Activities

What could this be?

I resigned on Wednesday. I was scheduled to fly on Saturday. That gave me two days to relax... or to leave behind something valuable for people I love.

One of our family friends has an autistic child. He loves to swing, but they can't afford a swingset. We were going to give them ours, but it's more than ten years old, and when we tried to pull it up, we discovered that it had become one with the ground. (We'll have to figure out some way to get that down to the dump.)

But the plastic slide, two-person glider, and rings were still in good condition. All they needed was a framework to hang on. I estimated $50 in wood and offered to build it.

Cut down to size

Beautiful model showing off the finished project

Gotta love mitre saws. Chopped the crappy fixtures off that old cannon in no time at all. Then I bought actual Schedule-40 fittings from the sprinkler shop down the straight. Cost an extra $5, but it's worth it for the safety.

Then, since it was our anniversary, Eri helped me put it all together. We used the high-pressure "blue glue" and made certain to twist at least 90 degrees as we inserted everything. We also redesigned it to use fewer fittings, which made the twisting phase a lot easier.

Working together, and being extremely careful, it took us about two hours all told. We left it in the sun, and after about 5 hours of curing, I'll try it at tonight's performance of Hairspray!

What could it be?

What's this collection of PVC parts? Here's a hint: I used it when I played Wilbur in Hairspray. The other actors kept calling me a "real-life Wilbur".

Why airplanes REALLY fly.

Sorry to make a whole article with little more than a link, but, really, my kids need to read this. And this seems like the easiest way to remember.

After so much coding, I decided to take it easy with a brain teaser. I liked this techinterview palindrome puzzle. October 21, 2001 was a palindromic date, when written in MMDDYYYY format. What was the latest palindromic date previous to that?