Busy Body and I used to have very exciting lives before we had children. She worked in CSI and I was an engineer in technology development. Don't ask me what I did, it was top-secret, classified, super-important stuff. Busy Body's work also required a lot of decorum and discretion to carry out the investigations and send those bad guys to jail. To counteract the tedium and up-tightedness we had to put up with every day, we used to email each other all the time on a variety of subjects. One stretch was a series of quizzes based on childhood memories. My favorite one was: how many doors were in the house where we grew up? I won that one (actually, it wasn't a contest, but I remembered them all and wanted some credit for retaining that useless information because Busy Body usually corners the market on it). Busy Body has the results of that somewhere...she used to print out the emails and delete them so it wouldn't take up important space on her computer at work. It sounds silly now, but it used to make laugh and laugh in my dilbert cubicle. Silly in the same way describing some of the things I do now would seem--for instance, Bubba is obsessed with a lot of electro-mechanical devices, usually robots, but this month, it happens to be hover-craft. He has recruited no less than three grown-ups to help him build one.
The first recruit is the neighbor boy who comes to vacuum the pool once a week...he will be starting college to study engineering next year and he couldn't resist helping Bubba for the better part of two hours with the leaf-blower, a pool ring, a pool raft, a small dump truck, and a toy car. They considered their experiments a success, although it wasn't strong enough to ride on, which is what I think Bubba's ultimate goal is.
The second recruit was dad, who was home for a couple of days, and they took two paper plates, cut four small, same-size holes in one, and one the diameter of the hair dryer nozzle in the other plate and then taped them together with a short "skirt" made from a plastic grocery bag. This worked, but it was also small-scale.
I was the third recruit and have failed miserably. We went to a science birthday party (how timely!) where there was a hover board powered by a large motor that all the kids got to sit on and ride. After riding it, Bubba examined it and said, "Mom, you could make this!" Maybe someday, but in the meantime while he is waiting for me to deliver, he has designed a pretend hovercraft big enough for him and Stump and Samantha to journey upon and I have been demoted from inventor to videographer/photographer. The hover craft is a small toddler bed mattress, with an office chair back turned so the armrests form rails, onto that, a small cat scratching post is set with a small fan hooked over the top and a box fan behind it. Bubba stands by the post to manipulate the fans. He says he is the "spirit." Stump is proclaimed the captain and sits in the front. Samantha is the princess passenger and sits securely, sideways, in the middle. Spirit starts the fans and off they go, warding off fish attacks and marveling at the wildlife and scenery.
Here is the magical transport...so much more exciting than a cubicle, yes?Posted by The Editor.
That looks like a promising start to a brilliant engineering career.
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