Thursday, June 3, 2010

Oh Happy Day... Part 1

Yes, today was a happy day, because I knocked two large items off the Mother Load, and it involved one of my great passions in life... organizing.

Since we're winding down our school year, (have I mentioned how happy I am about that lately?) I have a bit more free time.  Which is a good thing, since I had to place a call to DSHS...


 ... meaning a stink-wad of time on hold.  And I don't have a speaker-phone.  So this was my MacGyver solution to 47 minutes of wait-time.  What you see is an el cheapo voice changer Gunnar requested for his birthday last year (year before?), with the microphone sitting on the tiny speaker of my cordless phone.  You can, of course, just make your voice louder, or you can change the setting to Alien.  Or Monster.  (It's a laugh a minute at the Grasshopper house.)

Since we were dealing with the government, I set it to Monster.  Left it on the table.  Made lunch.  Ate lunch.  Cleaned up the dishes and played some solitaire before a live body came on the phone.  And told me she couldn't possibly answer my question.  And gave me another 800 number to call.

These are the times that make sane people go postal try moms' souls.

That was not the happy part of the day.  The happy part of the day involved a great deal of purging and organizing.  Woo-hoo!

I didn't get any pics yet, so I'll post more tomorrow (when I can take them in daylight).  In the meantime, here's a teaser...


... see the boy?  He can stay.  The thing he's holding?  Not so much.

That is a salt dough model of the ocean floor that we made back in 2008.  Not bad, yah?

That's a volcano erupting, at the top right.  A river runs from a lake to the sea, top left.  After the shallow continental shelf the sea-floor slopes down to a deep trench, then back up to the abyssal plain, with black smokers 'erupting', showing sea-floor spreading, and lastly an underwater mountain range.

Nice.

But a picture is so much easier to keep than the real thing!

And there's more... tomorrow.

7 comments:

Choate Family said...

Did you get a chance to use the monster voice?

Herding Grasshoppers said...

HA HA HA! That's what I should have done!

Ruby said...

Oh yeah! I could really use one of those voice changer thingies. Then I can just talk in my end nice and calm and feel virtuous but the body on the other end gets me growling. Love It!
Great that you are able to ditch some of the old projects. Storage is always a problem here but fortunately none of my kids have been horders (unlike daddy!)

The Hibbard Family said...

I love the MacGyver contraption! That's great! And, I have been adopting the same mentality - pictures are definitely much easier to keep!

Herding Grasshoppers said...

Maybe I should clarify...

the voice changer was on the phone just to amplify the sound, so I could HEAR when someone finally answered, without having the phone pressed to my ear for 47 minutes. *sigh*

I used my normal voice. That is, my normal I-am-really-ticked-off-by-your-incompetence voice.

melanie said...

Wow. What an excellent use of your son's wondrous 'toy'! Makes my elbow hurt just to think about being on hold for most of an hour (well, actually my elbow does hurt... from the paint I was NOT going to roll or spray today...) ;-)

Well done! ~ I'm eager to see more of your decluttering. I have a whole house to simplify before/as we move...

The dB family said...

"..so I set it to monster." I started laughing out loud (during Peach's voice lesson. Good thing they're downstairs and I was upstairs). Great job on the cleaning and purging! I can hardly wait to get started here, but the gardens are still calling my name.

Blessings!
Deborah