Usually, I don’t take blood in my coffee.

This morning though, I discovered my water dispenser has a sharp bit of which I was previously unaware.

Maybe the child safety thingy wasn’t to protect kids from hot water after all, maybe it was there to protect kids from the painful finger lacerations.

So I got a new water cooler recently. Excuse me, a new Water Dispenser. Nowadays they do hot, cold, and room temperature, so you can’t call them a water cooler any more. You know the things – metal and plastic, big water jug goes on top, place for a cup or glass, water comes out when you work the buttons or nozzles.

Anyhow, I do like the hot/cold/room temperature options. Hot is fantastic for making coffee, it’s very hot, like just a shade lower than boiling. I prefer to drink room temperature water, and the cold is available for guests. So far, so good.

Except every year they make the child safe protection stuff more insidious, more annoying.

I’m sorry but if parents are going to let little Johnny Dumbass play with the water dispenser, then little Johnny deserves the life lesson about hot water that he’s going to get. And for that matter, it’s also an excellent opportunity to learn about respecting the parents’ authority, assuming they at least told him not to screw with the water cooler.

But no – instead it seems society is bent on raising stupid children who will eventually grow up to become stupid (and litigious) adults. Nobody wants to take responsibility for raising their children, and so every damn thing has to become child-proofed and child-protected.

It just really agravates me that every morning I have to be inconvenienced trying to get my coffee, so that someone else’s dumbass kid doesn’t have to learn that hot water is hot (until they figure out how to defeat the safety thing.) Oh – and it’s not just for hot water – to save money, they made the hot valve also the room-temperature valve so I have to screw around with the safety device just to get a glass of water?

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That’s right, it’s Snail Pr0n! Just before lights-out tonight, I noticed Little Buddy had crawled ontop of Big Blue and was getting, shall we say, amourous with her.

Snail Pr0n!

A few days ago I spotted Little Buddy having his way with Speed Racer (whom I thought was a male…) Clearly there’s no question about Little Buddy being a bloke (maybe I should have named him Randy!) but until there are some eggs, I just don’t know for sure about the others.

I never really thought about it before – but the bit where a flash attaches to the top of a camera? They call that the Hot Shoe. It’s one of those things that you just sort of accept. Like apertures and diopters and f-stops – they’re just words and you learn the words and that’s that.

The Hot Shoe

But in fact there’s a reason that they call it a “hot shoe” – as opposed to just “shoe”, for example.

I discovered this while playing with an external flash. The bottom (“foot”) of the flash has little metal contacts that connect to the contacts on the camera’s hot shoe. When you push the shutter release, a connection is made internally that tells the flash to fire. So far, so good.

What makes it “hot” is that on some / many flashes, the entire electrical charge goes through there! Honestly, I never would have guessed that. I just figured there’d be a small, low-voltage signal that triggered the flash to fire. Nope! When the flash is charged, there could be 250 volts or more, waiting around the big pin in the foot of the flash.

Remember when I said I was playing with a flash? The flash had been charged up but then I opened it and took the batteries out. And at one point, the way I was holding it, my hand happened to be touching the “foot” when a finger brushed against one of the battery contacts (the ground contact of course).

Buh-ZAPPPPPP!

It bit me! Before that moment, I simply never would have imagined that a flash would run the full charge down and out the foot, into the camera, then back up into the flash.

That’s why they call it a “hot shoe”!

You know the hard sweet candies you sometimes see in a jar where they’re all welded together into a solid mass? The kind that you have to suck on for a long time because if you crunch them, the bits adhere to your teeth, and if you try to pry them loose with your tongue you cut your tongue to shreds on the sharp edges? Yeah, that’s the stuff I am talking about.

Recently I was at Golda’s Kitchen with my sister, and I picked up a couple Hard Candy kits, some flavour oils, and some colouring.

Making hard candy at home was an interesting experience. Basically, for only about twice the cost of buying hard candy at a shop, you can enjoy all the fun and excitement of dealing with a hot stove, a pot of boiling sugar, super-hot molten candy which is incredibly similar in every way to molten glass, then the super-happy-fun cleanup afterwards, and at long last, candy hunks with razor-sharp edges from being shattered apart with heavy tools. The package makes it sound fun and easy to make the candy mix, and depicts a woman and child enjoying the finished product. Do not let this trick you into thinking that the woman and child should enjoy making the candy together. I would not want to have a kid in the same kitchen, while making hard candy. Think, sweet tasty yummy delicious, boiling molten sticky danger.

If I sound like I’m being a jerky smart-ass, that’s because I am.

In fact, I really enjoyed making hard candy! I don’t have any kids around here to worry about (my house is not kid-safe, it is in fact a very dangerous place for the younger crowd) and it turns out the clean-up works best the way I like to clean up: Leave it soaking in the sink.

And with so many flavours and colours to chose from, you can have a lot of kooky fun. I control the Flavour! I control the Colour! (I also control the vertical and the horizontal, so watch out!)

The blue ones are cherry, green ones are banana, pink ones are sassafras, and purple ones are tutti-frutti. Tee-hee.

(the white stuff is icing sugar to keep them from sticking together)