V1 - Nerdhood Strikes Again!

So if you know me well, if it wasn't for my family and church, my life would revolve around trains and fountains. Well, I've hit a financial wall with my train effort, so I've moved onto some fountain efforts. I've created my first revision (there will be more) of a Laminar flow nozzle. What's that? In basic terms, it's a nozzle that when the water gets launched into the air, it is as clear as glass. (This idea, of course, came from the leap frog fountains at EPCOT). Over the years I've learned a bit on how they did it, what laminar flow is, and how to repeat it. I've found 2 companies that make these nozzles for the general public, but they want ~$1k for one. I made this first revision for about $40. Slightly more affordable.



Oh, just so you get an idea of what I want to do with this some day, go to http://www.wetdesign.com, enjoy their web site, but eventually wonder to Experiences then The DUBAI fountain. That's my favorite. I have 1 acre to start with, they used 53. I have a long way to go.

Yes we are still alive.

Sorry we haven't posted in a while. I'm sure we are the only ones living a hectic life at the moment....

Things, however, are going very well for us. We are still trying to get into a house of our own. The problem has been that we've found the perfect house, but the list of hoops/tasks/coordination/and such things is almost 4 months long. We found the house back in January, and we've been actively pursuing it sense then.

To give a general idea, it's a "Short Sale" (It is, but it's not, but it is), 85% remodeled home that we are picking up where the sellers left off. Their finances took a turn for the worst, so we're stepping in, but that makes for lots of fun lender hoops to jump through as well.

At the current moment, we have a closing date of April 30th, and we almost have all of the contractors lined up and blessed by the lender. (We have about $25,000 of repairs/improvements/finish work to do)

It's been quite the learning process. If you need to know anything about an FHA 203k Renovation Loan, just ask, we're getting to be quite fluent. Well, Em is. I just point people her way when they call me at work, she figures it out, then calls me and keeps me up to date.

I really want to post pictures of the home, but because we're not a private blog, and we are slightly concerned about 'cyber psychos', we won't. But if you want to see, let us know and we'll email you some.

I like being a nerd

So I heard about this on NPR today, and apparently the group wanted to do something different, so they got about 15 engineers to create a Rube Goldberg machine. None of the engineers were doing this as employment, they still all had their day jobs, but apparently they were having so much fun, and talking about it at work that at the end, they had over 60 engineers helping out. I'm pretty impressed. You can check out the news story somewhere at NPR.org.