle.net

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Brad and Lauren found this website sometime while I was away during the Summer. It’s cool and we messed with it for a while and then sort of put it aside. I remembered it when I was putting together a list of teacher websites for an hour long presentation I was giving during our in-service meetings before school. I included it at the end as the only item under a Just For Fun category. I think half of the teachers thought it made the whole hour worthwhile. Our Art teacher used it and our theme verse for the basis of our main bulletin board. An English teacher used it as part of a poetry assignment.

Here’s the last 50 posts from LloydAndLauren.com:

Will Lauren start writing in the first person?

Here’s Ron Paul’s wikipedia entry:

I’m gonna miss this guy.

PVC & me

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I’ve been trying to line-dry more laundry lately.  Yeah, for the environment and all, blah blah blah, but mostly because someone said your dryer is the second biggest energy-sucker in your house, and it’s cheaper to line dry.  Cha-ching!  You may recall this blurry post from the past that showed the old line-drying system?  Well, I’ve amped it up.  For reasons that are not relevant to this post, I happen to have a lot of PVC pipe and connectors hanging around in the basement.   I hung one piece from the ceiling, and in addition to all the other hacked pieces, can now get a whole load hung up and crispy.

Just waiting for spiders to drop.

But wait! There’s more!  With the addition of cinder blocks, I can dry sheets!

I have got to get a hobby.

No, I did not drag it on the filthy ground.

Feel free to mock me, you fabric-softener junkies.  I mean, Brad.

Oh, La La.

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TMI coming up ahead, people, so if you’re easily grossed out, just stop here.

I normally have a very rigid get-ready routine in the morning.  Everything is in the same order:  Shower, dry, deodorant, face lotion, body lotion, etc.  But there have been occasions where I forget something.   It’s not such a big deal to forget the lotion, but it is rather inconvenient to forget deodorant.  In fact, the only three times I can remember forgetting are each before some big event – a conference, a meeting, and my reunion. (Yes, my reunion, dnag it!) I’ve often wished that there were some little single-use thing you could keep in your purse. Not a big travel-size one, but something tiny.

Well, the internet came through for me here.  These babies are only 35 cents each, but the shipping will set you back a whopping $10.  I got a few of each, although this never seems to happen to Lloyd, and it wouldn’t matter if it did.

I test-pitted one today, and it appears to be working well.  With La Fresh as my witness, I shall never be stinky again!

Little packets of heaven.