LaurenandLloyd.com

where our wasted time becomes your wasted time

Gadget

Thanks, Uncle Rich!

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While we were at Lauren’s family reunion in Branson, Uncle Rich showed me an iPhone app that I had on my phone, but had never messed with before. It’s called Health, or something like that, and I don’t know what all it can do, but it does turn your phone into a pedometer (sp?).  It didn’t show any information when I first opened it, and I thought that because I hadn’t opened it before, that it wasn’t counting my steps. But after a bit, it made some nice graphs. it turned out that it had been counting my steps for years. Or maybe year? Or since October at any rate.

You can see by the graph above that I walked more in second semester than in first semester. I don’t have any idea at all why that would be. I believe the graphs are logarithmic, so changes in steps are more pronounced than you might expect from looking at the graphs.

Here’s the last month with a couple of annotations that I added:

walk it off

I think that the dashed line is the “recommended” “ten thousand” “steps” that “you” are “supposed” to take in a “day.”

Surprisingly, I don’t make a lot of gravy.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about composting lately. Sustainable Dave has worms doing his composting right in his basement, but that’s a little too creepy for me. I’ve thought about having a worm composter right outside our back door, because then I could just toss the scraps right after I’ve scooped them from the cutting board.

The whole reason for this worm pondering is that Lloyd doesn’t want me collecting scraps in a container on the counter until I get around to taking them on the long walk across the yard to the ‘compost pile‘. That’s a problem because I am NOT walking a single banana peel across the yard when it’s dark outside. There are jibblie things out there, like vampires. So, this morning I came up with a multi-tasker solution. I have a gravy separator that gets used once in a never, so now it lives in the trash can, like Oscar, and I can walk the scraps out to the pile at my leisure. In full, safe daylight.

Keep it secret.

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Keep it safe.

Jingle jangle.

Remember the purse fiasco a while back? Well, it was the perfect opportunity for me to justify a gadget purchase. I saw the Cash Can a few months ago, and now I have one! Yessir, even though I may forget my wallet, I’ll still have an origamied greenback dangling from my keys.

Money?
Oh.
There it is.

This guarantees that I will lose my keys.

Arrived.

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The spatulas arrived today. Many thanks to David Hall, best guy in the world!

Spatularific!

That’s all I have to say about that.

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.)

Danger, Will Robinson!

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After home visits today I went into Lincoln to see what Lloyd was up to.  Turns out it’s exciting and slightly dangerous putting up projectors.  Well, maybe not ‘exciting’, but this part looked pretty dang cool.

Sparks will fly.

Notice his lack of eye protection.  I guess he thinks that squint will save him.  Anyway, I tried to be helpful, but was less than useful.  I screwed up the only job he gave me.  (Sorry ’bout that.)  Also, sometime in the past few days he has misplaced his wallet.  The troublesome part is that he was up in the hot, hot, hot attics of the portable classrooms the past few days.  We He looked in two of the attics today and we’ll he’ll look in the other two tomorrow morning.  (Beth and Harold, we’re going to late church – we’re not ditching.)  Anyway, please pray for the recovery of his wallet.  I can’t bear to call Citibank again.

UPDATE:  Found!  Thank you, God!  Thank you, God!  It was in the second attic we looked through. I can say ‘we’ because I went up in one.  Let me just say, I have profound respect for Lloyd being able to move around in those tiny spaces.  It is CRAMPED up there!  We took some good photos with his iPhone, and when he’s done washing the fiberglass off his body I’ll download them.

Here he is putting his homemade shin guards on.  I laughed, but they turned out to be invaluable.   Yes, those are dish towels taped to boards, then taped to Lloyd.

Strapping on safety

Shin’ saving goodness.

L I B. M R good.

Don’t whack your head!

Up in the roof, as opposed to on it.