And So On...

I tried to start Mo out on the Special Olympics bowling season. They have a Wednesday group and a Saturday group. Since I typically have the girls on the weekend, and not Wednesday, it was obvious to get her into the group I'd be able to take her to.



But we get there, and it's bowling under black lights, 80s rock roaring like a Blue Angels flyover. For an autistic kiddo, they might as well fill the room with tear gas. It was overload even for me.



We tried. She got in half a game, sort of. It's hard to get the ball to go where you want it to when you're trying to keep your fingers on your ears.

That, and Mo wanted to use this ramp for the disabled that a girl on the neighboring lane was using. In her case, she physically couldn't swing the ball in the conventional way. Mo was curious, and I indulged her curiosity some, but I can't see letting her use it when the only disability she has related to bowling is an inability to give a damn whether the ball stays on the wood or even enters her lane instead of one of the adjacent ones.



Kind of like when she did track. She's wicked fast, but she won't run when and where she needs to in a competition. She'd take off before the gun and run hell-bent for the long jump sandbox.

When we checked out, I found out the noice and lights were for a birthday party. The alley only books birthdays at the same time as the Saturday SO session, so we're going to try Wednesdays as Trigger-time if Jalinda will let us switch days.

So we did the zoo. Again, I know, but that's why I bought the membership. And once upontime, there were three turtles...



Today we did my birthday dinner at my Dad's. I took this shot of a painting a student did back when Dad was teaching high school. Dad's narcoleptic, and while he detested the job, he was pretty lucky in this respect: he wouldn’t have found another gig where they'd pay for a Master's Degree and tolerate sleeping on the job. Sleeping at your desk so much it's what your students think of as essential to your character.



In fairness Dad, most of the students probably weren't working hard enough to deserve a teacher who stayed awake.

For all you who are about to post a comment about underpaid teachers, don't bother. I have a ton of teachers in my family: Dad's wife is a retired school nurse; I have a step-brother who's a high school Spanish and debate teacher; a brother in law who's a principal, etc. I won't say they're overcompensated, but for the amount of time off, the level of benefits, and the education required to get the job, they do pretty well.



But the actual dollars a person gets paid is not how they guage whether they are underpaid. The more you hate your job, the more underpaid you are. No matter how much you earn. People who really enjoy their jobs never bitch about the pay, even if it's truly peanuts. They might bitch about it if they have to take a job they hate because the small wages won't sustain them, sure, but I think that's different. They're not bitching about the low pay, they're bitching about the fact that they've found themselves obligated to earn more than that, and what's worse, they have an alternative that's more lucrative.

But other people's children are, universally, annoying. Hence, the large number of teachers who feel they are underpaid. Especially if their degree would make them $10,000 less a year in the private sector. That would seem to indicate they're overpaid on the face of it, but that's the source of the bitterness: it's a trap.



Oh, and the girls thrilled me by playing nicely with each other. A stethoscope turned out to be the key to sibling harmony.

Anyway: we took the fleet out for a launch. There's a soccer field complex I think I'm going to try. Almost did today, but they had so many games going, it wasn't a good time. If I can hit it when they have few or no games going on, it would be perfect. There's like a dozen soccer fields clustered together. It's a little hilly in places, and there are tree lines, but we'd still have a way better chance of recovering our rockets.



Speaking of which: we lost Sabrina and Salem (the yellow/blue and blue/black rockets) on their maiden voyages. Sabrina Bermuda Triangulated on us, Salem was visible under canopy but a mile or more away when he went out of sight. Miss Splodeyhead disappeared on her third launch of the afternoon. Elephant Lobster came down without getting the parachute fully deployed on a second launch and busted a fin off. I think I'm going to have to retire that one, though Em has expressed a nearly magical faith in Super Glue, and I might just try it.

Gonzo II did great.



I used some B engines this time. Not exclusively, Sabrina and Salem went away for good on C's, and it was a C engine that Miss Splodeyhead was last seen with. She's a hard one to figure, too, because she was more or less straight overhead, and she's a streamer recovery, so she shouldn't drift much but she didn't come down that we could see, even though we had a good 200 yards in every direction.

The B engines turned out to perform better than I anticipated. They take off with all the fury of a C, but they run out of umph while you can still see the rocket. Which means you have a much better chance of recovery. I'd been thinking about trying one of the large engine kits, something in an E engine (each letter is double the thrust of the previous, so an E-9 fires for nine seconds with four times the thrust of a C-6, and the C-6 would only fire for six seconds). So on an E-9, you're going to get serious altitude.

But E engines cost three times what B and C engines do. And those bigger kits, they aren't as cheap. Sabrina and Salem came as a two-pack for all of $9. Miss Splodeyhead, Scribble and Scribble II, and Nike were all kits I got for $4 to $8. If I only have a 50/50 shot of getting the sucker back, it's easier to confidently launch a $5 rocket than a $25 rocket. And if the larger the engine, the less likely the recovery...

I know, my testosteroney side might get the best of me yet. Still, I look at that big sucker and I think, heck, I could rebuild the whole fleet of smaller rockets for that.

This was the first launch were I re-fired recovered rockets. In the past, Em has vetoed further launches once each rocket has gone up once. She gets o upset when one disappears, and she doesn't want to take the risk. I think she's getting more comfortable with the potential loss. She likened it to the Gilbert Grape chorus of 'I can go at any time. Any time.' Started giving the rockets that voice.

Thing is, it's true for all of us. We can go at any time. Any time at all.



Oh, and on the way back from the zoo, I needed a CD/DVD burner (the one in my PC crapped out and I was getting anxious about backups), so we went to MicroCenter, where I saw the coolest car!