Quote Monday Gets a Drink

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Evie: “When you get bigger, you sometimes need bigger clothes. Even pajamas! ::shrug:: It’s the circle of life!”

After our visitors left: “Now that they’re gone, we can mess up the house again!”

We were making a snowman:
Me: “We need to find some arms and eyes.”
Evie: “And we need to find some magic things!”

Unfortunately, we did not find any magic hats for our snowman.

Evie and I were playing:
Evie: “I need a drink.”
Me: “Wait a minute, we’re mermaids, can’t you just open your mouth and take a drink?”
Evie: “Daddy, you can’t drink sea water!”

::Oliver practicing with a cup::
Evie: “Everybody, clap for Oliver! He’s drinking it like a human!”

Vampire?

/ Shane / 3 Comments

At this point, Oliver has pretty much just given up on sleeping. Maybe he has been turned into a vampire.

I guess we won’t know until he gets teeth.

ThinkGeek for the Holidays

/ Shane / 4 Comments

If you recall, I blogged previously about a Harry Potter-style wand that can change the channel. I must be a sucker for any kind of wand related merchandise, because I can’t seem to get over it.

Check out this voice activated wand flashlight. Say “Lumos” to turn the light on and “Nox” to turn it off. Tell me that’s not cool??

Available in two styles!

Also, there is a Harry Potter dueling wand game, which is sort of like laser tag. I don’t think this is as cool as the spell-activated flashlight, but they have more styles!

Four choices this time!

If you prefer something a little more practical (or useful at work), ThinkGeek has non-Harry Potter related merchandise, such as Rebel Leader headphones, for that perfect Star Wars look:

Or some awesome medieval weapon pushpins:

I never get tired of looking at their stuff, and I look forward to getting the catalog the way you look forward to getting a magazine you subscribe to!

Death wants me bad

/ Shane / Leave a comment

I had a Final Destination* moment today.

I was taking a shower. I set the shampoo back on the little shelf that hangs off of the shower head. Somehow the shelf had slid out a little bit, so my shampoo caused a chain reaction knocking all of the other bottles out the back of the shelf and down to the tub. One of the items, a tube of face wash, landed squarely on the lever that controls the water temperature, knocking it to scalding. It then promptly wedged behind the lever, hindering my attempts to turn the water temperature down.

What did I do to piss off death??

*For those of you who haven’t seen Final Destination, it’s a movie about people who get off a plane just before it is going to crash. Because they escaped Death, he comes back for them in the form of the most elaborate, over-complicated (and easy to stop) scenarios the writers could come up with. In Death’s defense, I’m sure he gets tired of taking all the texting-while-driving car crash victims and saw this as his one opportunity to have some fun.

Caffeine Content

/ Shane / Leave a comment

The amount of caffeine in various items came up the other day, so I looked it up and was sort of amazed at what I found. I am including a table below of common items with caffeine. I found the table here, which I admit is not the most scientific site, but I double checked the figures against at least 5 other sources (this one had the best table). None of them are exactly the same, but that makes sense. For example, every type of coffee is going to be slightly different. So these seem to be in the ballpark of everything else I found.

Interesting things that I’ve learned since I started looking into this stuff:

  1. Decaffeinated coffee has a non-trivial amount of caffeine (this chart lists it as lower than other sources).
  2. Teas don’t list caffeine as an ingredient because they’re naturally caffeinated…decaffeinating them is the unnatural thing. (Okay, that one I knew already)
  3. Caffeinated teas are far less caffeinated than coffee. They actually don’t have a lot more caffeine than decaf coffee.
  4. The type of tea has a huge impact on how much caffeine they contain (this one makes sense, but I was surprised at the difference)
  5. Chocolate (especially dark) has a LOT of caffeine, and is a much bigger deal than tea (You know you’re not eating 1 oz at a time!).
  6. A glass of chocolate milk has a not-insignificant amount of caffeine!! No wonder your kids are crazy.
Double espresso (2oz) 45-100 mg
Brewed coffee (8 oz) 60-120 mg
Instant coffee (8 oz) 70 mg
Decaf coffee (8 oz) 1-5 mg
Tea – black (8 oz) 45 mg
Tea – green (8 oz) 20 mg
Tea – white (8 oz) 15 mg
Coca Cola (12 oz can) 34 mg
Chocolate milk (8 oz) 4 mg
Dark chocolate (1 oz) 20 mg
Milk chocolate (1 oz) 6 mg
Ben & Jerry’s Coffee Fudge Frozen Yogurt (8 oz) 85 mg