Not So Brave

So long story short, er...as short as I can make it. I am driving down the road and a mouse comes up from the hood, looks at me through the windshield and retreats back under the hood. I, imagining he is going to come in through the gas pedal and crawl over my sandalled foot, pull over and jump out. My mother, who is following me in her car, pulls over.

The mouse pops back out in time for her to see it. Plan 1: make noises inside the car to scare it out...we hit the dashboard. Plan 2: open the hood. We can't figure out how because we both are basically too scared to stick our hands under the popped hood to find the latch. Plan 3. Lure him out with a spoonful of yogurt ( my breakfast while driving that morning). Plan 4: turn the car back on. That works!

The mouse leaps from the car near our feet. I run, screaming like a maniac. Mom reaches through the window and just keeps honking my horn to scare it, yelling "get back in the car and drive, now" over and over. During which time, the mouse is residing directly between her feet, unbeknownst to her. I am physically unable to speak, freaked out the mouse is going to crawl over her sandalled foot, and I just keep pointing, she keeps honking and yelling (my 4 year old is strapped in his seat yelling, "I want to see the mouse, why cant I see the mouse, I never get to see anything"...over and over).

The mouse, to escape the chaos, runs up the back tire into the rear of the car. I am now close to being late to pick my daughter up at camp. So, I hop in and drive down the road weaving, like I am trying to throw Bruce Willis from the hood of my car (this is twice in this blog I have aged myself by pretending Bruce Willis is still an action star) and then drive on the center line bumps trying to shake him out.

Long story short, don't know where the mouse is and now I have yogurt streaks across my window. Yep, forgot about the yogurt and turned on the windshield wipers. Ironically, we were returning home after seeing Brave.

How to Make Jewelry Using a Broken Sonicare

I've had this bottle of Lisa Pavelka's Magic-Glos UV resin and wanted to try it as a coating over my fabric covered cabochons that I use in the new frame flaring tool. However, living in Seattle, inevitably it would be raining outside on the day I wanted to use it, and therefore I could not set it outdoors to cure (ironically, as I write this, it is a beautiful, sunny day).

Our Sonicare broke a few weeks ago and was sitting on the counter waiting for us to figure out how to dispose of it when I realized that it has a UV light in it. The Sonicare has a 10 minute UV brush cleaning cycle, coincidentally, the same amount of time it takes to cure the resin. My "create recklessly mode" clicked on and off I went to see...can I cure UV resin with a Sonicare?

Well you can indeed! I simply removed the molded plastic tray from the door, lined it with foil and laid it flat on the table. Although it was awkward to close as I was using the whole body of the unit as the door since I wanted the door itself to lay flat (allowing the resin to stay level), in 10 minutes I had cured resin.

A UV lamp made for such resins is not too expensive, generally under $30, but what's the fun in that!

I can't imagine a scenario that this would have any safety precautions, but it certainly is not used as intended by the manufacturer, so try it at your own risk. : )