Just don't throw them at the windows.

We made a ladder-golf set! It was stinkingly easy. And kind of fun; like k'nex for adults. We used the great instructions found here, and have enjoyed many a game thus far. In the making:

Bits and pieces (= fun.)

Ta-da!

The "bolos" or whatever you call them (nunchucks?) are made out of nylon rope and two golf balls. Drilling a hole in the golf balls was a potential problem; the instructions use a drill press (we just bought a lawn mower--we don't have a drill press). The Mr. gave it a try with his hand-held drill, which, but for the added risk of drilling through a finger, worked pretty well. Then you throw the nunchuck-things at the ladders and try to get them wrapped around the rungs. It's fun. Honest. So after he set out to make these things, we've been seeing ready-made sets everywhere; however, we still have yet to see one that's cheaper than this was to make...

Oops (I guess?)

So we had some excitement yesterday afternoon. The Mr. was out in the backyard eating weeds (or weed-eating, to make him sound less like a goat), and I was making potato salad in the kitchen. Cue sudden and loud WHAP noise, which caused me to look toward the back yard, the Mr. to put down the weed-eater and stare at the house, and the Dog to leave the vicinity. We watched, mouths agape, as large spidery cracks spread in spokes across one of the plate-glass doors in the family room. We both went through a few stages of "Whoa, what?," followed by "Aaaigh! Keep the dog out!", to "Hey, that's kind of cool-looking" once we figured out it was the outside pane of two and that it wouldn't be exploding into shards inside the house. What actually did it, though, is still kind of a mystery. The Mr. thinks the weed-eater may have kicked something up, which is a definite possibility, but he was pretty far away; we've also had a couple of birds smack into these windows, so I guess there's that, though you'd think if a bird hit the window that hard he'd be lying there on the patio seeing stars. Some pictures:

I took those yesterday evening, a couple of hours after it happened. It's actually still cracking this morning--every couple of minutes I hear another little "pop." The Mr. criss-crossed the outer side with packing tape in the hopes of keeping it in bigger pieces, should it fall out of the frame. We read somewhere online that some kinds of safety glass can withstand storm winds without falling out of their frames if they're cracked like this--here's hoping that's the kind we have. Anyway. The glass guys are coming today to see what it is they'll need to do. As long as it doesn't fall out, it's kind of neat-looking--we had some friends by yesterday who hadn't seen the house and actually thought it was crackled on purpose. We were like, "of course it is."