Adventure

The idea in heading to Shawnee Mission Park was to fly rockets. But it was too windy.



So we flew kites.



Then Em asked if we could go walk the trails.



She had her BFF along or she'd have claimed I was violating her human rights by offering a trail hike. As it was, they were giddy to do just about anything.



We saw this guy flying a two-line sport kite. A big one, at times he had to really lean back. Gave me sore muscles just watching it.


Kite Workout from Chixulub on Vimeo.

So then we went to the trails. We were going to take the purple and yellow trails, though all we'd done in the past was the purple. At the point where they diverge, I looked at the map and it appeared that the two trails were about equal in length, so it seemed doable.



And it might be doable with a less squirrelly set of kids. Between Mo's tendency to cover her eyes while she walks when she's excited (which does wonders for your footing on a stony trail) and Em and her friend stopping every twelve steps to interpret rocks (I agree one did look like a whale, but these two, it was like the world was one big Rorschach test).



We did the first leg of the Purple to where it intersects with the yellow. Chatted with a lovely mountain biker for a minute, then set off on the yellow.



We heard sirens nearby. Sirens to beat the band. As if someone hadn't just called the police, but had somehow called all police to the park. And firetrucks from the sound of some of the horn blasts.



Then Em realized she didn't have her phone anymore. And started backtracking, looking for it. I dialed it hoping the ring would help locate the phone. Someone answered, 'I found this phone in the woods at Shawnee Mission Park.'



Yeah, we're in the woods, just noticed it missing.

Fortunately she was by the dam, and so was my car. I described it for her, white Honda accord, autism awareness magnet, Crayola scribbles on it from a night when my autistic daughter got up in the night more quietly than usual.

I asked what all the sirens were, and she said she didn't know, but that there were emergency vehicles all over the place.

We resumed our walk. And the yellow trail turned out to be a doozy. Not as rough as the purple, not as 'technical' for a mountain biker, but long.

We had fun trying to smash hedge apples by throwing them against trees. This is harder than it looks like it would be.



I understand the tree is technically an Osage orange tree, but these things are even less like oranges than they are like apples. I gather you can eat the seeds if you strip away the membrane around them, but I don't think it looks like a very appetizing prospect.



When we got near an exit from the trails, and I looked at my clock and realized we'd been wandering in the wilderness for an hour and a half, we bailed out and took the paved path back to the car.



There were still several cop cars parked near us, and as we approached the car, I noticed...well, I noticed a body bag on the shore of the lake. And cops doing cop things, mainly standing around, but one had blue gloves on and was doing something with a suitcase of equipment.



I thought it was pretty freaky, but the girls were unfazed. 'They're probably going to send that to the forensics lab,' Em's friend observed. She's convinced she wants to be a forensic pathologist when she grows up, so I guess it's a comprehensible statement. But I'm like, That's a human being in that bag. Someone's Mom or Dad or brother or sister. It's not cool or entertaining.



According to the news, the guy was a fisherman who apparently drowned. Tragically, I saw no indication that the guy took $90 million in pay for mismanaging so much debt that the world's economic system was nearly destroyed. Given the frailty of human life, it's a pity that deserve has so little to do with these things.

Complexity

Okay, I put together the complicated kite again, and it was windy. But for whatever reason, it wants to kind of fly straight out away from me instead of climbing.

As long as it's tipped slightly back, it has lift, but once it goes up ten or twenty feet, it tips forward and glides down to earth.

I put another kite up in hopes of towing the flower up, and the winds were so strong the center rod pierced the nylon and the kite biffed.



I don't know if I need to put a tail streamer on the far side of this sucker or what.

But Mo had fun with sidewalk chalk and a nitrile glove she filched from my workbench.

In Case My House Blows Up...

As if one flood wasn't enough, my basement got it again last night. The power went off in the night: I learned this when I woke up struggling for air. My CPAP was off because the power had gone off.

Plus, my leaky Sleep Number bed kept collapsing to the point where it dumped me off the good side and I'd have to wake up and re-inflate the right side of the bed. They overnighted a replacement part Monday but it didn't come Tuesday: UPS apparently sent it on a detour somewhere and it wasn't delivered until shortly before I called Customer Service this morning to bitch about it.

Nothing makes for a long day like not breathing in your sleep combined with not sleeping longer than an hour at a shot because your brand new thousand-dollar bed is defective.

That, and when I got in the shower this morning, it was ice cold. Seems the first flood must have been deep enough to put out the pilot light on the water heater.

So I relit the water heater and did some other straightening up to make this dump more fit for human habitation when I brought the girls home tonight, and headed off late to work.

My day didn't totally suck, though. My Dad called me wanting to take me and the girls to dinner tonight at the Mandarin Kitchen. Which we all adore. And as I left work, I stopped at QuikTrip for a soda, and I don't know if the QT chick at the register (who, by the way, was gorgeous) was just being incredibly sweet to people, or if maybe I was showing the strain of the day, but my money was no good, she had me covered, 'It's hot outside, go on with you.'



Bless her pea-pickin' heart.

Then, after dinner, we went to the Purple Park at Mo's request. It was way too windy for rockets, so we did kites. I tried the airfoil with the new streamers I made, but it kept diving. I think I need longer, heavier streamers for it or something.



Then I got out the seven-foot crayon kite (I should name these things: I won't fly a rocket without a name, yet I have four nameless kites). And before I had him a hundred feet up I worried the rods would snap. He was just getting pulled way too hard.

Slowly but surely I reeled him back down.



Then I decided to try the airfoil again but with the stock streamers it came with.

And it climbed. Like crazy.



It'd start going in circles and diving periodically, but if I let the line spool out it'd stabilize. Until it did so at the end of the 500 foot line, when I had no slack to offer, and it crashed somewhere down the street.

What kind of idiot flies a kite at 500 feet when he doesn't have 500 feet of obstacle free ground around him? Well, whatever I am, I'm that kind of idiot apparently.



I reeled line until I got to a tree the line ran over, and I ran into resistance. I finally walked down the street (unspooling what I'd spooled in) to find the kite hanging on someone's deck, the eave of which was what he'd been snagging on.

Then, instead of being smart enough to unhook the kite and reel in the line, I tried to get it back over the houses.

The crazy climbing kids who live at the house on the end got up on the roofs to help liberate my kite. They refused to be talked out of this craziness. Their Dad even helped with a boost here and there.



I told him I didn't want his kids getting killed or maimed for my ten dollar kite and he said, 'They're looking for an excuse to climb up there.'

I got the kite back, though, so it's all good. And without having to cut the line. No children were harmed in the making of this blog post. Fearless daredevils and inveterate rocket chasers that they are.

So when we get home I make Em go take a shower and she comes back and tells me the water won't get hot.

But I relit the pilot this morning!

So I went down and relit it again. And it went out a few minutes later. And I relit it again.

And the third time, I'm sitting there holding the thing down that you have to hold down for a minute before turning it up and fully on, and I'm reading all the safety warnings because they're there and I'm stuck with nothing else to occupy my feeble mind, and I see a warning.



I'm like, well, I think the flood is what made the pilot go out, but it wasn't that much water. A couple inches. So what's the risk? Is my practically brand new $800 water heater really dead from such a small incident? The warning tells me to not even think about repairing this thing. 'It must be replaced!'

If we were talking about a couple feet of water, okay.

But I wonder, am I getting ready for the Darwin Awards because I kept relighting this thing until it stayed on (four times seems to be the charm)?

So, if my house blows up, it was an accident. Maybe it's because I'm stupid, but I didn't blow my home up on purpose, and I wasn't cooking meth at all. It was either the flooded hot water heater, or else the Chinese Government is way more sensitive to criticism than even I realized.

Impromptu

Well, instead of Wednesday, I had the girls Tuesday this week. My ex's hubbie (there ought to be a term for that. Step-brother-in-law?) was having fun with kidney stones, and it wasn't going to be a fun time for the girls to hang out in the ER waiting for their step-dad to pee rocks.

I know, I'm no doubt in for the same visit sooner or later, all the soda and booze I drink. And I'm a total baby about pain. Em describes her step-father, a former Marine, as 'tougher than a burnt chocolate chip cookie,' a description I doubt will ever be attributed to me.



Anyway, we hit Hobby Lobby. 30% off on rocket kits through May. Picked up a Skywriter (the Scribble V) and a Big Daddy (the first 3" diameter rocket for us).

As we were leaving the Hobby Lobby, a woman pulled her car up by me and told me 'I was watching you in there, and I wanted to commend you. You are such a patient father.' I thanked her, and when she said, 'It takes a lot,' I confessed that it sometimes takes more than I've got. Still, what a sweet compliment.



Thing is, it was really a very easy trip through Hobby Lobby. At the end, after Em talked me into buying her fabric for a doll dress, Mo wanted modeling clay and I agreed. Then she wanted Silly Putty. Then a candy bar. She had to choose, and she changed her mind about ten times. It wasn't stressful, I just wouldn't let her have more than one, and like all of us, she wanted to have her cake and eat it too.



I was worried she'd eat the modeling clay, and told her if I saw it go to her mouth even once it'd be gone forever. This seemed to make the Kit-Kat look better for a minute or two.

Then to the Purple Park at Mo's request. Kites, not rockets, it was way too windy for rockets. It also clouded up quite a bit, and I wondered if we'd pull a Ben Franklin, but there was no sign of lightning so I decided not to sweat it.



I got the seven-footer up and let it out to the limit of the 500 foot line. Blistered my thumb with the friction as a matter of fact. Couple that with the tick bite on my ass I got the other day and kites are looking pretty dangerous.

I put new streamers on the airfoil kite, too. Rainbow ribbon from Hobby Lobby to replace the cheap-ass easily tangled plastic streamers it came with.



I try to keep Mo from eating her sidewalk chalk, but she likes the way it colors more densely when wet, so she licks it more than I'd like.



Back home, Mo asked for her modeling clay and proceeded to make 18 smiley faces. And not once did she try to eat the clay (I know this shouldn't seem impressive, but it is).



While she was doing that, I started debating about what to do with this Big Daddy kit. I have a design for the decals in mind: a jazz theme this time. I think I'll scan Daahoud from the Real Book and run the head of that over the rocket. Maybe spiral it, maybe just wrap it around.



I might work up some photos of the pantheon: Bird, Sonny Rollins, Miles, Coltrane, etc. The rocket's name will be Bebop, and the base coat of paint will be metallic copper.



The kit comes with laser-cut fins, but they're balsa fins and I prefer basswood. Basswood is heavier, but much, much stronger. I worried, though, that such a short rocket could easily become tail-heavy and unstable in flight. Plus, I had these laser cut fins ready to sand and bevel, complete with through-the-wall tabs to the motor mount.



So then I think maybe I'll fiberglass them. But you're rapidly back to making the ass end of the rocket heavy: if the center of gravity is behind the center of pressure, it's like a car fish-tailing. I think I'll brush a thin coat of epoxy onto the fins and let it go at that.



The kit instructions tell you to tie the rubber-band type shock chord they give you through a slit in the forward centering tube, but be serious. Rubber bands melt easily. I tied 400lb test Kevlar line around a carbon fiber BT50-60 centering ring and reinforced that with another carbon fiber ring ahead of it. I also subbed out the motor mount Estes provides for one that gave me more room. I ditched the engine hook in favor of friction/tape as motor retention, and I wanted the motor tube to protrude further than it could without shrinking the fin tabs substantially on the provided fins.



I'll also substitute the parachute. Estes provides a 24" parachute, but it's a plastic dude and I have rip-stop nylon 'chutes that are much more reliable.



I also haven't decided whether to do epoxy-clay fillets. They add strength but also weight. And coating the fin tabs with epoxy and then sliding them into the fin slot builds a pretty nice fillet of straight epoxy.



I figure if the balsa fins turn out to be the liability, I can order some 3" tubing from Balsa Machining and make something to go with that monster nose cone.

Memorial Day

We've all seen the movies and TV shows meant to remind us of the 'real meaning' of Christmas. But what about Memorial Day?

Bit of trivia for you: the reason cemeteries came to resemble parks is once upon a time, people packed a picnic and made a day of it at the bone yard on Memorial Day. They didn't just put flowers on Aunt Myrtle's grave, they played a bit of croquet and ate cold fried chicken, potato salad and apple pie by her headstone.



Which, in my mind's eye, is an Addams Family thing to do.

Anyway, my big plan for Memorial Day was to take the honyocks to the Kemper Museum and then go bowling. I have three free game coupons about to expire, and it's been an age since we did the Lebowsky thing. But neither kiddo was interested in bowling, and come to find out, the Kemper is closed Mondays.

We still mugged with the spiders. But it was a short visit. Really short.

But what had started as a rainy day turned bright and sunny, and we hit the park. I guess we're in a rut with our rockets and kites, but there's worse ruts.


Memorial Day 2008 from Chixulub on Vimeo.

We originally figured kites, but when we got to Shawnee Mission Park, the flags were laying against the poles. And when I asked Mo what she wanted to do (Em had made it plain that she didn't want to do anything with this huge liability called her family), Mo said she wanted to launch rockets.



So we did.

One of the hard core kite guys did show up and get some kites in the air. He specifically flew ultralight kites that are idea for low winds. Em had given up, by this point, with keeping the smiley face up in the air.



We flew hot, biggest engine a given model would support. It was straight up flying weather. Flew Mr. Creosote twice on E9's, Hatful of Hollow on a C6, Thor's Candycane on an Apogee D10 composite. Which I screwed up on.

The copperhead ignitor needs to be all the way to the top of the motor. I don't pretend I understand, physically, why this is so but I know it's true. You light the top of the fuel grain and it comes right up to pressure and WOOF! Light the bottom and it might not even fly.



The problem is the nozzle on a D motor is so small, it's hard to get the ignitor in at all. And apparently, while I thought I'd got it in, I must have got it most of the way there, snagged on the fuel grains and crumpled the ignitor. So it went through probably a third to a half of its total impulse (and expensive impulse it is), sputtering on the pad. Could have been worse: worst case scenario you use so much fuel on the ground that when it does take off it lawn darts before the ejection charge.



Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby almost got lost, too. He tipped coming off the launch rod and really angled off. We hiked off to find him, and luckily spotted him as a bystander picked him up. What makes someone think a rocket lands in a park and nobody is looking for it? If they'd left it alone, we'd have found it quickly. If we hadn't seen them pick it up and take it over by their picnic table, we might never have seen it again.

I mean, it has a parachute: if we didn't want it back, why wouldn't we just let it smash into the ground? I understand the dude who picked up Thor's Candycane last week: he thought it had been there for days in all likelihood. But this rocket was still hot. I'm pretty sure the people saw it land.



Anyway, to get back to the kite guy: I kind of knew the answer when I asked who was on the rectangular kite he was flying.

'It's my mother,' he said, very matter-of-fact. 'When she was alive, she always wanted to go see the pretty kites fly, so I try to get her out with them every once in awhile.'




I hadn't even thought about the fact that it was Memorial Day.

For the record, I don't want to be buried in a cemetery. My remains need to be donated to science, for real. Let some med school student carve me up. Take whatever organs you want, then dispose of whatever is useless in the cheapest way possible. I'm serious: do not spend a bunch of money on the funeral industrial complex as a way of honoring me. I'd be honored if those jackals don't get a dime off my demise.



But a kite of me? Or better yet a model rocket. A batch of homebrew. A bebop gig in a night club. These are truly tributes. Screw flowers on a grave. This guy flying the picture of his late mother, he has the true spirit of Memorial Day if anyone ever has.

Another crew of rocketeers came out to relieve us right when we were packing up. I'd have been fine with launching a few more, but the girls would have mutinied.





Before we left the park, we went over and watched a guy fly an RC airplane. He was an ace, did all kinds of crazy aerobatics. Then after he landed, got a wheel caught in a rut on the runway and busted his landing gear.