Category Archives: Fun

Me…exposed

January 30, 2009FunFunwarren

I read a blog called June Cleaver After a Six-Pack . It’s a fairly irreverent look at life by a military wife as she handles daily trials and tribulations. She has an interesting perspective on all sorts of things and is a ton of fun to read. Anyhow, she interviewed me for a piece on her blog called Swooning Over A Regular Joe… With a title like that, how could I possibly refuse? June sent me a bunch of questions and I answered them as best I could. If you get a chance, drop over and have a look at her site. It’s a lot of fun!

It was pretty strange answering her questions and participating in this interview. You know, it is sort of cool to talk about myself, but it’s also a little freaky and vain. I am not sure how many people might see the post on her blog, but it is still strange to think of how people might take the words I wrote, miss my intentions, etc. Luckily, I am a guy so I don’t really care what people think. In fact, I am completely oblivious to social cues in general (maybe that’s just me, not guys in general?).

When I started blogging, I debated how much of the real me I wanted to put out into the ether. Did I want to use my real name and talk about the city in which I live? Should I show my kids’ faces or talk about my friends? After a lot of debate, I decided that the world is mostly good and that I am not really important enough for it to matter if I put myself out there a little bit. So far, it has been a lot of fun and I have met a few people and gotten to know them a little better, even though I have never seen their faces. I guess the internet might make life a little less personal, but in a way, I have gotten a little closer to people than I might otherwise have been able to do.

So, here’s to blogging and to laying it on the line. Thanks for the fun June!

Forget Practical

January 28, 2009FunFunwarren

I mentioned the other day that we went to the WV car show over the weekend. My main purpose was to see the General Lee of course, but we did see a few other cars. We aren’t immediately in need of another car, but Emily’s ride is 11 years old (but still kicking!). We decided to just look around and see what tickled our collective fancies. Emily has been checking out the ads for the Ford Mustang so we decided to take the floor model for a test-sit. My hindparts fit very well in the passenger seat and Emily looked three kinds of hot in the driver’s seat. The gas mileage doesn’t look too bad and the price is fairly reasonable (if we get the vinyl seats, AM radio and pass on the air conditioning). I have always tended towards Corvettes but I can definitely see the four of us cruising to the tastee-freeze in a Mustang. “Emily is sold on this thing!”, I thought to myself. I can keep on driving the man-van with the promise of moments of glory here and there!

Something clicked and all of a sudden, my real wife returned. “How will we haul all 17 of the kids’ friends in a mustang? What about when I need to haul 16 feet of gutter? Or what about…”, I tuned out. Practical smactical. We still have the man-van. We can haul plywood and bees and kids in it. We’ll still take it on long-drive vacations. We can have the mustang for Friday night date night…though hauling loot from Sam’s might be a challenge in the mustang (that’s Friday night date night at our place).

Well, since my life is not my own, I spent the rest of the evening roaming through the great halls, stunned I suppose, looking at practical, suppository-shaped cargo carriers. I want my wife to get a mustang. I don’t need to drive it all the time. I think she should. Practical? Forget practical!

Refrigerator marble run

January 27, 2009Fun, TinkeringFun, Tinkeringwarren

Like many refrigerators I have seen, ours is an exercise in chaos. Both kids pretty much get the alphabet now but we’ve retained the magnet letters for some reason. We occasionally form up some clever words but there is a limit to what can be spelled out. In addition to the letters, the refrigerator serves as our command center of sorts. All things kid-related are stuck to the front door, held in place by magnets that are one sheet of paper from being over-taxed. Mo, one of our cats, seems to always push the envelope of magnetic tolerance and periodically clears the lower reaches.

I came across this post and it seemed like the perfect change…the fridge was just crying out for a change. I junked a bunch of stuff and threw this marble run together pretty quickly. Hot glue + magnets + plumbing odds and ends = fun! Abigail and I messed with it quite awhile after supper until bed time. I am sure that we’ll mess with it more this evening.

She was pretty quick to get the point of how the marble we were using knocked down through the system. Unfortunately, she also had to see the underside of our oven and refrigerator as we tried to recover renegade marbles that understood physics better than we did!

Mo our cat was, of course, terribly interested in the entire bit of fun. He kept standing under the outlet and got thumped a few times watching the marble come down!

Catapult of awesomeness

January 23, 2009Fun, TinkeringFun, Tinkeringwarren

My wife accused me of trying to be Jack Black with the title of this post. Although I do look pretty fantastic in wrestling tights, I don’t have his kung fu or guitar skills. Instead, I have to rely on my skills with a hot glue gun. This week I have posted about all sorts of domestic stuff so it’s about time for a little manly mayhem!

The kids and I made a catapult last night. I recently finished out a bottle of medicine and hated to see the bottle just go into the recycle bin. The bottle is just too pretty… I mean, the color instills fear in the recipient of the catapult’s action! Anyhow, with a few minutes, a couple of pieces of scrap wood and a hot glue gun, we made a catapult which we used to launch Jolly Ranchers into Isaac’s mouth.

Homemade Catapult at the ready

We had to mess with the angle of the base to get better distance, but Isaac was willing to dive for a few until we figured it out. We found that by lifting the back of the base, we could launch a Jolly Rancher quite a distance. As part of the fun, we learned some about the physics of catapults and also the history of seige warfare. Isaac knew that the spring stored energy when flexed. We talked about momentum and kinetic/potential energy. It was a pretty quick project and I think we all learned a little too. I think we may try a trebuchet this summer. We have a compost pile ripe for attack!

I think we’ll revisit this project in a few years and do a little experimentation. I would like for us to experiment with the length of the catapult arm, the angle of the base, the tension of the spring and the distance the arm can travel. I think we are a little young for too many calculations, but we may try this outside this summer with a bigger setup that we can really play with!

I had to spit on him

January 20, 2009Family, FunFamily, Funnywarren

A few months ago, we got a new cat Mohinder. Our other cat Madeline is pretty well trained to stay off of tables and counters. It could be that she’s old and too bitter to jump, but I prefer to think of it as her getting a proper upbringing in a loving home. Anyhow, Mohinder is a much younger, testosterone-fueled cat (though he must have an alternate source as his normal testosterone makers are no longer in his possession). He’s starting to get that stubble on his chin typical of a male going through puberty.

So, we’ve made training Mo a family affair. We keep a water bottle around to squirt him when we catch him doing something teenager-like. Speaking of that, have any of you with teens tried a water bottle for training? Isaac is only 4 years from it and I am already preparing my passport so I can exit the country.

Well, we have been progressing along pretty well and Mo is pretty bright as cats go. Isaac was so proud awhile back and had to tell me of his efforts in training Mo. Apparently Mo was on the dining room table. Isaac caught him but did not have the spray bottle handy. Being a resourceful bugger, Isaac came up with the only water he had available. He told me, “Dad, I had to spit on him. It was the only water I had.” Now let me tell you, I look at our dining room table with a more cautious eye and thank my lucky stars that Mo was not doing something wrong in the bathroom!

Uncle Warren

January 19, 2009Family, FunFamily, Funwarren

I loved the movie “Uncle Buck” when it first came out several years ago. I think every kid ought to have an Uncle Buck – the kind of no-nonsense guy who sort of watches out for the kid, no matter what. I liked it so much that my kids call my brother Uncle Buck – no, they really do – I doubt they know his real name.

So Emily’s brother and sister-in-law are expecting which means Emily and I will be an aunt and uncle sometime in August. I am typically a pretty no-nonsense guy so I am pretty much declaring myself to be L2D2’s “Uncle Buck” (though I hope he/she doesn’t call me that). I actually just got a hat very much like Uncle Buck’s a few weeks ago…

So, L2D2 you ask…what does that mean? We don’t know the name or the gender of this child but we have to have to call the little bugger something. We though about superhero names (Emily’s brother has a Superman tattoo) but that seemed sort of gender specific. I’d feel bad if I had called little Becky Spiderman for 9 months. I considered going with Neonate 1 or Zygote Alpha in the style of the Presidential code name system but that didn’t seem to work either. Emily and I both love Star Wars so we decided to go with L2D2, using the initials of the parents and the 2 for…well…version 2 of said parents.

So, without further adieu, I’d like to introduce you to L2D2, my niece/nephew!

L2D2

Congratulations L1D1! We are certainly very excited!

Brought to you by the letter T

January 13, 2009Free Programs, FunFree Programs, Funwarren

I follow Evil Twin Wife’s blog, and she recently participated in a fun internet meme.

It’s actually called “Brought to you by the letter…” game. Here’s how it works…

You leave a comment on this post, and I’ll assign you a letter. You write about ten things you love that begin with your assigned letter, and post it at your place. When people comment on your list, you give them a letter, and the chain continues on and on. (I copied that from her and she copied off someone else, so… feel free to rip it off again).

I got the letter “T” so here is my list:

Turtles – turtles are the strangest creatures…they are armored and primitive but always seem so fragile. I always stop when I see them on the road and move them out of the way…I love to help turtles.

Toenails – actually, I hate toes, toenails and all things feet…except I love to tease the kids. Abigail in particular always asks me what we are having for dinner. I always answer “toe nail soup and an earwax sandwich”

Toadstools – well, the non-poisonous ones. I am just starting to learn about edible mushrooms…I really dig hunting mushrooms

Tahitian Treat! – Enough said

Taffy – Saltwater taffy is so awesome, but I only really like it when I am at the beach.

Tybee Island – One of my two favorite beach locations is Tybee Island, GA. We’re going there this summer assuming the economy doesn’t implode on itself

Truffles – I don’t think I have ever found a truffle I didn’t like. These are some of my favorite.

Tinkering – My grandfather was a tinkerer before me and I think I have picked up his tinkering addiction. I prefer to reinvent the wheel whenever possible. Even better, I like to over-engineer wherever I can!

Thera-gesic – I go to the gym pretty regularly and lift weights which, of course, leads to sore muscles. Thera-gesic absolutely saves lives!

Temperature – I like it hot. When I lived in PA, I thought I would die if I ever got hot. Moving to Tennessee broke me of that. I came to love the heat in Tennessee. Hey, that reminds me, I also love Tennessee. We moved to Nashville shortly after we were married to attend graduate school at Vanderbilt. For some reason we stayed when we finished school. So, Emily and I sort of grew up together there. We were pretty young when we got married so we had no idea about life on our own…we discovered it and each other in Nashville. Anyhow, back to temperature…I still love the heat. I have mentioned before that my office has 8 server computers in it which generate a lot of heat. It typically runs 80+ deg F during the day. I love it that way though. My co-workers call me a lizard…they say I need a rock and a heat lamp to finish out my habitat.

“T” is a pretty easy-going letter. One would think that it would be simple to come up with a list of stuff starting with “T” that one likes…I mean genuinely likes. It’s harder than you’d think. I am surprised and how hard this was.

So, if you want to participate, leave a comment to that effect and I will give you a letter. You can leave a comment and not participate too. Also, if you want to spread the fun, I wrote a little program to generate random letters so you can be fair in passing out letters to your respondees. Choose from the bigger-but-with-better-images version (6 mb) or the smaller-but-with-poorer-images version (300kb). As always, these programs are just for fun and not to be used for any nasty purpose or to be sold…

Ham sandwich and a big screen tv

January 12, 2009Fun, TechnologyFun, Technologywarren

Almost a year ago, Emily had a training where they served box lunches from Heavenly Ham. Inside her box was an entry card for an Oscar party prize pack. It included a big screen tv and a party tray from HH. We didn’t think anything of it at first, but decided to enter.

Usually we don’t enter those sort of contests because there are 200 million people entering and someone in some far off place usually wins. Anyhow, this time we did enter. A few weeks later, I got a mysterious email from a HH address. At first, I thought it was spam and nearly deleted the message.

The text in it was typical spam-talk, but they listed a few pieces of information that caught my attention. We were the grand prize winners and they didn’t need our bank account or social security information to award us the prize…it must be real! I responded and emailed back and forth with the company representative. A few days later, we received a generous gift card to Best Buy to choose a big screen tv on which to watch the Oscars with a few friends.

That’s sort of the funny part really…we don’t watch tv much. We haven’t had cable in 14 years. We do get antenna reception but find that there is little on worth watching. To be fair, HH said we could spend the money on anything at BB. Still, it was an Oscar party prize so we decided to go ahead and get a big screen tv and a surround sound system with an upconvert dvd player. We took all sorts of goofy pictures of the buying process including posing with the Geek Squad car, the BB sales guy, picking up the food, etc.

So, we invited family over and watched the Oscars and had a good time. The HH party tray was awesome. If you’ve never had Heavenly Ham, try some…it’s a little pricey but so good. I’d eat there every week if I could! I especially love their ham salad.

We still don’t watch much tv on it, but we love an occasional Netflix and it’s hard to beat the Dukes of Hazzard and Daisy Duke in big screen form! Thanks Heavenly Ham and Best Buy!

The real use of a garden tub

January 9, 2009Family, FunFamily, Funwarren

When we bought our house, the main bathroom had an enormous garden tub with jets and big fancy knobs and drains and room for 2. We were sure that it would get a lot of use and be a great thing to have in our new old house. We quickly found, however, that our 50 gallon hot water tank would not fill our 80 gallon tub and, more importantly, our 80 year old floor joists would probably not support 50 gallons of luke warm water plus two hind-ends. So, here we are, stuck with an enormous garden tub in our bathroom that never sees any use. Yesterday, we found a perfect use for it – a place to let snow melt off of boots!

Now let me back up and tell you the events leading to this. We got some snow so the kids were off of school. I went in to work in the morning but was owed a half-day of time for working over the holidays. I came home for lunch and knew I had to stay as Emily and the kids were driving each other crazy. We decided to bake some cookies and invite the neighbor kids over to play. We started with a lively game of Dance-Dance Revolution. It’s a ton of fun and I can get a mean dance on when I need to out-do my kids!

After an hour or so, we decided to make use of the snow that had fallen so we headed to a cool hill nearby where we wore every last bit of snow off. By the end, we were sledding on pure mud and I ruined a pair of jeans! Anyhow, we had a great time playing but were so dirty when were were done, we didn’t know what to do. Normally we strip and make a mad dash through the house, but it was too cold for much of that. We made it to the bathroom and got into the bathtub and got rid of the snow and mud. It was a perfect use for the garden tub.

As I think of it, we may just leave it in the bathroom now after all. I had planned to make it a real garden tub and haul it out back and stock it with fish. I don’t know what we would do with snowy boots if I did that, though!

4 from 4

January 8, 2009FunFunwarren

Kris over at Quilted Simple tagged me for the 4th picture challenge. I decided to change it a little and do the 4th picture from the 4th folder for 4 years…so I have 4 pictures for you.

This last picture has a pretty funny story…which I will tell another time. Hover over each picture with your mouse for a brief description.

And now, by the power vested in me by the electrons of the Internet, I now tag anyone who looks at these pictures and has a blog to complete the same challenge (or some variation of your choosing) and report when you have posted – Gesundheit and go likewise!

My Home Among The Hills

Life in WV!