We planned to meet my mom at King of Prussia mall - the world's largest indoor shopping place by retail square foot, including an Apple store and several high-end stores like Versace and Tiffany's - for a little white-sale shopping at JCPenny's. We left a bit early so we could make a couple of stops along the way.
Abby wanted to buy a spring for a recent invention project. The thing she's building is a kid of box that beats would-be burglars over the head with a piece of wood if they should attempt to open this particular safe-keeping box. This is in lieu of a lock.
I wanted to stop at Microcenter to pick up an Eee PC. Berta had recently expressed an interest in having an available PC in the family room for browsing during TV watching and homework assignments without having to lug out and power up the work PCs, and this fit pretty well. She needn't have spoken two words of that endorsement before I was ready to buy. And I thought that our priciest purchase that day would be the Eee PC. Alas....
I used to live near a paper mill. Several of them. Some of my family worked there, including my grandfather and my uncle Joe (my grandmother's sister's husband). Both my grandfather and Uncle Joe were in the Navy, and they plied their skills at tying knots to their new trade in the private sector.
Perhaps it is not widely imagined how paper is processed by a mill. Actually, all of the paper mills in Downingtown are recycled paper plants. They don't use cut trees to make paper, just old paper and cardboard. The paper is put into a big vat of chemicals to help break it down and re-form it into pulp, then it's pressed out through some machinery to be flattened and dried. The resulting paper can be any thickness, and can be used to construct many things, like boxes for board games, french fry containers, or inch-thick concrete pillar molds.
When flat, cut stock comes off the line, it's often stacked in piles and wrapped in cellophane. Prior and in addition to this method of keeping the paper from flying all over the place, the paper was tied together with string. If you've ever tried to tie a knot around something box-shaped, you know the standard difficulties. Now try imagining that the string has to be tight enough to withstand shipment and that the box isn't a solid object, but many thousands of shifting pieces of paper or cardboard. Then, perhaps, the benefit of such a specific knot becomes apparent....
On this day in 1999, we were sipping free champagne on a flight between Amsterdam and New Delhi to celebrate our first wedding anniversary.
I was working at Kruse at the time, and our off-shore contractor wanted us to come visit and have some personal contact with the team. The ramp-up for the visit was quick - only two weeks, which was quite possible in the days before 9/11. When it was decided that I would be going on the trip and the date was picked, the question was essentially, "Got anything going on that week?" And my answer - "Just my first wedding anniversary."
I have the impression that sending your wife with you on a week-long business trip around the world because it was during your first wedding anniversary is not something that most employers would do. Mine did....
In sixth grade, I had an interesting science teacher. After our late-year lesson on simple machines - levers, pulleys, screws, etc. - we were offered a challenge: Create a device that used a simple machine in some fashion to launch an egg as far as you possibly can. The boy and girl that flung their eggs the farthest would be treated to a nice dinner out with the teacher.
The game was on! I came up with a few crazy designs on paper, but basically stuck to the same principle - using compressed air. Yeah, ok, not much of a simple machine, but in the end there wasn't much to the device beyond a simple lever.
My dad got a giant tank of compressed air and attached a valve to it (the lever), and to the valve, we attached a long clear plastic tube. As you might guess, the tube was the diameter of an egg....
A couple of weeks ago, I headed out of the house for a lunch meeting. It was 12:30 on a Friday, and both kids were at school. Being that it was a just a lunch, I didn't think much of how it would affect the rest of my day.
The lunch ran a bit long. I didn't leave until somewhere around 3:45, and I figured I would pick up a couple of things on the way home, including the weekend fish feeders that we needed for during our upcoming trip. Being that it was just lunch, it never even occurred to me that it was so late in the afternoon that Abby would be done school and waiting for me at home.
While driving home, I got a call from a number I didn't recognize. Our neighbor across the street and a few doors down had heard Abby sobbing on our front porch. She took her up the street to stay with another of our neighbors, and that is who called me. How thoroughly mortifying.
It took me until 4:20 to get home, cursing traffic the whole way. I drove straight to my neighbor's house, where I found Abby playing cheerfully. I was very glad that we have great neighbors that would help out like this, but thoroughly shamed that this escaped me. more
