For the first time last week I got to see an Elio in person. To recap, the Elio is a two-seater (tandem) vehicle that drives like a car but, because it has less than four wheels, is legally classified as a motorcycle. It has a traditional gasoline engine under the hood, and due to the vehicle’s aerodynamics combined with its low (1,200 lb) weight, it gets 84/mpg. It also has a five star safety rating. The Elio, designed and built here in the United States, will go on sale in 2016 for $6,800. If you want to read more about… (read more)

Susan had a business meeting last week in Ft. Worth, so I decided to take some vacation time and spend the week with her down in Texas. I’m not sure why they decided to have a meeting in the one place that’s hotter than Oklahoma right now but they did, so during the day while Susan was at work I decided to cool off by visiting some of Ft. Worth and Arlington’s thrift stores and antique malls. Ho-ly crap! Ft. Worth and Arlington have some amazing thrift stores and antique malls! After two days of shopping I made myself stop… (read more)

Last month my family and I took a 2,800 mile road trip where we drove from Oklahoma to Iowa, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. On the last night of our vacation we visited to the Mall of America in Minnesota, and while we were in the mall we visited the Peeps store. My souvenir for the entire trip was a blue coffee mug from that store that said “Inside We’re All The Same,” underneath five bunny Peeps. The next morning we packed all our bags into the car (with the gift bag containing my mug on top) and drove 800… (read more)

The massive amounts of rain we’ve received in Oklahoma over the past month has had an affect on us. After the water level in the pond behind our house rose significantly, We’ve seen several displaced snakes up near the house, for example. The mosquitos are bad this year from all the standing water and will continue to be bad throughout the summer, I’m sure. Also, recently, I’ve noticed water seeping in to the garage when it rains. The concrete is only wet about a foot into the garage and not enough to damage anything, but long term this seems like… (read more)

Whenever I visit White Water Bay, I think about the water. I recently read that there are half a million gallons of water in the park’s Wave Pool alone. Between the Activity Pool and the Lazy River, I’d guess that’s over a million gallons. Add in all the other rides and there’s probably one and a half million gallons of water throughout in the park. Upon entering I’m blinded as the sun reflects off everything blue. What to do first? Ride the rides? Slide the slides? For me, it’s the Lazy River. The Lazy River is a long and winding… (read more)

Last night I found an old copy of robohara.com on CD. Back before I ran WordPress (which I installed in 2005), I had my own blogging system I cobbled together with a bunch of poorly written ASP and PHP scripts. The one (only?) good thing about that old system was that all the entries were stored in a separate HTML file. Based on that I was able to open up the files in Chrome, manually copy the text of each individual entry, and paste them into WordPress. I started on this early this morning before work. Before starting I disabled… (read more)

When I was a kid I had this toy called the Mighty Men and Monster Maker. It allowed you to mix and match head, torso, and leg plates of various monsters (and a few super heroes) and create crayon rubbings of them. Because this thing had so many different little pieces it is very expensive on eBay (often going for between $50 and $100) and very rarely has all the pieces, much less the box. I found an essentially complete one at a garage sale Saturday for $2. Shall we? Here’s the box of the Mighty Men and Monster Maker.… (read more)

I visit a lot of garage sales from the comfort of my car. When I pull up if all I see are clothes and baby toys, chances are I’m going to visually scan what I can from the street while slowly rolling by and taking my chances. On the other hand, if I pull up and see toys, computer stuff, books, or movies, chances are I’ll probably pull over and stop. And if I see your front yard full of giant metal letters, I’ll definitely stop, if for no other reason than to hear the story. The proud owner of… (read more)

Susan recently installed Roadtrippers on her phone. You tell the app where you’re headed, it figures out where you are, and based on that it shows you points of interests along your route. On our test run of the app, Roadtrippers informed us that we were only 75 miles away from the world’s largest can of Coke. An hour later in Emporia, Kansas, we exited the turnpike, followed a big road that led to a smaller road that led to a dirt road, and found ourselves staring at an old silo painted to look like a can of Classic Coke.… (read more)