LaurenandLloyd.com

where our wasted time becomes your wasted time

cdc

I’d be rich

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I was tooling around Lincoln yesterday gathering information on the things we’d need for the new CDC Playground. Don’t tell Lauren. She thinks I watch West Wing all day. One of the most pressing answers I needed was, “What does a ton of boulders look like?”

You buy landscaping boulders by the ton, but I didn’t have a good understanding of what that looked like. So I went to a landscaping company and asked how much boulder I could get for $190.00 (which looks like the standard price for a ton of granite boulders in Lincoln Nebraska).

He had a kid (which now means anyone under 30 years old) meet me at the boulder pile and said kid pointed to rocks, um, I mean boulders, and said how much they weighed. Turns out a basketball-sized boulder is about 100 lbs. So you’d get 20 of them for $190. But if you double the size, the volume is 8 times as large, so you’d only get 2-ish of those for $190.

Pricing for granite is also interesting. Granite boulders are $90 a ton in Denver (which makes sense, because that’s where they make boulders). It is $60 a ton in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. More expensive than granite (well, everything is here) is moss-covered boulders, which we had aplenty in Missouri.

In fact, we couldn’t give away rocks in Missouri. We had to (okay, I only remember doing this once) pick up rocks out of fields and put them in piles. Not to later sell them for $3.00 each. Just so they could be in a pile.

I think the rocks were happier in piles.

New Playground

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As you may have heard, we’re building a new Preschool. We’re at the stage now where they will soon begin dirt work on the playground, and, since Lauren is busy, I thought I would try my hand at playground design. We have hundreds of ideas for the new preschool, and Lauren and I went through and picked out the ones that we thought we could actually do and wanted to do.

The next day I drew them up and attached them to poster board with yarn. It was a lot of fun. It was actually a display board that I got at an auction, so it was nice to use it.

I’m especially proud of the contour lines for the tunnel. You can practically crawl through it. It’s that lifelike. If you’re interested, each contour line is one foot in elevation change.

CDC-Playground

Croncrete

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We can add “poorly-mixed concrete” to my list of life accomplishments. The preschoolers and I been working on a little low fence at school to hang some fence buckets that can hold outdoor building materials – sticks, pinecones, etc. – and today we really got a lot done. The children ‘helped’ dig the holes a couple of weeks ago, and today we set the posts in, tacked up the cross-boards, and I filled it in with some no-mix (i.e. – ‘really hard to understand directions’) cement. I made it a bit too wet (I think), but the posts are short and are buried pretty deep, so I think we’re good.

I forgot to take a photo. Maybe tomorrow I can show you the ‘final’ product.

Crazy Hair

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So, I’m sitting at the computer staring blankly, and said, “I don’t know what to post about today.” Lloyd looked at my head and said, “Hello?”

Oh, yeah.

We had Crazy Hair Day at school. The preschoolers are wrapping up a study of hair, and today was our final hazzah. I had planned on lots of braids, but laziness won out this morning and I pulled out an old set of hot rollers. As I wrapped my hair Lloyd asked, “How long have you have those? I’ve never seen them.” I’ve actually had them for years, because deep in my heart I want to have naturally curly hair. I used to curl my hair at night and think, “I could totally pull this off tomorrow,” and always chickened out. Today was the first time I’ve left the house with curly hair – well, except for my wedding.

I had my hair curled at noon for our 7 p.m. wedding and it was dead by 3. My sister came to my apartment and we tried to fix it with an array of curling devices and tons of hairspray. I lived right behind the church and walked over there with curlers still in my hair. I had to protect my dignity, though, so I walked to the church with a box on my head.

box

Yeah. Dignity.

Not so smart

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It’s not the best story I’ve ever told, but here’s what I’ve got for today.

Haleigh found a walnut outside.  We brought it in to investigate it.

Behold. A walnut.

Now, I’ve heard that walnut juice can stain, so I wisely took the precaution of wearing an apron so my clothes wouldn’t get yucky and look bad for tonight’s home visits.  I scored the soft shell with a knife and let the children pull it off.  They got most of it, and then I worked on getting the rest so we could see the nut inside.  The whole investigating process took a good fifteen minutes or so, and was quite educational.   We learned that the black spot smelled yucky, the inside smells like camping, and that the clear juice that’s inside permanently stains your hands.  Oops.

They don’t make hand aprons.

At home visits I had to explain that my hands actually were clean, they just looked like they were dirty.

I’m off to go scrub off some more skin and go to bed.  ‘Night.

Lovin’ the Mac

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Good thing my boss doesn’t read this, or I’d make her pretty mad. She’s got this classroom rating thing that says it would be good for children to have a listening center. Phewsh. (That’s a scoffing sound.) Have you ever seen classroom listening centers? They’re nothing like they seem in the catalogs. Headphones all a-tangle, the audio tapes that get destroyed by children jabbing at buttons you’ve told them not to jab, the actual machine being jabbed beyond tolerance, books ripping, cats eating dogs. It’s mayhem, I tell you, mayhem.

Being the rebellious type that I am, I decided to go ahead and have a listening center….. my way – the ‘re-inventing the wheel, gadgety, too complicated’ way. (Mind you, I should say that at no point did she actually say that I had to have a listening center. She was quite gracious and understanding in hearing my grievances.)

I have the recording program Garage Band on the iMac, and in addition to recording requiems, turns out I can read a story¿ add some background music, and put it on my Shuffle. A couple of cheap headphones from Wal-Mart, and we’re good to go. I think they could swallow the Shuffle and it would survive.

Can you see the shuffle?