Day 267: Make A Paper Jetpack

     If I had known about this when I was younger, I'd probably would have burnt down the house by now.

     The video may be a bit on the cheesy side, but the guy does a good job of explaining how to make the rocket thing. So I did as he said and I built one, and I nearly lit my entire desk ablaze because I get a little trigger happy with lighters. Fortunately I came out unscathed. I live to do something idiotic another day!

Day 266: Tin Can Radio

     Here's another project that didn't work out at all. We've all seen those tin can radios. Those soup cans that are connected by fishing wire that transmit messages to fellow soup can enthusiasts. The primitive walkie talkie took approximately 40 seconds to construct, but took well over a half hour for me to realize that it wasn't going to work. Sean and I took turns calling each other via can from opposite sides of the living room, but it was too hard to tell whether or not our messages were traveling through the line or not. So I positioned myself outside on the driveway and talked through the line that led inside the open door of the house and to Sean who was still in the living room. The background noise was blocked by the house, which was good, but my neighbors who were out playing basketball gave me a few puzzled looks, which was embarrassing. Still, I tried to communicate with the makeshift telephone but it just wasn't happening. Finally, I gave up and went back to using my normal cell phone.

Day 265: CD And Toothpaste

     This is the last time I take advice from a friend of a friend of a friend. I was told that the application of toothpaste would fix any scratch, dent and mark on a CD. So I followed the instructions from some YouTube and carefully coated my copy of an old skateboard DVD that had gotten scuffed up over the years. Things got messy quick as I rubbed the paste in. After I rinsed the disk and let it air dry, I found that there was still a cloudy film of paste covering the CD. So I rinsed it again and dried it with a towel. Once it dried for the second time, I popped it into the player only to discover that it worked just as badly as it did before. In fact, I think the stupid toothpaste and towel drying inflicted more damage than anything. Stupid!

Day 264:Fresh Ground Coffee

     I was wondering through the isles of the grocery store like I always seem to do whenever I cant think of a challenge to try when I came to a stop at the coffee grounds isle. I stood in front of a wall of  coffee ground flavors. There was everything from pumpkin spice to french vanilla to some sort of chocolate flavor. It was pretty awesome, and a tad bit overwhelming as I struggled to choose just one flavor to go with. In the end, I went with the french vanilla beans. I filled my little bean bag with the flavored beans then dumped them into the store's coffee grinder just like how it was depicted in the illustration. The machine spat the grounds back into the bag and I was pleasantly surprised when I dove in for a whiff. The aroma was enticing especially compared to the smell of that crap coffee I've been drinking lately. I was pleasently surprised again at home once I sipped the fresh brew. That was some good coffee, too bad it was also some expensive coffee.

Day 263: Pest Control

Through BEE-ing Nice

     Without going into too much detail, I'd like to talk about our little pest problem. See, we've got a beehive inside one of the walls of our house. The bees have been getting inside and started dying all over the damn place. So my dad and I came up with a contraption that seemed pretty awesome. First, we taped saran wrap over the lights in the kitchen cause that was their main entry point. Then we fastened our homemade bee catcher to the hole in the house were the bees were living. We duct taped an old planter bucket to cover the entire hole. The bucket had a long, clear tube that connected it to the 2 liter bottle that contained a mixture of sugar water and bee attractant. My dad told me that bees cant fly once the're covered in the sugar water, which means that they are totally hopeless if they fall into our trap. I sustained a bee sting right on the top of the head while I tried to install the bucket trap (nicknamed the "through bee-ing nice" bucket) but puff levels were high that day so I survived. The two of use were ecstatic about our project. We showed everyone that came over the inner workings of it and watched them as they admired it in awe. The only problem was, it didn't work very well.Only a handful of bees actually made it to the bottle to die. We were a little disappointed till we discovered that many of the bees were trying to flee through the holes in the kitchen lights. Luckily, the saran wrap blocked them and with the lights on, they all died a brutal and horrifying death. =)

Day 262: Dry Ice Bombs

Good luck finding any piece of this puppy

     I'm still surprised that the lady at King Soopers actually allowed Mouse and I to buy all that dry ice in the first place. Boys with dry ice is bad news in every instance. We knew it was dumb and dangerous, but that wasn't about to stop us. So we gathered the materials and set up our launch pad in the middle of a deserted parking lot. We crushed up chunks of the dry ice and threw them into the water bottle. Then I poured the water in after the ice and Mouse capped it with the lid. Both of us rushed away and waited for a bang. But when the bottle refused to blow, we became skeptic about the whole thing. We tried again with a new bottle and a heap-load more dry ice and water. I kept at a distance of about 10 feet, a distance I thought was safe. The plastic seal was crackling under the pressure but it was still holding together. I took a step closer out of curiosity. Right then, the pressure had become to great for the bottle to contain. That's when I learned just how dangerous and stupid this challenge was. A single cacophonous shot rang from where the bottle once stood like a shotgun. The blast echoed through the vacant lot and winded me. There was no trace of a plastic bottle, only the back spray of water on the asphalt. Mouse and I caught each other's eye and ran for the car. It was an overload of adrenaline as we sped away from the scene. I can't promise that I won't try this challenge again, but I can safely say that I wont be standing so close to the explosives next time. I enjoy my ears too much for that.

Day 261: Dictionary

     With all this schoolwork and all these blog posts I've been doing lately, you'd think that I be a seasoned veteran with words by now. Unfortunately, that's not the case. My vocabulary isn't up to par. That's why I've decided to take on the daunting task of actually reading the dictionary. That's right. I went to the thrift store and bought the fattest dictionary I could find just for this challenge. So far, what I do is read it as if it really was a book. If I come to a word that I don't know, I highlight the word so I can later write it in a notebook that I will study from. Honestly, I don't know if I have the will to make it though the entire book, but I just plan on taking it word by word and see how far I get. If all goes well, I'll finally know what the hell pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism is.