@carlsonf
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I like doing spreadsheets and I like doing tedious things like sorting through details (similar to sorting through LEGO bricks). I was a technical librarian in my work life so I have some information research skills and related organization/cataloging skills. The thing I hate to do is call people on the telephone. I doubt that calling people on the telephone is going to be coming up in the LAN ambassador world.
I am not on Discord but I have been meaning to look into it and learn what to do – so yes, I’m interested in that. I just need to learn.
Fresh Cranberry Cookies – from https://www.justalittlebitofbacon.com/fresh-cranberry-cookies/
For the Cookies:
2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp table salt
1 tbsp cornstarch
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1 tbsp lemon zest
14 tbsp (7 oz, 1 3/4 sticks) unsalted butter cool room temperature
1 large egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup chopped fresh cranberriesFor the Lemon Glaze
1 cup confectioners’ sugar
1-2 tbsp lemon juice
1 tsp lemon zest
1/2 tbsp cream cheese
red sanding sugar optionalInstructions
In a medium bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder, table salt, and cornstarch. Set aside.
In a large bowl (or the bowl of a standing mixer), rub the sugar and lemon zest together until the sugar has become lemon scented. Add the butter and beat the sugar and butter together on medium high until light and fluffy, 3-4 minutes. Add the egg and vanilla and mix well. Add the flour mixture and mix on low until just blended. Pour the cranberries into the bowl and fold them in with a silicone spatula. Put the cookie dough in the refrigerator and chill for 30-45 minutes.
Preheat oven to 350F.
Drop the dough by rounded tablespoons onto cookie sheets, about 2 inches apart. Gently flatten the tops of the cookies with the bottom of a measuring cup or glass. Bake the cookies for 15 minutes, or until cooked through and lightly browned. Transfer the cookies to cooling racks and cool to room temperature.
Whisk together the confectioners’ sugar, 2 tbsp lemon juice, lemon zest, and cream cheese until smooth, adding more lemon juice if needed so that the glaze drizzles from the end of a spoon.
Using your spoon, scoop up the glaze and drizzle it over the cookies until all the cookies have some glaze on them. Sprinkle the glazed cookies with red sanding sugar.
Lots of great tie-ins for you @smallfrost! I can tie my being laid off from Westinghouse at age 58 to the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster. Westinghouse and other commercial nuclear vendors went from a posture of preparing to sell many new plants, to an intense industry-wide shift to analyzing and defining lessons learned from the disaster, and making modifications to the world’s fleet of reactors to harden them against similar scenarios. Westinghouse went through a large downsizing that was life-changing for me.
On second thought I think it might be worth listing the ingredients in the chat, so maybe it would be easier to search. I don’t know whether a search of the threads would hit on words in the attachments but I think it’s unlikely. So here are the ingredients for Elsie’s Spice Bars:
SPICE BARS – 350 ° F – Makes about 60 2”x ½” bars
1 cup shortening, 2 cups brown sugar, 2 eggs
3 cups flour
¼ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon cloves
2 teaspoons cinnamon
½ teaspoon nutmeg
4 Tablespoons liquid (can be molasses, coffee, fruit juice, sour cream, milk, etc.)
Dried fruit – about 1-2 cups
Chopped nuts – about 1-2 cupsI never measured the dried fruit or nuts so those are estimates. Aunt Jean didn’t specify an amount. I just throw them in there until it looks good.
My grandmother Elsie Dalton Schumacher reportedly developed this recipe for spice bars. I guess my mom didn’t like them or wasn’t on recipe-sharing terms with her mother, because I never heard of them until I was on a road trip with my aunt Jean, who had a box of these spice bars. I thought they were great so she gave me the recipe. I thought for the LUG cookbook it might be more usable to have it as an attachment rather than write it in the chat – thoughts on that?
One note – the recipe specifies shortening – which I have always thought was kind of gross. So I tried making these with butter instead but they just didn’t turn out the right texture. So I have been buying little three-packs of Crisco shortening instead of the giant can of shortening. One of the little packs is the right amount for this recipe.
@playingwithechoes I am definitely bringing the nuclear plant containment building and cooling tower to the Home Show.
I’ve never seen a bug in Josh’s basement so I voted No. I agree with all the above comments about how courteous Josh is being to poll the group on this, and join in thanking him for hosting the group and all the LEGO stuff. A special thank-you to Greg for posting the super creepy centipede.
This intellectual property discussion is interesting – does it mean we are downplaying LUGDoug’s travels? Seems like we should avoid tagging him on social media.
@greg, I did want to have it done for the Home Show but it’s not worth the aggravation and rush to try and solve it before Tuesday. I think that it is not minifig scale – I think minifigs are proportionally too tall. The tower would be about 19 inches high but a real cooling tower is around 660 feet.
@rcgrier3406, thank you for your good ideas as well. I will bring it along at Home Show setup and maybe during the course of the event, my expert advisors can help me find a solution.Thank you @greg for your thoughtful answer AND your attention to proper grammar. I will welcome your thoughts when you get to take a look at it.
@greg, such a nice offer and what a fun-looking cone. Am I reading the room correctly that glue is NOT an option?!! I’m trying to figure out how a cone would look as part of this. Maybe if I could build enough supports on the bottom and the cone could sit on top of the supports, maybe it would work. I still don’t think the top cylinder connections would be stable enough. Let’s touch base on this topic after the Home Show setup. Hope you are OK!
@greg yes you are right, hundreds. So depressing. I had originally thought about that design you posted, but when I found the AP1000 I dropped everything.
I forgot to add the picture of the Studio Stability warning. In my opinion based on handling this thing, the Studio warning does not even highlight half of the poor connections. So bummed!
Then I started playing around with building some internal supports but again, the angled connections between that top cylinder and the slanted sides are just too frail. The whole cylinder itself is very frail as well. It’s a series of hinge clips sitting on jumpers, so each hinge is supported by only one jumper stud on each side.
It’s awful. It might be possible in a no-gravity situation to put this together, but on Earth it will not stick. At one point I thought I could build a paper wall to hold up the sides, but it didn’t fit (I would have to cut it out later). Then I thought of a balloon, which I still think is a great idea (I just have to pop it later). But it doesn’t matter – the yellow fences are not stable enough, the long sides are only connected to the structure at their tops and bottoms (and not to each other) and there is absolutely no way that the little top cylinder will attach – and hold – to the long sides.
Without glue.
I’ve concluded my cooling tower absolutely will not stick together in real life. Either I use super glue or waste hundreds of dollars. Any thoughts? Will I be shunned? It’s all my fault for being naive in Studio, which clearly states there are “122 clutch power issues (106 warnings and 16 cautions) and 22 stability issues.” Of course I never looked at the “Stability” tab until now….
If I will be allowed to stay in the LUG after using glue, can anyone recommend the best glue?
I bought a Hazmat Guy and I had to change his head to a smiley face because he looks too frantic. He came with what looks more like a pressure washer. I’ll have to put that Geiger counter on my list of things to get… Thanks!
Today I finished the AP1000 reactor building. I’m looking forward to displaying for the first time at the Ross Park Mall! The roof will just be resting on top so that it can be lifted off easily and people can see the inside better.
Thanks Tim, it will be a cutaway view of the containment building, so people can see the plant components inside. The outside containment is basically free-floating so maybe I will be able to lift it off to reveal the entire inside build. But if I decide that’s too risky, the main components will still be visible.
Thanks Greg – yes, I’ve gotten a lot of help from LUG people who have way more experience with building.
I took a long break from this project, but the 2023 Q4 meeting gave me a huge boost in confidence and energy so I got back on track. Classic FOAK (First of a Kind) project! The designer of the LDD file advised me that I might encounter some stability issues – and he was right. I’ve made some adjustments for stability but the more I’m building, the more I see that some of these structures would be better with a different configuration of parts. However, I already bought the parts generated from the LDD/Studio design so I’m going to keep my fingers crossed that it’s sound enough to stay together in my car when I drive it to a display venue. This past week I’ve been ordering a few more parts so that I can finish off the reactor building with a cutaway containment. Here are a couple of pictures. The long flat rectangle laying on the table is the outside containment wall, which needs a few more parts before I can stand it up and curve it around the inside containment.
