spugbrap’s blog

If you stick a bottle of Gatorade in the freezer for about 1.5-2 hours or so (time will vary, depending on size of Gatorade bottle (32oz was the size I had most recently), temperature of freezer, etc.), it turns into slush.

Flavored slush is fun, as evidenced by the long-lasting and continuing popularity of snow cones, Slurpees, Slush Puppies, etc.

If you leave it in the freezer for TOO long, it’ll turn into a bottle-shaped, flavored block of ice, which won’t come out of the bottle’s opening until it melts enough. So, don’t leave it in the freezer for too long, or the fun slushy treat will become a boring block of ice. :)

Over the weekend, my family and I went over to a friend’s house to carve pumpkins. I was a bit late, so by the time I got there, most of them were already done. Jena asked whether I wanted to carve a pumpkin, or a watermelon from her garden. At first, I was going to do a pumpkin, because I’d never heard of carving watermelons–at least not for making jack-o-lanterns.

But, then she sat down to try carving a watermelon, herself. It didn’t take long for us to realize why this was a great idea! Instead of scooping out pumpkin guts and throwing it in a bowl, we could scoop out the watermelon and eat it! So, I grabbed another watermelon, and proceeded to scoop out and eat the tasty insides.

When I was done, I had a hollowed-out green oval/cylinder shaped thing to work with. I sat for a few minutes, trying to think of something green to make it look like. My first thought was a Mountain Dew can, but I decided that it would be too hard to try and carve all of those letters into the small watermelon. Then, I thought of a turtle, and went looking around the house for turtle faces to imitate.

Luckily, Xander loves turtles, and I found plenty of possibilities. I finally settled on a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, from the cover of a video game. Most of the TMNT faces that I saw kind of needed visible teeth-separations to look good, but I found one that had a good enough facial expression without needing tooth detail.

I started by drawing on the watermelon with a pen, which allowed me to correct mistakes by wiping off the pen with a wet paper towel. I’m not very artistically inclined, so I really didn’t expect it to turn out very good. I was very close to giving up and going with a standard pumpkin carving style, rather than trying to make it look like something in particular. I also came very close to asking Xander to draw a ninja turtle face, for me, because that boy is a great artist, and I’ve seen some of his ninja turtle drawings before. But, I actually managed to draw a face that I was happy with.

Then carved it out with the pumpkin carving tools. I couldn’t decide whether to cut out the whole ninja turtle mask part, or to just cut the eyes out. Dallin suggested cutting out the eyes, then the whole mask, and then putting the eyes back into place with toothpicks. I knew that they’ve done the toothpick thing before, with pumpkins, so I trusted that he knew what he was talking about.

The final product turned out better than I thought it would! It’s easily recognizable as a ninja turtle, and I think I consider it my best pumpkin carving, ever. Jena’s carved watermelon turned out great, too! It’s cool to see this different color scheme: green with red inside, rather than the standard pumpkin orange with yellow inside.

Here are some close-up pictures of the carved watermelons, as well as some pictures of the watermelons next to the pumpkins that our respective families carved/painted:

We all had lots of fun, and look forward to doing it again next year! We will definitely be carving both pumpkins AND watermelons again.

Well, I lived up to the promise I made when I posted about the 7-Eleven + The Simpsons Kwik-E-Mart promotion — I visited the Kwik-E-Mart in Bladensburg, MD on 7/27/2007.

I almost didn’t get around to it, but I really wanted to go! Earlier in the month, I even tried to get my team, at work, to go as a combination weekly status meeting / team building exercise. But, I wasn’t able to get everyone on board with the plan. The main drawback was that it was over an hour away, under normal traffic conditions.

It was getting towards the end of the month, so Lacey and I drove up there with our 3 kids (Matthew, Skylar, Nikki), our friend Jena, and her son Xander. We didn’t even think about the fact that it happened to be opening day for The Simpsons Movie, until we were about half-way there. We were wondering if there would be anything special happening at the Kwik-E-Mart that day. As it turned out, there was…

When we got there, we took a bunch of pictures outside, then went in and took pictures of everything Simpsons-related that we saw. It was fun taking pictures of some of us standing next to the life-size Simpsons characters. There were lots of other people there, doing the exact same thing, too. It’s a good thing they had extra staff working during the Kwik-E-Mart promotion, because it enabled them to handle the high volume of customers pretty smoothly. We bought a few Squishees, half a dozen pink sprinkly donuts, and a bunch of hot dogs for lunch.

While we were taking pictures of everything, we ran across a man holding a large video camera, who was recording all kinds of things. We talked to him, at one point, and found out that he was recording video for Fox 5 News! He recorded us in several places, including Matthew and Xander getting their Squishees, Skylar and Nikki looking cute (I don’t remember exactly what they were doing), and me getting my 6 donuts out of the display case.

When we got home, I programmed the Tivo to record the 10 o’clock news, and the 11 o’clock news on Fox Channel 5. We actually watched the 10 o’clock news in realtime, hoping to see ourselves on TV. At around 10:55pm, they finally did a Simpsons segment, which was about 5 minutes long. We didn’t quite get the face time that I’d kinda hoped for, considering how much he actually recorded of us, but I know they had to condense their footage to fit within the 5 minute segment.

In any case, it was fun for us to see ourselves on the news on TV! I was looking into ways to get the video clip from my Tivo to my computer, but ended up finding it posted on the Fox 5 DC website. Woohoo! To watch it, yourself, see the links below.

Pictures:
Pictures from our trip to the Kwik-E-Mart

Video:

There are two ways to watch the Fox 5 News coverage of the Simpsons Movie opening/Kwik-E-Mart promo (in which we made brief appearances):

1. Download the 10MB .flv file to your computer (to view with your favorite media player application, if you’ve got the right codecs)

OR

2. View it in your web browser (from its original location, on myfoxdc.com)

If you look carefully, and especially if you pause at just the right moment, you can see all of us in this video clip. I have yet to find an easy way to extract just those frames from the .flv file, but hopefully I will get that done at some point.

Anyways, my hands getting donuts out of the display case, and my bright green shirt, can be seen at around 1:20 into the video (NOTE: if you’re watching it on the myfoxdc website, start timing *after* the horrible local advertisement).

From 1:27-1:31, you can see me, all 3 of my kids, Lacey, Jena, and Xander; we’re in the background, behind the kid who’s talking.

From an article on msn tv news (and every other AP affiliate):

Over the weekend, 7-Eleven Inc. turned a dozen stores into Kwik-E-Marts, the fictional convenience stores of “The Simpsons” fame, in the latest example of marketers making life imitate art.

Those stores and most of the 6,000-plus other 7-Elevens in North America will sell items that until now existed only on television: Buzz Cola, KrustyO’s cereal and Squishees, the slushy drink knockoff of Slurpees.
…

What an awesome promotion! I just wish more stores were getting the temporary face lifts. But I vow to attempt to visit the closest one (in Bladensburg, MD) sometime this month. To see tons of pictures of the real-life Kwik-E-Marts, check out the Simpsons Movie Kwik-E-Mart Mirror.

There’s also a sweepstakes going on, with the grand prize winner getting to be animated in an upcoming Simpsons episode.

Ever since Lacey and I saw a 2-page spread in a magazine, back in 2002-2003, showing a red Infiniti G35 coupe (with a spoiler), I’ve been in love with that car. When we went and test drove one, back then, we were very impressed. Ever since then, I’ve been wanting one, but they’re rather expensive, so I couldn’t justify it. Back in 2005, I bought my Nissan Altima, with the express purpose of reselling it in a couple years when I was ready to buy my G35. The idea was that I would be in a better financial position than I was at the time.

Well, I’m definitely not in a better financial position, but somehow I got it in my head, recently, that now was the time to buy my G35. I started researching prices and options, and decided I definitely wanted the coupe with a manual transmission, and it be either black or red, with a spoiler. For some reason, most of them are some shade of silver/gray/blue/goldish, and Lacey and I agreed that it had to be black or red. After doing some drives, researching how much I could reasonably get for the Altima, working the numbers to try and see if/how I could afford it, etc. I finally found a promotion that pushed me to go ahead and buy it (and fast!). A 12% off deal, which was about to expire. I talked to 2 different dealerships, and did some negotiating, and bought the car that day! It didn’t have a spoiler yet, but I paid for them to put one on. Here’s a picture before the spoiler:

Here it is with the spoiler, it really makes it look hotter to us: