Mysteries of the Deep

As mentioned in my previous post, when we visited Leo Carrillo State Beach last week, we'd found the lid to a baby grand piano. It worked as an incredibly effective, if somewhat cumbersome and heavy, skim board. I got fairly winded dragging it back to a good start point over and over,



Of course, the underlying question is how did it get there to begin with???
Was it on a ship from whatever the country of origin was that was caught in a storm??? The piano from the Titanic??? (Not likely on that one, I suspect it had a concert grand) A wild party at someone's beach house??? Being an affluent area most anywhere along the beach, could it have been a mishap while a piano was being delivered??? Insurance fraud, disposed of the evidence in the murky depths??? One of the images I found was actually of a mystery piano that appeared in Biscayne bay... I notice the lid is absent in that picture, could it have come loose there and migrated to the West coast???



Since this encounter, I've been considering making a smaller skim board for next time...

The Dyson Sphere

A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure originally described by Freeman Dyson. Such a "sphere" would be a system of orbiting solar power satellites meant to completely encompass a star and capture most or all of its energy output. I was going to put those first two introductory sentences in my own words, but Wikipedia did such a fine and succinct job that I thought I could do no better.

After the completion of my last creation while I was killing labels, I was at a loss for what to make next. My older boy told me I should make a Dyson sphere. I responded, "everyone makes a sphere while they're killing labels." He counters with, "A hollow sphere???" Hmmm... once again, I was presented with a challenge. Could it be done??? Well, why not??? It started out looking like a chip bowl, then it started looking like a big 'ole dinosaur egg. (this didn't happen all in one day, so I was punching a hole in the edge and hanging it from the hook in my locker. That is what caused the distortion visible in the second picture.)



It came out WAY huger than I'd intended, but yes, that is a hollow shell of labels!!! It has that odd taper to the one end, but it's still pretty cool.



Looks a little bit like a giant pear, huh??? Second shot my boy is pantomiming that he's eating it.

In other somewhat related news, here's a picture of my son's MP3 player. He went on a weekend with one of his friends, and their dog got a hold of it for just a few seconds, ate the part where the headphones plug in off of it!!! I believe that you can still plug it in and access the files, so it can be used as a storage device. Terrible picture, I used my old camera for the shot. If I'd been using my new one, I'd have been sorely disappointed by the results.



Today we made a return trip to Leo Carrillo beach. It was cloudy down there, where it was nice and sunny at our house on both ends of our trip. Didn't get started as early as I'd wanted to, but did get there sooner and left home sooner, so the drive wasn't quite as bad as last time. Once again, I kinda wished I'd brought my camera with me. Saw porpoises by the dozens, and cool pelicans and even ducks. My younger boy chased a duck into the water, and it went submarine on him. He thought that was cheating. We dug a tunnel through a little cliff of sand, probably around four feet of digging through sand. The coolest thing, though, was we found the lid to a baby grand piano. Used it as a skim board, it was incredibly effective!!!

Carmogedden??? Not Quite

This was the weekend of the dreaded 405 closure. I almost never go over to that part of town because 1. I have no business over there 2. Every time I go over that way, the traffic really sucks!!! I have a feeling the extra capacity they've added will do nothing to improve the situation!!! The predictions had been dire, and the warnings have been going on for more than a month. Guess everyone got the message, because there were no real problems!!! In honor, I made up a little thing on CoMixed. Feel free to click on the image and vote it up!!!



The "Everything went better than expected" guy is one of my favorites!!! It shall be my theme...

The Random & Shirt Post

I've had these shirt pictures for quite a while. I've been meaning to make some kind of post of 'em, and finally here it is, along with a bit o random!!!



I'm up in the middle of the night after having gotten up early for the Saturday shift this morning. Hadn't planned on it, but here's how it worked out: I took an energy drink to have with my lunch today. When I got home this afternoon, my wife made me a delicious iced coffee. That would have been plenty enough, but we went to Big Lots in the evening. They were having an extra 20% off, and I bought a few more random energy drinks, as well as almost $100 worth of other sugary beverages and salty crunchy snacks, as well as some school supplies (in early July??? Blasphemy!!!). When I went to put them away, discovered some of the energy drinks I had stashed had corroded through!!! One of my my favorite kinds, Monster Mixxed, was just starting to leak, so I opened it and tried it. Tasted fine, so I iced it down and drank it. I think that was too much.



I bookended the normal work week (as abnormally normal as it was) with a couple of ironic shirts. On Tuesday (1st work day this week...) I wore one not pictured here, from the first year we did the Christmas-goody day shirt exchange at work. It merely has the words, "Don't rush me, I get paid by the hour" on the front, so it's not especially photogenic, but it is pretty amusing. All my co-workers love it, because doing what we do you won't be there long if you're not at least kinda rushing. The irony was double that day, as I was working an hour early for overtime, and I ended up killing labels, one of the few tasks where you're not quite as rushed!!!



Since I worked today (yesterday now, but doesn't seem like it to me) I was able to have one of the weekdays off. Usually it's Friday, but when I signed up I was offered Thursday or Friday. I opted for Thursday, so I worked two days, had a day off, worked two more days, have a day off. Friday they had this coming Saturday available. I can choose any day but Monday for off this coming week. Think I'll take Wednesday so I'll have another two days then a day off. Unfortunately, that will leave three at the end of the week.



On Thursday I took the family to Leo Carrillo State Beach. It's a bit of a drive, but a couple of my friends at work always go there and say how nice it is. It was pretty good, but lots of rocks. I think we spent almost as much time driving as we did at the beach. I think it was around 60 miles each way. I didn't take my camera, but wising I had did some searching for a web image. The one I've got here is from the Virtual Tourist website. The first one that really got me was from Craig Wolf's blog. I didn't feel right about borrowing his AMAZING image, but I did set it as my computer's wallpaper!!!



On the other end of the regular week, I wore my "Weekdays-Weekends" shirt. The irony here was I wore it on Friday, and I was coming in the next day. At morning break, I noticed one of the girls who used to be in our department sitting outside with a girl who looked a lot like another girl who left the company a few years back. As I was heading back from break, I got a better look at her, and it was who I'd thought, only with her hair darker. I stepped out to say hey, and remembered that she'd always gotten great amusement from my shirts. She'd already seen the front of the shirt, so after I asked her if she'd seen this one, I showed her the back. She LOLed heartily, and fived me!!!



I had a strange dream this morning. I'll not relate all of it here, but at the end of it I was bitching out a little kid, and was hailed as a hero for having done so. I woke up (like one minute before my alarm went off) and was laughing and wondering where that came from!!!



A recap of the unmentioned shirts here, the second down is called 3037, and it's my most recent acquisition (with the exception of the Old Navy flag T-shirt I bought on July 4th. My oldest got the exact same one, and my wife got a red tank with the exact same print. Youngest got the coolest of the lot, a Captain America shirt). Can you make out the writing hidden it that shirt??? Also represented it the Filthy Hippies, one of my favorites that always gets comments. The blurry question mark I don't actually have, it's the icon Woot has when they're doing a random shirt. They actually came out with a shirt like that!!!


Missing from the mix is my Schrödinger's Cat shirt. It's another amazing shirt, but every time I wear it I seem to end up having to explain who Schrödinger was & his experiment. One of my friends at work, after having heard the story, commented, "Wow, he was like, a mad scientist!!!"