Repair of Baby Toys, Recycling and Economies of Scale

This Easter, Dorothy and I were taking a walk with the kids and we stopped in the local Walgreen's to get something, I forget what. While wandering around I stumbled onto these rather cute little toys. They float and when you touch the contacts on the bottom, the quack or ribbit a few tunes. I showed on to the kids in the stroller and their little faces lit up so we got the frog and the duck.
The kids, and Charlotte especially, really really liked the toys. Charlotte was the first to figure out how to light up the frog. (She really likes her frogys). Of course, this meant that the frog was the first to die. It only took a few weeks to do that, so Dorothy went back to the store to see if they still had some. She bought their last frog.
I did a search on the net and found the place that makes these, but they only sell them in large bins to stores and I wasn't ready to by 50 frogs. So, on a hunch, I started poking at the first dead frog and figured out how to take him apart. Once that was done, it was easy to see that replacing the batteries would be fairly simple.
So I did. What follows is a brief "how to" on fixing these little toys.

A view of the underside showing the 2 contacts. These can be set off by fingers, water or as Charlotte discovered, a babies tounge.

Removal of the innards. The 2 wires go the the speaker located on froggies butt.

Frog and Duck side by side. I wanted to make sure they were built the same.

Note that the pcb says "Duck-1" on the duck. It's interesting to note that the from board says "Duck-1" as well... The only physical difference is that the duck has 2 led's and the frog has 1.

The whole thing is held together by the 2 contact pins. The go up through the plastic and through the board where they are soldered on. Remove the solder and the pin comes out. Do both pins and you have access to the batteries.

A view of the 3 button batteries in the duck.

Remove the old batteries.

And do the same for Mr Froggy.

It took a bit of doing to find the replacement batteries, but here they are.

Put in the new batteries, solder in the pins and frog and duck are alive once more. I super glued the plug back in to make sure it had a good seal and ta da... live toys and 3 very happy kids.

Now this little project is a great example of recycling. I saved some bits of plastic from the landfill and made my kids happy in the process.
The down side is that these things cost us $1.50 each at the store. The batteries cost me $2.00 each (or $6.00 per toy). The people who make these things make millions of them and must be getting batteries for $0.10 or so. At the rate the new batteries cost me, it would be cheaper to just buy a big bin of the toys all at once and dole them out as needed. What a choice.

Post Partum Depression, Karma and the Balance of Luck

My favorite definition of stress can be found here (it's the #2 version)

Did you read that? good, now this sentence will make more sense: For me, at the moment, that person has a name. I won't share that name at the moment as I'm sure some how it would get me in trouble. He's the guy that bought my house when the babies were born.

I was trying to fix up the house for us as it would have been a really nice place for my family for the next 4-5years. We would have had a big back yard for growing things, letting the dogs play and letting the kids play. We would have had a nice big room for Dorothy's studio so she could work with clients separated from the pets and allergies. We would have been in the middle of town so I could have avoided the hell that I-10 has become. Heck, we would have had a lower mortgage payment.

But for various reasons, I ran out of time and money to get the job done and I had to dump the house during a time of bad house prices and low turnover. Getting the house sold and realizing just how much I was losing in the process was one of the many contributing factors to my Postpartum Depression. Yes, men can get it to and there were a few things that added to my problems.

This leads me to my theory on the Balance of Luck. The basic idea is that luck will balance itself out. A run of bad luck will be followed up by good luck and so forth. Because of this, I try not to depend on luck. I just don't want to deal with the bad luck that follows the good. Karma is more my style. As I see it, Karma is the idea that what you do in life comes back to you. I try to be a good person, helping out friends as best I can, doing what I say and just being polite whenever possible.

Luck however, has had it's own ideas. I've been really lucky in the last few years. Meeting Dorothy, getting married, having 3 beautiful and healthy kids. Dorothy delivered naturally, we had probably the only doctor in Tucson that was willing to try. I was able to take her home the next day after she spent about 30 hours in the hospital from start to finish. The kids, even though they spent some time in the NICU, never needed any real assistance. They just had to get bigger and learn how to eat. We got through the dreaded RSV season with noone getting seriously sick. I got a cold for a week and wore a mask around the house, and towards the end of the season, all 3 girls got a brief cold. And the kids are doing very well. If I account for their "adjusted" age, they are doing things that the books say the should be doing a month from now, or more. These are all things in the good luck category.

So I was expecting some bad luck. Unfortunately I forgot that luck can come in small doses or great big doses. When I sold the house, I knew I wasn't going to get much of anything for it as it still needed work. The unnamed guy I sold it to basically took over the payments and agreed to pay off 2 credit accounts I had built up in doing some of the repairs. This was all done in a nice legal manner and I still have the 2nd lien on the house that's due when he sells the house. Unfortunately, Mr. Unnamed Guy seems to have a problem with paying the bills on time. This weekend marks the 4th time that he has paid the mortgage late. Which means that this is the 4th time I spent the weekend fielding calls from the mortgage company about why the payment was late and what was I going to do about it.

Now for those of you who haven't dealt with depression before, here's my take on how it works, at least for me. Depression is caused by stress. A body can only deal with a certain amount of stress before something snaps. That breakdown is the start of the depression. For me it manifests itself as a lack of appetite, feeling worthless, feeling like I can't take care of my family like I should, lack of sleep, a lack of energy and I tend to feel sick to my stomach. As you work out of the depression, it's important to note that the break in your stress response is still there and will take quite a while to fix. So now, things that wouldn't normally have bothered me are capable of kicking off little cycles of depression and I have to fight really hard to keep my head above water.

So, Mr. Unnamed Guy. Even though you have caused me an inordinate amount of grief since you bought my house. Even though you seem to have a problem living up to your side of the bargain. Even though I thing a jury of my peers probably wouldn't send me to jail for trying to teach you a lesson the hard way, I'm going to take the high road. I'm going to wish you all the Luck in the world and hope that your karma gives lady luck a push in the right direction.

Photo slide show

Terry has made more photo shows, this one is from their visit last week.

http://www.photoshow.com/watch/Hc2Mt5Dn
and
http://www.photoshow.com/watch/rN3ac9aq

Stuffed Zoo

Poking around the net you find some strange things.

Dorothy and I both like stuffed animals. I have an interest in getting our kids as nice of a big stuffed animal zoo as I can. So when I stumbled onto this site, I thought it would be a great place to use in building up our zoo. It seems like they have everything, even Mosquitoes: