Finding that perfect gift

Each year I try to find an ornament for all of the girls (including my wife) that fits with something at least half way notable from the preceding year. I'm not sure why I started this tradition, it seemed like a good idea at the time. This is the only gift that I really sweat about as it takes a lot of leg work trying to find the right ornament. That said, the effort is worth it; each year when we decorate the tree the girls look fondly back on these small symbols of yesteryear.

My wife is probably the hardest to find the right ornament for. My daughters are always into something new and usually it's not too hard to find something appropriate. As they get older and get past the Disney princess phase, it will become more difficult. But for my wife its difficult just coming up with the appropriate theme, let alone an ornament to match that theme. Sometimes I have had to be somewhat clever (e.g. finding a mini Clue board game ornament the year she wrote a murder mystery play put on by our church).

This year the theme was her new book. Finding the right ornament was going to be tough. One year I did the Snoopy at a typewriter ornament, but what to do this year? I finally had to resort to making it myself. This was especially apt as one portion of her book was about making gifts for people using a small budget.

I measured her book and reduced the dimensions down about one third and cut a piece of wood to that size on my table saw. If I had thickness planer I would have used that, but I don't. My father-in-law has one, but I was trying to do this without her realizing I was up to something. Anyway, I painted this small block of wood white. For the cover, I took three of her books (we have plenty lying around the house waiting to be sold. If you want one, we'd love to sell you one), and placed them on our scanner so that I could recreate the cover in one image. Since my wife does plenty of scrapbooking, I was able to find a ribbon that matched the colors on the cover of her book. How fortuitous. I affixed that to the spine of the block with double sided tape and glued the cover on with a spray adhesive. I had to be careful not to over spray it and saturate the paper. I actually made two of these. The first I didn't paint the wood completely, and overdid the spray. Good thing I didn't wait until the last minute.

Needless to say, I think this ornament was one of her favorite gifts this year. Whew!

Halloween is just an excuse

Just as my kids find Halloween an excuse to load up on candy and put on fancy dresses, pumpkin carving is an excuse to get out some tools. Those pumpkin carving kits definitely make things easier, but they can be improved upon. I just saw that Williams Sonoma has this kit. Ooh it's on sale, I might have to have my wife stop in and get it.

Cutting into a pumpkin with a steak knife might be fun if you want to get out some aggression, but the easiest way to scalp a pumpkin is with a saber saw.
The scoop in the kids' kit works ok, but I need something I know I won't crack in half. An ice cream spade works much better at scraping and thinning the walls of the pumpkin. Don't get me wrong, my kids do get to work on their own pumpkins. It took a little bit before they were willing to get their hands dirty; but once they got started, they did well. I would scrape the inside and one would scoop out the junk while I scraped out her sister's pumpkin.

The girls traced on their designs and cut out the eyes, mouth, etc. with the tools from their kit. But when my one daughter wanted a perfectly round nose, you can't beat a wood-boring bit.To light up the pumpkins I thought about using kerosene and toilet paper, but instead I opt for something more traditional (and something I can leave on the porch). I take an old light bulb socket and stick it through a hole that I again drilled out in the back of the pumpkin. Those flickering lights give a nice candle effect without the wind constantly blowing it out.

This year I did not break out the dremel tool for these designs. Last year my daughter used it to carve (yes it's safe enough for a first grader) out a design from our local paper that featured our mayor. To be honest my wife was surprised that I didn't get my own pumpkin this year. I guess I just wasn't inspired enough. :-)

Making greeting cards

My wife loves making greeting cards and does a great job. She gets out many of her different scrapbooking tools and really gets into it. I think I would just draw a blank trying to come up with a good design and decently written text. Maybe it's just because I prefer using different tools. I have to admit this video has gotten me a little inspired. Good thing her birthday passed recently.

Reenforced Perler Beads

My daughters enjoying doing crafts. Seeing I like working with my hands and my wife likes making gifts to spoil people, this is no big surprise. One of the crafts they enjoy doing is making designs with Perler Beads. These are pretty easy for them to do, the only adult supervision at the end is to iron the beads designs to fuse the beads together. (No, I don't let my preschooler use an iron).

One of my favorite things to do is disc golf, and my daughters know this and are my biggest fans. My oldest daughter made this design for me.

The only problem with these craft projects is that break apart rather easily. This results in these little beads joining the Polly pocket shoes on the floor waiting to be sucked up the next time we vacuum.

Back to the craft, besides it being really cool that she has made this with a long haired disc golfer on it (that would be me), I measured it and it was a legal size mini-marker for disc golf. (For the uninitiated, you mark where your disc landed with a mini-marker, and make your next throw from that spot.) The only problem with using it as a mini-marker is that it would soon just crack apart and be a bunch of beads in my bag.

To keep this from cracking into a ton of pieces, I layered around 10 coats of polyurethane on each side of the marker. This gave it a nice smooth coating and will keep if from falling apart. What I really wanted to use was EnviroTex Lite, but I didn't have any on hand. EnviroTex Lite is high gloss finish that you pour on and is equivalent to about 50 layers of varnish.

At my last tournament, other disc golfers on my card like the mini and asked where I got it. My daughter is now making a bunch for me to sell at the next tournament.

I was helping her make some of these and man is this a tedious process. Part of the problem is my big fingers don't do well with the tiny beads. What I needed was something that could guide the beads down onto the peg I wanted. A toothpick proved to be perfect. You could load up a bunch of beads on it and easily drop them at will anywhere on the pegboard. It was actually kind of fun. Here are images of the disc golf markers she is going to sell. If you want one of these or a custom one for yourself, drop me a line.

Revisiting Conversations

My mind is constantly in motion and often is engaged in multiple activities at once. Part of it is just the speed at which it works. In college, I would bring a crossword to some classes that seemed to go just a bit too slow. I would continue to follow the lecture, but when the professor went on a little too long or belabored a point, I'd fill in a couple of clues to keep from drifting off in boredom.

The problem with this is that when something needs my full attention, it is difficult. My brain wants to work on some design or something in the background while I attend to the task at hand. I had a friend call with some rather tough news that needed my complete attention. I went off by myself, turned off the radio, and sat in my recliner as he recounted what he was going through. It was tough to keep myself focused on understanding the tough times he was going through and not start plugging away at a Sodoku or something.

But the other problem with this conversation, was that after it was over, my brain kept working in the background on this conversation. A little later, there was a list of questions in my head that I wished I had asked, but it was (IMO) inappropriate to start up the conversation again just for those questions.

Even posting here, once I hit the publish post button, give me a couple hours and there will invariably be something else I wish I had said. For example, when I was posted about going to the chiropractor (now months ago), I wanted to make the witty comparison between my opinion of them and the doctor in The Pearl.

Note To Self #3

When scheduling an annual physical at the doctor's office where your mother-in-law is the nurse: schedule it before Mother's Day. My arm's just a bit sore.

No Fooling

You will all be glad that I refrained from any April Fool's high jinks this year. My wife is probably glad too. The problem actually is that April Fool's day is on the first day of April. It suffers from the same problem as my birthday. It sneaks up on people. Each year I don't start thinking of a good prank until that morning which is of course far too late to pull off a really good prank.

What makes a good April Fool's prank?

1) It needs subtlety. This is what Slashdot never seems to get right. Just about every post on April 1 is a really bad attempt at humor or pulling a fast one. It may just be that geeks are humor impaired. The challenge with Slashdot is that you aren't looking for the prank, but trying to find out if anything posted that day is true at all. It is really just lame and I make a point of not visiting Slashdot on April Fool's Day.

2) It must be convincing. My wife reads many more blogs and one of her friends who is 8 months pregnant (and due to her body frame looks like she was full term a month ago) posted the simple message "Our baby was born this morning at 4:45! Too tired to post details. Will do so later. All are well." Very convincing. Of course one of my cousins was born on 4/1 and nobody believed my uncle at all when he called to announce the news. Given the history of pranks that he and siblings pulled, you can't blame them.

3) It should be harmless. No one should get hurt, lose their job, etc. They should be informed at some point that they got snookered. Every year I look forward to listening to WXRT as they always do something interesting. This year 4/1 landed on Sunday. Usually we listen to some hymns to prepare for church, but I wanted to see what this year's theme was. To my surprise the regular morning weekday DJ and was broadcasting and doing the regular weekday programming (news, sports, traffic, weather on the half hour, etc.). Even though I was looking for it, I almost missed it. I wonder how many non-church going folk got in a panic and headed off for work. :-)

I'll have to work on something good next year for my kids. I'm sure they will appreciate it, but of course, why wait until next year?