make a cartesian diving squid in a bottle

Get a fishing lure squid, bonus! Most of them glow in the dark, they are really easy to find!

Get yourself an eyedropper, this one was glass I'm sure a plastic one would work, you just may have to add a weight or something to the bottom

pull the squid over top of the eyedropper, it may take a lot of wiggling, as the rubber eyedropper tip is a lot wider than the squid head, I found it easier to oil the squid and turn it inside out, rolling it onto the eyedropper, being sure to wash it before you put it into the water.

Squeeze the bulb of the eyedropper and get about enough water to fill just the bulb, this may take some trial and error, to get enough water that his head just comes above the surface

This is what it should look like to be neutrally buoyant, prepare for awesome. (the term neutrally buoyant brought to you by my dive instructor Neil, and the letter E, for Ed, Ed owns the dive shop, Ed and Neil are good peeps.

fill the water to the very top of the bottle and put the lid on TIGHT. Squeeze the bottle and play with your new diving squid friend! He's even awesome at night, I contemplated giving it to my daughter to play with as a night time toy, but was reminded by my much wiser (and older) husband that it probably wasn't a well thought out idea, as she is 2.5 years old.

**OH! I originally did this with a 2L pop bottle (yes, pop, I'm Canadian) but it was really hard to make him dive, so I swapped it to a 500ml bottle and that fixed the problem

So obviously the 'science' in this is buoyancy and density, if it really boggles your mind you can read more about traditional cartesian divers here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_diver yeah yeah it's a wiki link but it seems to have all the right info. 

Go, be with squid, be with bliss

butter dish

these things are ALL over pinterest so I figured I'd share mine, My *awesome* mom found it in an antique store and I LOVE it.
 LOVE LOVE LOVE it, I've taken 80 pictures of it just because I love my butterdish so much.
I need a life.

yes, there is butter in it.

Make Money flowers on a money tree!

Sometimes money as a gift is thoughless and lame, but sometimes it isn't. This is one of those times that it totally wasn't. I'll leave the details of WHY I gave my husband money for his birthday out and leave you with HOW I gave my husband money for his birthday without it being...well, an envelope of money.
I give you the MONEY TREE!
Yep, it's a real life money tree in full bloom (and pajama clad toddler)

Here are the 'blossoms'

It's three bills, in this case, three fifties, I'll demonstrate the fifties because they're way prettier than the brown 100s. Wow I'm noticing now that that one in the middle is way longer than the rest, fail

This was the 'after' photo of when we were unfolding the moneys, I took the pictures backwards so you could see the fold marks.

First, fold the bill in half long wise, so you have a center line to follow. I'm canadian, I write center center, not centre.

Fold the left and right lengths of the bill inwards, about a half inch, it's good to do them all at the same time, as to make all the petal lengths the same, which I clearly did not do on that one flower

Next, fold the corners in to the middle line

Then fold again longwise

That's it, now do that with two more bills and lay them on top of each other.

Take some thin wire, I think this is a 36 gauge floral wire, and wrap it around the center. Then, fan out the petals, bend them and fiddle with them so they stay open to look nice.

There you have it, a money flower!