LaurenandLloyd.com

where our wasted time becomes your wasted time

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Welcome! (Will the comments vanish?)

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(Note: I was talking to Brad tonight and we were saying that we didn’t know what we’d post tomorrow. We joked about just re-posting old stuff, so here it is again: The first post ever! Now the question is, will the old comments still be here?)

Cricket crack corn and I don't careIt seems like everybody else has such a cool website, we thought we’d throw in our two cents.  That’ll show that guy at http://www.bradaptation.com what’s what!  Heh heh…..

Top Ten Reasons We Decided to Have A Blog:

10. We wanted to be as cool as Brad.
9. It’s a reason to shop for a digital camera.
8. We are REALLY bad friends / son / daughter / brother / sister and hardly ever call anybody, so this will be a way to check in to see if we’re still alive.
7. Any chance to post pictures of my ‘prototypes’ will just enhance the world as we know it.
6. Did we mention we wanted to outdo Brad?  His website is so cool, I hate him.
5.  Our cats are really not getting enough airtime, and their agent is hounding us.
4. Because the domain name lloydandlauren.com wasn’t taken.
3. This should work out to be cheaper than Christmas cards.
2. You WANT to hear about the glamorous life of Lutheran schoolteachers in Nebraska.
1. The billboard in our yard documenting our life was causing our neighbors to complain. (Don’t believe what they say – floodlights canNOT cause automotive paint to peel.)

That’s all for now.

Surprise!

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Lilies! As always, Brad, they are a delightful shock when we see them in late summer. Thanks. 🙂

They are just so pretty.

Also a surprise? Since the virus debacle, our readership has plummeted. We now have about four readers, so I’m going to guess it’s Brad, Peggy, Kristi and me. (Lloyd never reads this.) So, say what you want, guys! We’re all alone in our own little club!

We have twice as many as yesterday - up from 2!

Terrible Memories – Fluoride

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No photo – I’m having some technical troubles.

So, we had to have flouride treatments at the dentist’s office when I was a kid. I don’t know why – I guess because that toothpaste I was slathering on daily wasn’t cutting it? Whatever.

The fluoride treatment the absolute worst part of the dental visit for many reasons. One reason was because of The Machine. The Machine was (and remember, this is from the faded memory of a kid) a hulking steampunk monstrosity that had hoses and tubes and grinding gears and such. It was kept in a back room of this old victorian house, where it was dark and full of fluoride-loving spiders. (I’m positive about that.) They strapped you into a restraining chair and asked the dreaded question, “What flavor?” Here’s where you had to decide what delicious flavor you didn’t want to love anymore. The choices were cherry, orange or grape, but they all tasted like slightly-sweet vomit. The doomed flavor was poured into a tray, hooked up to a bubbler hose, then put into your mouth. You had to bite down on the tray while The Machine bubbled grape vomit around your teeth for an interminable length of time. Then the Assistant pulled it out, making ropes of grape-spit string all over your face. Rinse, spit. Rinse, spit. Gag.

Then – HORRORS – you had to do the whole process for your BOTTOM teeth, so now the tray was upside down and leaked grape vomit into the bottom of your mouth.

I’m getting woozy recounting this story. I have to stop.

Prepare to be underwhelmed.

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It’s incredibly cold here now, and it reminded me that last winter I started a movie and never finished it. It has sat on my computer until tonight, when I drew up the last cartoons for it and just got it over with. “Good enough for who it’s for” and all that.

In reality, I had to just get it out there because it’s irrelevant now. It’s a gripping documentary about how cold I keep our house in winter, except now that the new windows are in, I am allowing degrees and degrees more heat to be BTU’d around here. (Like – two of them!) Also, now you know about the nose warmer.

Here is a list of things that are wrong with this movie:
1. It does not star Julia Roberts and Adrian Grenier, who are our preferred stand-ins.
2. Lloyd doesn’t like how he’s singing.
3. I don’t like how I’m singing.
4. I think Lloyd doesn’t like how I’m singing.
5. The drawings are terrible.
6. There are no transitions and the timing is off.
7. I have some typos because I forgot how the song went.
8. There is a LOT of white-out on those drawings, but not enough.

All that being said, here it is: Baby, It’s Cold Inside.

Nose warmer

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The house seems better with the new windows, but every so often one or the other of us is cold. Last Friday night I was in front of the t.v. swaddled in sweats, a wool sweater, a regular blanket and a down blanket, the heat was set at 70 – and I was still cold. Specifically, my nose was cold. Every inhalation was like my nose had turned into a tiny little freezer. It was a new sensation to me.

This is not new to Lloyd, however. Many, many years ago he complained that his nose would get cold when he typed on his computer, so I knit him a nose warmer.

“Lauren, I didn’t know you could knit,” I hear you ask. Well, the answer is, “Yes! I can knit!” I can knit nose warmers, and that is all. I know one kind of stitch, and I can make a very small something with that one stitch, and then I don’t know how to finish it and make it not fall apart. It was very useful for Barbie scarves as a child, though they unraveled quickly. (Once in college I finger-knit a scarf that went all the way around our tour bus. The bus thanked me, but I think it was just being polite.)

Oh. Back to the nose thing. Lloyd was cold last night and when I brought him the nose warmer he said, “I can’t believe you haven’t posted about this yet.”

I live to serve, as long as the heating bill is low.

You can see this nose warmer in a starring role in our video!

How to make coffee with a funnel

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That’s right – I’m shamelessly going for the Google search with that title.

I have a definite caffeine addiction, and it mostly rears its ugly head on the weekends. On weekdays I usually have had two or three cups of coffee by 7:30, and on weekends if I don’t wake up until 8 or 9, the headache has already set in.

I got this mug from a preschooler years ago. They know me so well.

I forgot to make a batch of cold brew coffee this past weekend (it’s an overnight process), and my old one-cup coffee maker met with a terrible end after I discovered it had been put away in the basement with coffee grounds inside. (Can you say ‘mold farm’?) Anyway, I went to my tried-and-true method of brewing coffee with a funnel.

Ready, set, shake!

It’s just folding a coffee filter, putting it in a coffee mug with some coffee grounds and pouring water over it. If you use a little funnel, it has an advantage over those one-cup-coffee gadgets that just sits on top of the cup and brews weak coffee. With the funnel, when you pour the water in, only so much water can actually go into the cup before it reaches some sort of equilibrium. The water gets stuck in the funnel, steeping until you lift the funnel out. A larger funnel will still work, but you get weaker coffee due to less steepage. (That is a word, spellchecker! Sheesh, live a little!)

See this very technical diagram, drawn on the back of my bank statement:

The funnel – almost as multitasky as a stool. (Get a hobby, spellchecker.)

Note: Someone is actually searching for this! To improve drainage, put a skewer or something between the filter and the funnel wall. Happy drinking!