Legoland Craziness

What:    The Legoland Discovery Center in Schaumburg, IL

When:   Friday of Spring Break for everybody in the USA

Who:    Our family of 5, plus about 4.5 billion others

Result:  Total fun


Yup - Legoland was pretty cool, but it was just totally packed.  We got there about 11:30am, but our tickets allowed us to queue in at 3:45pm.  As expected, kids had a blast - they are not phased by crowds of gazillions.

First up, crazy jungle sculptures:

Then, build your own racecar and crash it down a hill:

Legos in water; awesome:

More cool sculptures:

And even some fun rides:

Another hungry sculpture:

All in all, it was a real good day.  We left at 7pm, grabbed a crazy expensive sandwich across the way (with 12% sales tax - geesh), and drove on home.  We left home at 10am, and got home at 11pm.  

Backup Power

I've been going through the mental exercise of trying to determine if we could use a generator as a backup source of electrical power for the house.  This led me to map out all of our circuits in the house, and then try to think of essential circuits, and alternative options for those essentials.  Here's a picture of my newly labeled main panel:

Doing all that research led me to think a backup generator seemed to be only half a good idea.  The other half of the good idea is a manual transfer switch.  Couple the two ideas together, and it was a good insurance policy for future power outages.

I found a Reliance Protran 2 manual transfer switch on Ebay for about half the price of new.  It was scratch and dent, but only one little flake of paint chunked off.  It has slots for 10 circuits, or up to 5 double pole circuits.

Wiring it up was a piece of cake.  The difficult part was simply deciding which circuits were the essential circuits.  That, and how I would use those circuits during certain times of day/night or summer/winter to balance the electrical loads.

The input of the transfer switch is this power inlet box.  I ran a big fat wire between this box and the transfer switch with the great help of Kiddo #2 - he pushed and I pulled.  The portable generator plugs into this exterior box, and powers up the transfer switch.  

The portable generator is this Generac XT8000e.  I bought it on Craigslist for about 60% of new, and it only had 1.2 hours of use on it.  It should deliver up to 8000 continuous watts and up to 10,000 watts of surge power.

I hooked up my Kill-A-Watt meter to the generator and found it produces 63 Hz and 118VAC with no load.  I've gotta ask my work buddy electricians about this frequency deviation.  I think it will work just fine.

Slabbin' Tree Trunks

Here are two cool videos my bro-in-law took of his friend's log getting sliced up to make a table top.  Pretty impressive...

Log Slice #1

Log Slice #2

The 3D Puzzle Dinosaur

Here is proud Kiddo #2 and his 3 dimensional puzzle.

It was an awesome gift from Grandma and Grandpa in MI.

Catching Up

Well I kind of lost track of this blog over the last 6 weeks.  Actually, there's not too much to catch up with.  Just some birthdays:

My birthday is up first.  There's brownies underneath all those candles.  I'm not sure why Kiddo #3 is so sad looking:

He's happier here.  Look at those muscles!

Kiddo #2 had a birthday late last month.

He was given Lego cupcakes!

No pictures, but worthy of mention:  Lovely Wife had her birthday on the last day of the month.  I gave her an electric tea kettle!  That has come in pretty handy on these cold wintery evenings.

My Journal

I thought I should print out my electronic journal just in case something gets erased, or lost.  I have it backed up on 3 or 4 hard drives, and a couple of thumb drives, and in the cloud, but it's still a fear.  So over the Christmas Break, I printed it out on hard copy.

It is just a little over 1000 pages long - the above picture is 527 pages of 2 sided print.  The journal  goes back to 1994.  I started journaling in that year but quit around May.  I took it up again in January of 1996 and have only missed 3 or 4 days since.

I used to write this journal in a square of a calendar, but you can't fit very much in a single square.  Thus, the early years are only about 35 to 40 pages per year.

I typed out all those old journals into Microsoft Word, and continued to keep the journal by typing in it every day.  Later years are 70 to 90 pages per year.

So this stack of paper is half my life - a front and back bundle of paper that measures 2 and 3/8 inches thick.

Someday maybe my kids will enjoy reading through it - - a little bit at a time.

One Last Post for the Year - Krumkake

Just an hour to sneak in one last post for the 2015 year. 

It's been a long time since we've made our favorite Christmas cookie: Krumkake: A Norwegian cookie of simple taste but addictingly good.

Here we all are just getting started.

The iron is still heating up.

Kiddo #3 had big eyes watching the production.

Halfway done.  Only one burned finger so far.

They turned out pretty good so I must say.  

This is Grandma Evie's grandmother's recipe