There you stand, in the grocery store, wishing that you had enough money to get you some of those crazy expensive protein bars. Sadly, you turn away, lamenting your puny muscles, wishing that there was some way to get protein bars without all the extra packaging and high prices. Well pay attention, for here is how to…
Make Your Own Protein Bars
Thanks to Krista’s protein bar recipe, I was able to make some protein bars of my own. Follow along with this picture essay, and you will learn the secrets of how to make some cheap, homemade protein bars.Here are the ingredients. If you want to use some eco-friendly protein powder, or organic bananas, or what have you, then by all means do. I opted for the cheapest ingredients for this demonstration.
Since me n’ Tiff bought and moved into our bodacious townhome last summer, we’ve changed a lot about it. A big thing we changed was the kitchen; with the help of Leon, Bil-lay, and 10, we took out a lot of old and put in a lot of used (new for us) things. I saved a lot of what we took out (nails, wood, etc.), and have reused those materials to make some new things.
For Valentines’ Day, I made Tiff a kitchen island with these saved materials. I started with not much, but with a lil’ gumption and elbow grease, the kitchen island was completed. Here is its story…
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. With this handy advice in my noggin, I drew out the plans for the island. I wanted to make it the same height as our counters, and also make sure that there was enough room for our trash can to fit in it. Before I show you my plans, please remember that they are copyrighted, so if you copy them I’ll sue your pants off.
Look above. That used to be a yellow cheese school bus! Man, when I first saw this, I was too interested. I read all the steps, and looked at all the pictures of what Jake Von Slatt did. What he did was buy a cheap school bus (a little more than $2,000) and transform it into a beautiful, homemade RV. I like his homemade RV for a couple reasons:
He did it cheaply. The bus cost about $2,000, he did most of the work himself (or with his friends), and he got a LOT from the dump, craigslist, or freecycle.
He reused a lot of materials, thereby creating his RV in a very “green” way (reused bus, materials from dump, reused mess off websites).
You can see the process of the bus’s conversion. Seeing all the steps it takes is really interesting, and makes me want to (one day) attempt something like this. It’s really cool, so por favor take a look at it.
Anyhoo, enough with my thoughts. Enjoy this video of Von Slatt giving you a tour of his homemade RV that came from a lil’ ol’ cheese bus.
Last spring, two of my friends went to work building a bicycle generator. They slaved away on it for literally a couple days, but eventually it was ready to be tested. Me and Tiff stopped by for this special occasion; Thanh and Billy had hooked up the bike generator to a lamp. All we needed was a volunteer to ride the electrical monstrosity. After a moment of trepidation, I bravely stepped forward to offer my bike pedaling services, and as night fell in the thriving metropolis of Raleigh, I began pedaling…
Amazingly, it did not explode in a deadly shower of sparks. It worked. We had invented… ELECTRICITY. As that realization hit us, Captain Planet flew into the room, and everybody high-fived. It was awesome.Update:WRAL is going to put this on the news. The bad news is that we have to put the bike generator back together, as it’s been through some mess since last May.
Get yourself a smooth-sided glass jar. Pickle-jar-size will do. You want smooth sides so that dirt doesn’t settle on the ridges of the inside of the jar.
Grab your jar and go find a swamp or pond or lake. Look for a lot of plants in shallow water; there will be a lot of plants and animals in areas like that.
Using a cup, scoop some of the pond mud into your jar. Add water and swamp mess until your jar is almost full. Be sure to leave some room for air.
Seal up the jar, and bring it back to your house. Put it in a good, sunny window. The sunnier, the better.
What Will Happen?
Over the next couple days, you will hopefully be able to see tiny creatures swimming back and forth. Some plants might even begin to grow. As time goes on, you might observe strange creatures and their habits, or you might see plants grow to dominate this lil’ world. There are many different variations as to what you could see, so the only way to know for sure is to go out and do this experiment.
As for my world in a jar, I came home one day to find that one of my cats had murderously knocked it off the windowsill and onto the floor. Everything in it was in abject chaos. After waterboarding the cat to punish it, I set the lil’ world in a jar back up, but all that has grown since that disaster has been algae. Hopefully you’ll have better luck with this. Good luck to anyone trying this out; it should turn out pretty cool.
Last spring, two of my friends went to work building a bicycle generator. They slaved away on it for literally a couple days, but eventually it was ready to be tested. Me and Tiff stopped by for this special occasion; Thanh and Billy had hooked up the bike generator to a lamp. All we needed was a volunteer to ride the electrical monstrosity. After a moment of trepidation, I bravely stepped forward to offer my bike pedaling services, and as night fell in the thriving metropolis of Raleigh, I began pedaling…
