Busy day at work…. but not much worth relating here. I managed to make it to Tim F’s chiropractic clinic in Jericho again.. Whatever Tim’s doing seems to be working.. My back doesn’t hurt for the first time in about 10 years.. that’s kind of cool when something like that just stops…   I got home in time for Diane’s 6PM yoga. It was a quite/slow  class tonight just what I needed. I love Dianes yoga.. I love Diane.

Gabe and I had some minor mischief planned for the evening. I’d made a bunch of Aluminum and Potassium Perchlorate (Sam always loved to say ’Potassium’) … flash powder yesterday. Gabe and I were messing around with it yesterday after Max left… I had a fair bit of it left over in the lab.. All through Yoga I was getting the creeps knowing that it was sitting in that jar right under us.. Even though Perchlorate compounds are ’relatively stable’ .. I wanted to get it out of the barn….   After dinner (peanut noodles – yum !) … Gabe, Mason. Abbot and I took the flash powder outside, poured it in a paper cup, stuck in a fuse, lit it and moved back These pictures just do not capture the beautiful white flash and mushroom cloud.   I was 20 feet back and I felt like I’d gotten an instant tan form the thing and  I’m still seeing spots. Diane came outside right after to tell us that Brad’s dad, Lee, was sitting in his house on the hill on the other side of the interstate when he saw the explosion.. he figured it was us and called down to ask for more.. It was very cool

Note: don’t try this without a reasonably sane  adult..The following can be dangerous.

Next on the list was to try an experiment I’d seen which used confectioners sugar as a ’safe’ way of shooting 10 foot long jets of flame from your mouth. (Again.. ’safe’ being a relative term here).. You can do this with any fine milled substance such as powdered sugar, corn starch, flour, coffee creamer etc.   Anything that fine burns like crazy when you mix it with enough air because it’s got such a big surface area to volume ratio.  This is what causes things like grain elevators and sugar factories to blow up.. (In fact there was a tragic sugar factory explosion just a few weeks back) ..
   Anyway.. the idea is you pour a cup full of powdered sugar into your mouth.. then blow it out forcefully over an open flame. We used an alcohol soaked paper towel on a coat hanger.   You don’t want to use anything that would low out like a match.. and you certainly do not want to be holding the fire source in your hand.
These movies don’t really do it justice.. you produce quite a jet of flame this way.. and it’s much safer than using flammable liquids  such as alcohol or kerosene like fire swallower’s use. These powders are non toxic.. and non flammable until they’re spread in air. The main downside is that you’re left with a mouthful of wet powdered sugar at the end.. ewwwwwwww

Here’s the aftermath… a bunch of sugar coated nutcases !

Sweet dreams all.. sweet dreams, Sam
-me