when life gives you rainbows

Share them.

The second one shows the double rainbow more clearly.

While this one reveals a portal to a magical world.

don't go breaking my top

Santa Claus brought me a Whirl-o top: 

It has an LED that lights up when it spins. 

It has a tin gizmo that you flick with your wrist to get the top spinning. 

It launches itself from this gizmo when it gets going fast enough. 

Until today, the LED lit when the top got spinning and went off when the top slowed down. 

After a spectacular launch earlier today, 

the LED started lighting when the top was stationary and turning off when it got moving. 

The top glowed on the kitchen table for a few hours. 

Soooo, after trying to fix it by launching it a couple score times, 

I decided I would have to put on my big engineer glasses and 

take it apart. 

After locating it online so I could show y'all, 

I noticed an 800 number on their website. 

I decided to call and ask, 

expecting to get a bored order fulfillment clerk who would think I was a Class A Idiot 

for thinking they might care to help me fix a $10 toy. 

Instead, I got an excited person who was quite interested in what had gone wrong. 

He explained it to me in some detail and told me 

what I needed to do to get the top functioning again. 

The second hardest part was finding a tiny Philips head screwdriver 

(which appears to have gone missing from my eyeglass repair kit.

 I decided to go ahead and use a tiny flat head screwdriver. 

Don't faint.) 

I got the three tiny screws out. 

After some fiddling and a few test drives 

(cleverly NOT putting the screws back in until I had verified the fix), 

I found the middle spot where the guy had told me the tiny spring fitted. 

The top then returned to its customary behavior. 

Then came the hard part, 

which was getting the screws back in properly. 

This top has always worked amazingly well 

(the all-tin ones spin longer, but the LED model is way cooler). 

It has had hard daily use from most of the members of my family, 

who are a little jealous that I got the coolest toy for Christmas this year. 

I can now say that they have wonderful tech support. 

The Retro Space Blaster is coming out soon, 

and will certainly be on my wishlist to Santa this year. 

ta da!

A few weeks ago, I was looking to update my celery spread.

I'd been spreading plain tahini on celery, but I wanted something that spread more easily. I also wanted a little saltiness.

I mixed the tahini with a little lemon juice to brighten it, and thinned it with a little water to make it a nice, spreadable consistency.  I added salt bit by bit, tasting as I went. I added more lemon juice, more water, more salt and stirred and stirred.

When my new spread was pretty tasty, I thought I could do a lot with this basic sauce. I could spice it up. I could add parsley and olives. I could cut the salt, thin it, sweeten it a bit, and serve it over fruit.

I was really proud of my invention.

Right up until the moment I realized that I had just painstakingly reinvented hummus.