Jolly Green Giant

This deserved its own little post. It's only fair after I did a whole big post for Mr. Creosote, the fattest and heaviest rocket I've built.




Meet Jolly Green Giant. He flies on a mini A-10 3T and there's almost enough room for the motor and a foot of 75lb test Kevlar line under the nose cone. I might have gotten away with a centimeter shorter but I'm not certain of it.



Don't make fun of him because of his name. He's drinking milk, alright? So step off it, bitch! (These little rockets sometimes have a chip on their shoulder. You've got to be sensitive to what it's like for the little elf.)

If I get him back after a launch, I think I'll put him on my desk at work. I have to launch him at least once, he's a real working rocket after all, but he's just so cute. Finding him in the grass will be tricky. A streamer would help with that, if there was room in his body tube for something like a streamer.

The Whole Sick Crew

Well, it's possible I won't get to go launch rockets with the KCAR gang tomorrow at Shawnee Mission Park, but I'm loaded for bear and planning to go if at all possible.

The Midwest Rock Lobster fleet has swelled to nineteen rockets. Nine of these are virgins. There'd be ten new rockets except Hannah Montana, also built since last month's KCAR launch has been conceived, built, painted, flown and Bermuda Triangulated over Lone Elm Park's soccer fields right before the Soccer Mafia decided to pick a fight with me about who owns a city park and whether a kid could be bludgeoned to death with a paper towel tube.



Any endeavor can be compulsive behavior if you do it right. I'm becoming the rocket geek equivalent of that Catholic family in Monty Python's Meaning of Life who have to send their innumerable honyocks to 'medical experiments.' I actually have trouble remembering all these rockets' names.



Mr. Creosote, the big fat bastard with the tuxedo is easy. The red, white and black May pole looking one is the Tony G. The theoretically small one is the Jolly Green Giant (if a smaller rocket that actually flies can be built, I can hardly see how). Scribble IV, the Crapper, some of these are too easy. But Lola (the fluorescent pink and purple one); Buster (the dark green and white one); Peter Pan (the metallic blue and bright green one with the boat tail transition, named because according to Em he's the rocket that never blew up); Tubester (the green/purple job with tubular fins); Two-Da-Lou is the two-stage Echostar kit (dark blue, yellow and silver, with a payload section toting my non-business card); McRocket is the yellow one with red bands. And that's not all of them, though I think I eat least named most of the new ones here.

A lot of these rockets would not have been possible if it weren't for badly stocked hobby store. Hobby Haven at a hundred-something and Metcalf has body tubes, nose cones, centering rings and so forth for people who want to design their own rather than buying kits. But they never seem to order new supplies. Back in March or April, I told them the stock was pretty picked over. I bought some bulk tubing from Apogee components last fall and found some centering rings and such to complete rockets out of them but not everything I'd had in mind. The guy shrugged it off saying it was about time to order that stuff.



Probably once a month or so, I've been back. I've seen no evidence of new inventory, only a shrinking selection of stuff I'd seen last time. And every time I'd tell them their rocketry stuff was pretty picked over and generally got 'This time of year' as a response.

Well, if you're selling the stuff this time of year, maybe order some inventory?

So then I notice the centering rings are made by this Balsa Machining outfit. And I go to their web site and they have EVERYTHING. I mean, everything. More stuff than Apogee (though those guys are pretty awesome). Not so many pictures to go with the items, you kind of have to know what you want, but they've got it all. And here's the kicker: they sell to the public and at a third to tenth of the prices Hobby Haven charges. So I'm undercutting the brick and mortar store by buying online, but the brick and mortar guys got four or five warnings and ignored them. Plus, all my stuff from Balsa Machining arrived two days after I ordered it. I had a confirmation with a tracking number the day I ordered.



And BMS has a bunch of stuff I haven't even thought seriously about trying. Centering rings for multiple engines in a cluster, for a start. They also sell a lot of transitions to go from a large tube to a small tube, or vice versa, something I really like. Like the Great Pumpkin and Peter Pan, where you have a relatively large body tube tapering to a smaller one at the tail, though aping the tapers of a Delta or Saturn rocket is what seems to inspire the production of these things. Egg lofters are about the only kits I notice with the fat end first, though aerodynamically its a great way to go. There's less total surface area but plenty of payload room.

You Pay for Advertising...

I'm not one for name brands as a rule. You pay for advertising, as the line from My Cousin, Vinnie goes.



But with spray paint, I've found, you get what you pay for. There are $1 cans of spray paint at Wal-Mart, some no name brand. Krylon is three and a half bucks.



But I tried the cheapie stuff thinking I was saving money, and it takes three coats of it to do what one coat of Krylon does. Krylon coats so well you about have to go next door to make sure your coats are light enough. For real, a whole can of $1 paint doesn't cover as well as 1/4 can of $3 paint. You're not paying for advertising, it turns out, you're paying for paint. Go figure.



Rustoleum is good, too. And Kilz makes few colors but they are extremely well made and they make the most awesome clear coat. Three and a half bucks a can, same as Krylon, but a couple of coats of it and a rocket looks like it's encased in glass. Kilz also has a special nozzle that can be sprayed from awkward angles. From now on, Kilz clear coat is the only clear coat going on Midwest Rock Lobster fleet vehicles. It shames Krylon's clear coats and Krylon makes several.



Things can go wrong no matter the paint. You can get bleeding behind your masks. I tried using stickier masking tape to get around this and it works, except it also peels off the paint you were trying to protect. John Coker's thing works pretty well but not perfectly. After you mask off a rocket, paint it again with the base color. The bleed over will be the base color and will seal itself off. Then when you add the second color, you'll get a cleaner line. I still get some bleeds, but the method works.



Of course, all is for naught if the clear coat melts the colors. I think this happens. Lola had sharper lines before the clear coat, but now she has bleeding in places I'd swear had clean color breaks. She's still cool looking, but when I launch $5 worth of cardboard, plastic and balsa hundreds of feet in the air and probably lose it in a tree even if there are no trees in sight, I want it to have good detail work.



And then there's artifacts like checking. Some paints seem to be worse about this than others, but I could be wrong. Doing lots of light coats will prevent it to a point, but the Grape colored Rustoleum on Lola checked like crazy on the first coat. It just wouldn't go on light enough to avoid it, I guess. Maybe I should have tried going next door and painted it from there.

Tardis Express

I used to have a bumper sticker that said 'Tardis Express: When It Absolutely, Positively, Has To Be There Before You Sent It.'

It was a spoof on the FedEx ads of the day, an ad campaign about to be obliterated by 'Where's the Beef?'

For the uninitiated (read you twenty-somethings I keep asking out on dates), 'Where's the Beef' was 1980s for 'That's Hot' and 'I'm Going Into Rehab.' You just couldn't get away from it.

So I was thinking today on my painfully long drive to get the honyocks, I could FedEx myself home faster than I could drive it.

But then I noticed the FedEx guy wasn't getting anywhere either.



That Tardis thing would sure come in handy...

Fashionista

Em got into the whole dress-up thing at my Dad's house this weekend.

Tubester

This is a vague imitation of a kit I saw. It uses short pieces of body tube for fins. Em thought it looked like a honeycomb. But after I picked nucular green and purple for colors, Tubster became the name. Or maybe I should have called it Test Tube Baby.

She vetoed Tube Snake Boogie, my first choice.

As Bridget Jones Would Put It: V. Early

It was the dog barking that woke me up. Barley the Dog Faced Boy was freaking out, and as I came out of the ether I smelled smoke.

I've had a house fire, and one of those is enough for a lifetime. So the smell of smoke brought me to pretty quickly. I go running into the kitchen and Mo is up, playing on the computer. The TV was on, turned to the Home Shopping thing. The microwave was humming and three blackening Ore-Ida fries were going around smoking.

Mo had an oven mitt on and was was noshing on another cinder fry as she played on KidPix.

It was 4:00 a.m., but she was up and apparently hungry for French fries. She was in a good mood, happily beat-boxing and singing away.

I heated up some fries and threw on some chicken nuggets for good measure and eventually convinced her to go back to bed at 5:00, but I don't think she really went back to sleep. Every time I thought it might be safe to put my head gear back on and conk out myself I'd hear a thump and find she'd tossed her mattress off its frame or something.

Every meal today, Mo has dragged the fries out of the freezer. She had fries for breakfast, fries for lunch and fries with her grilled salmon for dinner. In fact, she at the fries I'd heated up for her before she ate any salmon at all, and I think she'd have forsaken the fish for more fries if I had them. The bag was empty by now.

Come to find out, the Artist Formerly Known as Frau Lobster has taught Mo how to bake a potato in the microwave. Four minutes is the right time for a small spud in their microwave. Mo is logical to a fault, so when she woke up hungry and her body was screaming for starch, she grabbed the fries. I didn't have any potatoes on hand, but I think she probably figured if it takes four minutes to cook a potato that this is also the time it takes for something made from a potato. We'll have to refine her instruction on this score.



The salmon, by the way, was skinless. So I placed it on a bit of foil, which I sprayed with pan spray, before I grilled it. I worried about it because I'd had bad luck int he past with this technique. It turned out perfectly.

Soccer Cops*

I probably shouldn't have tried to fit a launch in on a school night, but I thought it would be fun and if Mo went to bed more like 9:00 than 8:00 a better chance she'd sleep through the night.

Then, on the way to the launch site, the awesome soccer field I found a few weeks ago, I noticed I was almost out of gas. And that my car was filthy. So I got gas, and a car wash at the Gas & Sip. It was getting pretty gloamy by the time we got there (I'm not sure 'gloamy' is a word, but it ought to be). I wasn't sure we'd have adequate visibility, but the sky was still bright. Plus, Hannah Montana, the latest Midwest Rock Lobster creation (I'd wanted to call her Roseanne Roseannadanna, but Em said, 'I can't say Roseanne Roseannadanna') was relatively large and relatively yellow. I figured we could spot her floating down on the 18" parachute she sported.



I set up my launch rod, and Em explained to the kids who were hanging about a Soccer Mom issue mini-van about the various rockets we'd brought. I loaded Hannah Montana with a C6-7 to give her good loft and plenty of time to arc back down closer to earth before the recover charge deployed that big parachute.

I figured the fading light would make the exhaust trail more visible (which it did), and thought that might make it harder to lose track of the rocket (which it didn't).

About the time we'd given up on visual contact, a guy came over asking me if I was 'about to shoot another one off.'


Well, 'shoot off' isn't really the term, but in dozens of launches at about a half dozen parks I've mainly entertained questions from scout leaders who want to do a rocketry unit or other parents/adults who have just had fond childhood memories of their first experience with rocketry jogged.



I explained to the guy, disappointed to tell him this, but no, it was getting way too dark.

"Good," he said.

Come again? Whuh?

He proceeded to tell me there were kids around, something I'd kind of sleuthed out for myself. I'm like, well, yeah. Two of them are mine. I didn't tell him the younger of the two had spotted a sprinkler that had come on and gone to dance in it.

Maybe I'm slow this way, but it genuinely took me a few exchanges with this guy, who I would guess is approximately my age but much more physically fit and dressed for soccer, before I realized he thought I was a threat.

No, check that. I didn't really think he thought of me as a threat yet: I came to realize he thought he had the authority to ban me from a city park. The anarchist in me kind of took over about now.

I tried to explain to this jock that I didn't require his approbation or permission to fly model rockets in a city park. He tried to explain to me that he owned the park.



Okay, he didn't quite say he owned the park: he said 'We have ownership of the park.'

That's right. A guy in shorts and a t-shirt is telling another guy in shorts and a t-shirt that the first one has ownership of a city park that trumps the rights of the second guy in shorts and a t-shirt.



I know, I lost my cool at this point and that's wrong. But I imagine if I'd tried to suggest to this guy that he didn't have the right to play soccer in a city park, he'd have head-butted me. So what I did next is less extreme than what I envision this jerk would have done.

'Why are you being such an asshole?' I asked. These are, for the record, my exact words. They were sincere but inappropriate as there were honyocks in hearing distance, some of whom might be expected by their parents to treat this particular asshole as a mentor.

Also, in fairness, I'd suggest that while my asking him why he was being an asshole is wrong and bad role modeling on my part, that if you want to avoid being accused of being a duck, it's not the smartest move to waddle around on webbed feet quacking.



Then the question of authority came up. Basically, I called the asshole's hand of statements that all begged the question of Who the Hell do you think you are?

He told me I should talk to his boss. Which I was glad to do. Not that I need his boss' permission to fly rockets either, but I was so pissed off that any challenge was going to be called blindly.

His boss, Kimball Leavitt, seemed to be on the same page. He wanted me to have one of his professionally printed business cards because that would intimidate me. He wanted me to understand that the club he belonged to had contributed $250,000 to develop this soccer complex in a joint venture with the City of Olathe. When I wasn't impressed with that, he shouted loudly enough that spit landed on my face. I think the chain link fence that happened to be between us saved him punching me and me proving that I'm not confrontational enough to engage in fisticuffs, especially with someone who is obviously my better physically.

Full disclosure: after our little exchange which consisted of these two soccer jocks telling me they had authority they don't have and me telling them they were talking out of their asses, I departed with an exclamation of 'Goddamn assholes.' Which was also wrong, even though there weren't kids in earshot. It was from the heart even if it wasn't helpful.

So I came home and typed the following email to Kimball Leavitt, the Technical Director of this militant soccer organization. He hasn't yet responded, but I'm making this an open letter to his ilk who need to learn the difference between public property and private, between a country club and a city park.

First let me apologize for being confrontational and resorting to name calling this evening. It’s not how I like to carry myself, and it hardly qualifies me as a good ambassador for my hobby, model rocketry.

I’d like you to imagine you’d found a great place to practice soccer near your home: a softball complex in a public park. Maybe you and your mates go and kick a soccer ball around there because there isn’t a soccer complex nearby. Not that long ago, this isn’t far fetched, right? Then imagine a guy comes from a softball diamond two diamonds away from the utterly empty one you’d picked for your pickup match and tries to tell you it’s not okay to play soccer in a softball park. Even tells you he’s got ownership of what is obviously a city park.




If I’m any judge of people, I’d guess Kimball Leavitt would not simply quit playing soccer and go meekly home.

Now, to rocketry. Please understand I wouldn’t do anything to endanger children. There are large and high powered model rockets, ones you have to have FAA waivers to fly and certification to buy the motors for, etc. I don’t launch such rockets and if I did it would not be in a public park.

Is it a projectile? You asked me that and I was too emotional to give you the correct answer, which is that it’s not in the sense you mean. When it’s launched, yes, it’s a projectile. It’s launched vertically, not at people. When it spends its fuel and deploys its recovery device, it is no longer a projectile. A parachute, or a streamer in the case of extremely small rockets, is used to destabilize and slow the descent, mainly for the safety of the rocket itself. The paper tubing making the body of the rocket is maybe slightly stiffer than the tube from a roll of paper towels. No kidding, back in the 1950s when kits weren’t available, the tube from a paper towel roll was a popular body tube source.

And I think if you imagine someone furious at you because of the menace of a falling paper towel tube, you might have some idea why I was so taken aback by the notion that model rocketry is incompatible with a soccer park. Two or three ounces of paper tubing, plastic and balsa under a parachute canopy might indeed fall on a kid, I suppose, but I doubt it would do worse than startle him.

For that matter, having been struck in the face by a soccer ball, I’d suggest that soccer balls are massively more dangerous than model rockets. Even under thrust, model rockets won’t do much damage: Estes has flown them into windows and the paper tubing just uncoils, taking the impact and leaving the glass unbroken. I’m not going to try that test on my own windows, but I doubt any soccer ball manufacturers would make that claim.

I’d also be more impressed with your authority to ban rockets from the park if there was anything destructive about it. I police my igniter wires and the plastic plugs that hold them in to be certain I’m not littering. The launch rod has a deflector plate to keep that first burst of exhaust from hitting the ground, so no scorched grass or potential grass fires. Rockets are always launched vertically and always with a recovery device (they idea is to fly a rocket again and again).

They are electronically ignited for safety as well: the fifteen feet of wire between the launch controller and the rocket provide safe distance for me and my kids pushing the launch button, and provides an easy way to call off a launch if, say, a kid was to wander into the perimeter of the launch. That’s why they’re not lit by fuses the way fireworks are: imagine NASA lighting a fuse and running for cover to launch the shuttle. This is rocketry, not pyrotechnics.

If I was tearing up the grass, endangering people, interfering with soccer games (I always pick a field with at least one empty on each side of it for my launches to minimize the chance that I’ll even have a rocket land in someone’s game), or if the park was truly on private property, I might be more impressed with your authority to ban me from the park. Again, I apologize for the hot-headedness this evening, but please understand I was presented with a guy who came out of the blue carrying himself like a schoolyard bully who never grew up. I shouldn’t have taken the bait, but the utterly outrageous nature of the orders he was trying to give took me off guard.

I’m not trying to make enemies when I say I’ll be back with my kids to launch again. We come in peace.

I will launch rockets again at Lone Elm. I'm not trying to make enemies, as the end of my letter states. I'm just not going to comply with bullying. I tried that back in grade school and it doesn't work.

*Note my restraint: I didn't refer to them as the Soccer Nazis or the Soccer Gestapo, tempting though those appellations were. Maybe it was that crush I recently had on a Jewish painter, but bullyish jocks just don't measure up on the atrocity scale. The Soccer Cops are really just pitiful imitations, blessedly impotent to enforce their stupidity on others.

Hollandaise

Grilled chicken, does that even warrant a recipe? Light the fire, wait for it to simmer down, throw the chicken on, flip it after a bit, take the chicken in and eat.



The Hollandaise sauce was nearly as simple because I cheated and used a packet of McCormick's. Then I read in Joy of Cooking and saw it might have been just as easy to make the real thing.

Oh well, still got Em to try upwards of 1/16 of a Brussels sprout. The sauce improved it, from what I gathered, to nearly non-toxic. I think she liked Hollandaise, she's just too cool (read eleven) to admit it to her Dad.

Mo ignored her veggies for the most part, and the pasta. But she ate two full chicken breasts and then scarfed down her sister's leftover in an astonishing protein grab even for her.



I'd been counting on that fourth breast for my lunch today.

I grilled boogers the other day, too. And made some more 'Asian' slaw. I just can't stand to heat up the kitchen. It was all I could bring myself to do to boil water for pasta.





I live in the wrong part of the world. I should live someplace like Portland, Oregon, maybe Seattle. Someplace with moderate summers and winters. Maybe when my honyocks are grown I'll head out West.

Dolly Doctor Bill

Okay, one of Em's numerous grandparents bought her this American Girl doll a couple years back. It's one of those things that's desirable simply for being ridiculously expensive.

And not long after, Mo showed us how well that vinyl skin absorbs even water based markers.



So when Em went to the American Girl place in Chicago, she took Felicity for a head replacement. I met two men just this evening who would be well served by a visit to a doll hospital to get new plastic heads. Of course, they probably think I could use a replacement unit, but unlike them, I'm right.

So then Em has been waiting and waiting for Felicity to come back from the American Girl Hospital. Even trying to get her friends down the street to intercept the package if they saw it on my doorstep so Felicity wouldn't be abandoned to the fates between the time the UPS driver drop kicked her onto the porch and the time I got home.

Then the doll hospital called to say they couldn't figure why she was in for limb reattachment. Her limbs were fine.



No, head replacement, I explained. They explained that was another $15.95 more than what had been paid. So I paid it.

And here's the big pay off: $4.27 worth of plastic, 93¢ worth of toy hospital gown, $49 of marketing and one happy, happy kiddo.

Ride

The Johnson County Fair last weekend, took honyocks, rode rides.





It was great, if pricey. From the ferris wheel, I could see a bit of the Demolition Derby we regrettably missed; also could see the Gardner Aquatic Center really well.







The Power Surge, you can see it in the leftish area of the above photo, this was the reigning champion of the Scary Ride world. A few years back I rode it with Em and she freaked out so loudly they stopped the ride early. I don't recall if they were blasting heavy metal music on the platform back then, but she might have been loud enough to cut through Ozzy.





It's spinning seats on spinning arms on a rotating wheel on an arm that tilts up and down. You're feet and legs dangle free. Plus, it's maintained and operated by hungover carnies.



But this year, the Zipper took the title belt. It's seen to the right of the Power Surge in that same photo, the sixth one in this set. Or maybe neither can be the undisputed champion, because the Power Surge was still pretty intense.



The Zipper is not open like the Power Surge, it's a cage ride. You're in a spinning cage on a belt that goes around a loop and the loop spins. You can't see where you are on the loop, so you're on your head suddenly and with no warning. Or the car feels like it's flying off the thing. And it squeals and pops, sounds like bolts shearing.



And of course we rode the tilt-a-whirl type thing and the blindingly fast teacup type thing. This latter, when it was over I told the carnie running it that was an intense ride. "It's running slow," he said. "Supposed to run 11-1/2 RPMs, only going about ten tonight."





Yikes.







By the time we got home, all Mo would say was, 'Tuck you in?'