Water color made easy. You get a pack of a dozen water-color pencils in light and dark blue, green, black, brown, yellow, peach, orange, red, pink and purple, plus a small paint brush. Draw with the pencils, then dip the brush in water and blend the colors. For the artist in all of us.

You get (8) fine point Sharpie® markers: black, blue, green, red, yellow, orange, purple and brown. Great for posters, labels and just general notes around the house. No charge for the pocket clips on the caps.

A 3-pack of notebooks for introverts. These 48-page lined notebooks measure 5-1/2" x 3-1/2" and have grocery store-paper-bag-color cardboard covers, pretty much what you find in your Moleskinny notebooks, but at less than 1/4 the price. Plus no strangers will talk to you on the bus because these are labeled "private thoughts," "don't talk to me," and "people to avoid" on the covers. They've got a pic of a tiny person reading at the bottom of the pages, but so what? From our friends at Archie McPhee.

Nice rare-earth neodymium disk magnet, 1" dia, about the same as a quarter but over twice as thick at 4mm. Rare-earth magnets are permanent and powerful, and this one has approx 7 lbs pull, and always will. Comes with a galvanized metal keeper approx 2" dia so you don't lose it.

If you're devoted to explosions, and who isn't, you'll love the new expanded 2nd edition of William Gurstelle's Backyard Ballistics, now 25% longer, with 25% more ka-boomery. Still the go-to reference work for building rockets, cannons (carbide and potato), flingers, fire kites, electromagnetic pipe guns, tennis ball mortars, cleaner-bag balloons, ballistic pendula and petards. You simply can't have more fun with common household materials. The soft-cover, 210pp compendium includes detailed and illustrated instructions, parts lists and sensible ways not to be hoist on your own petard. Be careful out there.

Very appealing plated N52 neodymium disc magnets are 3/4” dia, which is a bug-hair smaller than a dime, and 1/8” thick. They have an impressive 7-lb pull, while an actual dime won’t hardly buy you anything these days.

Yes, this grade C8 ceramic magnet is beastly--a monster, measuring 6" X 4" X 1" thick with a conservatively rated pull of 35 lbs, 3850 gauss. Powerful and, like all ceramic magnets, brittle, so keep it away from your laptop and don’t drop it or you may have several little beastly magnets. Use it to hold tools in the shop, or knives in the kitchen--or paint a bull’s eye on it and toss paper clips at it.

This plated rare-earth magnet is 15mm (0.59”) dia. x 10mm (0.39”) thick, and has a hefty 10-lb pull. Comes inside a white plastic cylinder with a lip, which you can keep or discard, not that you need us to tell you that.

Remember the Civil War? It was in all the papers. Still is, if you order this set of (3) 20-page collections of contemporary newspaper articles compiled from mostly Northeastern U.S. papers including the New York Herald, the Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer and others, from 1861 to 1865. Printed on slightly heavier than today's standard newsprint in a broadsheet size of 22" high x 30-1/4" wide. Students will be amazed at how long tweets were 150 years ago.

Titled "The Field and Forest Handy Book," this volume has been justifiably in print since 1906. Written by Daniel C. "Uncle Dan" Beard, the founder of the Sons of Daniel Boone and one of the founders of the BSA, it's a compendium of eternally relevant woodland lore, from building cabins, sleds, boats, and bridges to camping in swamps. The only part we skipped was on how to cook a muskrat. (We know a place that delivers.) Loaded with illustrations. In soft cover from David Godine's Nonpareil Books, 428 pages.

Nice little teaching magnet set for the primary grade classroom has (6) magnets in star, two-bar, horseshoe and ring shapes, all plastic coated in silver and red to mark the poles. Range in size from 1” to 3”, and include a few paper clips and small nails for demo purposes.

"WE DARE YOU!" by Vicki Cobb is a 322-page book for children, filled with over (300) scientific challenges and experiments that can be done with ordinary household stuff. A savvy adult could introduce kids to science by betting them their allowance money on the afore-mentioned challenges, including making square eggs without using a square chicken, writing with potatoes, blowing frozen soap bubbles, and a whole bunch more.

Our tactical twofer is a 6” long x 1/2” dia. aluminum body ball-point pen with black ink, with an automobile window breaker at the other end. In gun-metal gray, as befits things tactical, with a pocket clip on the flat-top cap. Escape from your car, then write us a thank you note.

Lego® goes crazy with this 100+ piece kit with everything you need to build (16) different contraptions (be pretty stupid if they made 16 of the same contraption) for your amusement. In the mix are gears, pulleys, belts and axles, which you could turn into a rocket racer, Lego® launcher, donkey cart or scissor grabber, among other things. Includes a 50-page spiral-bound graphically illustrated instruction booklet. And, yes, adding Lego® pieces of your own just ramps up the fun.

But wooden gearheads only. Making Wooden Gear Clocks is a 64-page book complete with full-size patterns for making (6) operating mechanical clocks plus a gear-machine kinetic sculpture. From Woodworking & Crafts magazine, this is for fairly advanced woodworkers, and calls for having most standard tools plus a drill press, scroll saw, router and in some cases a lathe. The resulting clocks are both intricate and stunning.

This strontium ferrite sheet is stronger than your average fridge magnet, and considerably bigger. Measures 7-3/8" sq x over 1/16" thick, with (2) adjacent corners trimmed off. Rubberized finish, black on one side, writable white on the other. Can be easily cut with a scissors.

We're liking this little plated N45 neodymium magnet because it will stand on end and stick out very prettily on the ice box. Measures 1" tall x 1/4" square with a hefty, for its size, 3-1/2 lb pull, 13,800 gauss. (Will also lie down on its side, of course, because everybody does.)

This whimsical pack of (30) postcards measures, unsurprisingly, post-card size 5-3/4" x 3-15/16", with non-duplicating images of gravy and bacon, Nikola Tesla, narwhals, spontaneous human combustion, boxing kangaroos, infinity and taxidermy, among many others of that ilk. Those ilks. Whatever--just buy 'em and stop asking so many questions. Blurbs on the back.