Geeks R Us

Things have been busy here but nothing major to report.  Okay, I can maybe think of a few things but you’d think we were nerds.  Here’s the first one to report: I, under the tutelage of the masters Mr. and Mrs. K and with the help of some other fabulous ladies, learned how to make my own picture frames.  It was awesome, a little tiring, but I think it was worth it. 

We cut and routered our own boards,

 

glued and stapled and clamped the pieces together,  

  

fitted glass and backings and wired them for hanging,

 

and finished our frames (minus the paint),

enjoying every step of the way.

I came away with 4 total, all 8x10 frames.  I need to decide on a paint for mine now but I have them hanging up anyway.  I wish we had a lot of the tools required for such a task as this would be fun to make more.  Someday maybe.

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Our next “big” news is that we cancelled our cable early May to save some money and while we have a digital converter built into our tv, we don’t get great signal without the aid of an antennae.  Neal found a tutorial online on how to build your own out of pretty ordinary things.  Behold, the fruits of his labors:

It is pretty monstrous.  And it worked. The idea was to place it against a foil lined backing and raise it up on a stand and Neal found a projector screen plus stand in a dumpster and planned to use that to really soup it up.  Well we had a few issues, one being that it is huge and we have no room for it downstairs by the tv and the other being that our plan to put it in the attic was foiled due to no chance of hooking it up like we wanted.  Oh well, it was a valiant effort Neal.  We are currently borrowing an antennae from Neal’s labmate and are enjoying a few free channels for the time being…

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Aedan, at age almost three, has become a little techie himself.  He can use the computer mouse to a certain degree, playing games on pbskids.org by himself.  He can also navigate around Neal’s iPhone pretty well, getting to the desired apps like the whoopie cushion noise generator (groan) or the bug squishing game.  His latest favorite has been a spelling game and what do you know, hooked on iPhone works for him!  He can actually spell or at least recognize certain spellings (I’m not sure if I would completely call it reading though), words like FERRY, BARGE, BLIMP, CAR, TRAIN (are you seeing a pattern yet?), PLANE, TAXI, SHIP,…. It is so weird to feel proud that he knows how to spell because of a game on a phone.  What is the world coming to?  I didn’t even touch a computer until something like 5th grade.  Oh well, it is still amazing to me.  I’ll try to get a video of him soon.