marius

Baldur, I checked your profile and it says you have three followers. I KNOW you have many more than that! ; )

marius

Dear AuntieB,

It has been a while since your nephew delighted us with one of his wild cryptograms. My brain is getting rusty. matthew's 3D mahjong has helped, but I'm worried about the rust. What can I do?

Sincerely,
Gentle Listener

AuntieB

Gentlest Listener,
I would personally kick my nephew in the butt to motivate him a bit, but I have caught on to what he has been up to this week and shouldn't stop him.
Baldur has spent an inordinate amount of time baking.
He's calling it recipe development. In his files he had a recipe that he himself created for cinnamon oatmeal cookies. Though he claims they were quite delicious he never baked them any longer because he thought the amount of butter they contained was obscene.
This week he tried the recipe replacing 1/2 of the butter with canola oil, and said the cookie was actually much nicer with the substitution.
Auntie B doesn't remember ever trying the original but the new cookie is indeed quite wonderful.
Then he removed the pecans and the raisins from the formula and added crushed banana chips and dry roasted peanuts. Heavens! These are amazing!.
(Auntie B has a small plate of them in front of her right now).
Anyway he is still tinkering with the recipe, not being happy with the amount of banana flavor. Baldur has actually since ordered a bottle of banana extract online and anxiously awaits it's arrival.
He is calling these cookies :'Minkeys' after Inspector Clousseau's pronunciation of the word 'monkey' in the 'Pink Panther' movies.
Another addition he is toying with is a small amount of chocolate chips, but he is afraid of introducing too many different flavors.
I wonder if he would be interested in tinkering with a lemon meringue pie recipe next?
Anyway your Auntie B will try to coerce Baldur into doing a puzzle, meanwhile why don't you try online Othello?

http://www.freegames.ws/games/boardgames/othello/othello.htm

Auntie B loves this game and taught it to her nephew when he was quite young.
Do let me know how everything turns out because Auntie really does care.

Auntie B

Dragon

Dragon had never heard of Vaseline glass before. It's certainly interesting but I don't own any.
I now have 3 strands of beads hanging in my kitchen window. The sun is muted today but they still have a rather beautiful glow and I'm very pleased with the way they are turning out. This is quite an addictive past-time and I can see why Baldur frequents the bead stores and online bead companies. We actually have vertical blinds so I simply use a small gold ring to hang the bead strands with, I can remove a single blind and put the ring over it before re-attaching it to it hook. So far so good! I stuck to pretty much all glass too on my beads (I just think they catch the sun better than plastic). I've found Wal-mart to be a good source of cheap glass beads but they don't have a great selection. Micheals has a fantastic selection but they are prohibitively expensive so I don't buy much there even though they are beautiful (Dragon is very cheap). I'll have to check out that website Baldur goes to, is it Fire Mountain Beads?

Dragon

Oh marius, here's one of my favorite word games.
http://www.bigfishgames.com/online-games/2164/wordzen/index.html

belladonnis

Baldur the beads do sound beautiful!!! This really gives me and idea! I have a deep entry way or atrium (not sure if atrium is correct) to my front door. Thats one of my favorite features to my house. It big enough that I have a iron loveseat and chairs on one wall with iron work and sconces that hold candles above and on the other wall I have a stone waterfall with various water plants surrounding it and above this I have these beautiful iron work mirrors. Anyway my front door was nothing but glass and I love it but anyone could see in to part of my living room. I covered the glass with this film that looks like stained glass.....took me forever to find something I liked.....something unique since I didnt want to just put a curtain up over it. My dining room window also looks out to the entry way but I didnt want to put a curtain there either nor did I want to put a film over the window because it really does constrict the light coming in. The beads sound like the perfect thing to hang there! Thank you for the idea!

marius

AuntieB, many thanks for bringing us up to speed on Baldur's activities and for the game too. Dragon thanks for your game suggetion and gotta say, I'm getting such a chuckle out of your bead-stringing! Tee hee, bet before long ALL of TD will be stringin' beads and chatting! (Bead-strining hasn't happened to marius yet, but it's tugging at her. Oh yes, tuggin'.) ; )

Going to check the games very soon! Thanks!

belladonnis

Marius I saw from my updates that I have a few followers myself, I didnt know what it ment. At first I thought.....Oh no what have I done for TD to have me followed!LOL

marius

Tee hee ... there goes belladonnis, out to buy some beads!

While she's gone ... yall might enjoy this youtube my 82 year old neighbor sent. It's called, "Don't Bungee Jump Naked." (If Polenta watches this, the lady speaks in PURE Southern accent and pronounces the word 'naked' as 'nekkid.') Got tears in the eyes laughter with this one. Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1_W0LCHwK4

Dragon

hehehe marius. I love the last line "I laughed so hard my water broke and I wasn't even pregnant"
I'm gonna have to steal that one.

marius

Glad you liked that Dragon!

And, perhaps you and Baldur, (and any other bead-stringers) might enjoy post #158 on ThinkWrite XXXV! ; ) It's a quote and the minute I read it, I could "see" all the 'stringers-of-beads' so clearly!

Baldur

Dragon, it's Fire Mountain Gems and Beads, here is the site:

http://www.firemountaingems.com/shopping.asp?skw=KW10WMV18N059QB&WT.fmg_linksection=65V3NB 6UT6GM&WT.mc_id=CW100203

and yes that was very funny, it took a full minute for the 'Southern dialect' software in my brain to kick in. Once it did however I really enjoyed her story.

Thank you for giving me the comment number on the ThinkWrite XXXV discussion. I really don't follow ThinkWrite, it's too much to keep track of.
It reminds me of ancient Baldur history. Once upon a time I enjoyed reading Star Trek novels and was up to date on them through at least the 200th one published.
There was the original series STTOS and Next Generation STNG... great 2 books a month. Then came Deep Space 9 STDS9, Voyager STV, Enterprise STE. Then a series based on Starfleet Academy, one on a Captain Lounge at StarFleet, one on the alternate universe evil Star Empire etc etc.
Then they started releasing better novels in hardcover format, which would eventually get re-released in softcover. If you were a die hard fan however you wanted to read it right away.
What a mess!
I believe there are other storylines now as well.
In any case there were dozens of books coming out each month.
Does Baldur just pick and choose from those for his reading?
No, I stopped reading them altogether. It just annoyed me that the franchise would do this.

Baldur

belladonnis, I had a similar privacy problem. The front door of Chez Baldur is mostly glass, plus it has glass sidelights amounting to a 6 foot wide window into the center of our house. We tend to walk around naked in the house in warm weather. Several times each evening Robert would turn on the stairwell light and go downstairs into the garage to get a drink.
Illuminated it must have been quite a show for any passing neighbor. There is always someone walking a dog coming down the street, we are not that far into the wilderness.
What I found was a product at Michael's that you paint on the glass that simulates stained glass. It also peels off like a window cling when you are tired of it. I cannot for the life of me remember the product name.
It is sold individually by color in plastic squeeze bottles. They also sell peel and stick leading strips should you desire them.
According to the method they recommend you paint the design on a little teflon sheet that they also sell. You allow the paint to dry and then you peel and stick it on the glass, later outlining it with 'lead'
What I did was to outline a geometric pattern on the glass with the leading and then using the squeeze bottle of 'clear' glass paint I covered the surface with tiny scribbles (the paint goes on opaque but dries transparent). The overall effect looked when I was done looked like textured privacy glass, and didn't stop any light at all.
From outside you can see shapes but no detail.
I suppose if one stood stark naked right against the glass it would be quite obvious, but for privacy for the interior of a house it is perfect.

Baldur has since also hung beads over the sidelights.

Baldur

Here it is.... 'Gallery Glass'

http://www.michaels.com/art/online/displayProductPage?productNum=cp0002

Qsilv

http://www.beadcompany.com/

you can click "flash" (because otherwise ThinkDraw wouldn't draw for you) and by just hovering your cursor over the 3 next choices, see a couple fairly boring photos of the place... but if you click "non-flash" then the main picture shows some strung-bead curtains -- are those sort of what you're making?

(I quite like the side beads on these pages.)

Baldur

Mine aren't so regularly patterned, but yes.

matthew

Seems nobody wants my cookie since I came out of Dragons butt with it so I thought I would pop in here... but after coming out of a butt, I really don't wish to discuss beads...

belladonnis

LLLOOOLLL!!!!!

matthew

Thank you, thank you... I will be here all night folks...

matthew

Gotta go now...