Dirkus Maximus

I know that everyone today enjoyed waking up to the bit of global warming that we got overnight. We can all thank Ashley for that.  Ashley has been praying for seven months now that God would please send her some snow, if he’s not too busy that is.  Well, she didn’t get if for Christmas like she was hoping so apparently he must have been saving up for her.  We got about three inches around here and the roads are horrible.  I worked overnight last night and got to drive home this morning in it.  Life was all good until I hit the VA/NC state line, I was able to follow the snow plow all the way up 17 until I hit the state line.  The plow turned around at the line and nothing had been sanded or plowed on the NC side of the line.  Total drive home this morning was about 2 hours so  I was totally over the whole snow thing by the time I got home.  Of course the kids are just getting up at this point and are ready to go out in it.  The kids built a snowman and part of a snow fort and made a brief attempt at a snowball fight before deciding it was too cold to be outside anymore and heading back inside for some hot chocolate.  Got some good pic’s of the kids with their snow fort.

Woohoo! Westly has survived 75 days of having the kids home, and somehow managed to maintain her sanity. I’ve taken the day off so we can celebrate the first day of freedom. New developments this year include…

• Andy got his own computer. Sure, it’s the old hacked up beige G3 All-In-One educational Power Mac from 1998, with a 500MHz G4 upgrade chip, half a gig of RAM and 10.3.9 shoehorned on by way of XPostFacto, but it works. Mostly. (Lance, you may now play the Sanford and Son theme. I know you have that sh*t queued up every time you come to my site. )
• Andy’s also riding his sweet Mongoose bike to school this year. I expect it to be stolen by next week. No amount of cabling and locks will keep someone from ripping that off, and I know it.
• Addy’s teacher is in the hospital (no idea why), and will be for a while, so she gets the joy of starting the year with a substitute who’s had little to no time to prepare.
• Ashley’s not up to anything new at the moment, aside from hating school. Well, that and hating the new chores list Wes has given them. She told Wes this morning that she’s doing so many chores it feels like she’s living on a farm.
• Everyone on the planet it now coming to J.C. Sawyer Elementary (the school our kids go to), because they’re the only ones who passed their EOG (End of Grade) testing numbers last year, it seems. Apparently if your school sucks bad, Elizabeth City will allow you to pick another school in the area to take your kids to. This means that J.C. Sawyer now has so many kids that there’s three lines of cars in front of it this morning, everyone is cutting everyone off, blasting horns, screaming and flicking each other off. Great example for the first day of school, really.

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I just got done building the Stirling Engine kit I got from verycoolthings.com with my kids a little while ago. We completed it in around 45 minutes, and I let the kids look at the directions and tell me what to do and I even let them tighten a couple screws on it. Despite the fact that the magazine is entirely in moonspeak, we managed to breeze through it pretty easily. I wish I could get a translation on the last couple pages with the tuning tips. It works pretty well, especially in “reverse” with the engine sitting on a cold object. I managed to get it spooled up to 183RPM (counted the revolutions myself while watching a clock) with it sitting on a can of frozen juice with my fingers on the top plate. I also replaced the stock clear flywheel with a lightly microwaved DVD-R to make it more visually interesting. I think I might still need to tweak it a little, but overall it’s not too bad. You can catch pics of us putting it together and a video of the engine in action after the jump. (more…)

We went to the Norfolk Zoo for the company picnic today. I’ve gotta say, it was a LOT better than that disaster at Nauticus last year. We actually had room to run around, we had a ton of inflatable stuff for the kids to play on, and plenty of good food. The DJ was great and there were a few contests for people to get into like tater sack races, egg toss, tug-o-war and stuff like that. We all had a good time, and I won a ginormous beach umbrella as a door prize. Check out the gallery of pics after the jump. (more…)