R is for ... Rockets & the 4th Grade Space Program

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my dad wanted to turn his homemade gunpowder into model rocket engines. That idea never came to fruition, but not because we didn't love model rockets. The first one dad got was a tiny thing. He put it together, we launched it and everything was awesome except... the rocket was too small. We needed a bigger rocket fix.

Next, he used learning from the kit to build his own, bypassing bigger, more expensive kits. This one used the tube from a roll of paper towels, balsa wood fins, and the nosecone was an old pill bottle hotglued to one of those plastic bubbles you get gum in for a quarter from the tiny machines in front of stores. Parachute from a plastic bag and thread! All he had to buy were the engines and igniters.

We loved that one so much that I made a replica for the fourth grade science fair. We saved the last bit of nosecone assembly to catch a grasshopper and seal him into his capsule. The hope was that it would come down where we could retrieve him, and ask what he was going to do now that he was the first grasshopper in space... But wind caught the parachute as it drifted down and blew him far away on the hills behind the school. A tragic blow for the fourth-grade space program.

After this, Dad was always on the lookout for bigger, sturdier cardboard tubes. He came home with one that was five foot tall and six inches in diameter. But we knew we couldn't get it off the ground with our current model rocket technology, so it was stored for 2 years while we built and launched increasingly bigger rockets with separate stages of ignition. Stage #1 gets it so high, ignites stage #2 and #1 pops off as #2 fires... Then we added a stage #3 and #4...

They went high enough that no one could see them anymore, but the parachutes were colored with markers by this point, so when they drifted far enough down that binoculars could see them, the chase began to retrieve the rocket.

Except for the times that we had rocket engine failure. Turns out, it's really hard to time the ignition on the separate stages. Sometimes... the next stage of engines wouldn't fire until the rocket had already turned and was no longer pointing up. Sometimes they fell and didn't kick on until they were more or less at ground level and could chase people--so you couldn't come watch our launches unless you were ready to run.

Finally, the learning curve progressed to the point we felt confident enough to attempt the five foot rocket. It launched beautifully. I think it had five stages... We lost it in the sky before all the stages ignited. But we caught sight of it again when it was speeding down without the parachute. One of the stages delayed igniting until the sucker was pointed at the ground... It rocketed into the middle of the road and the top 12-18 inches smashed down like an accordion. Luckily, no one was in the road at the time.  That was the best launch ever. Height. Speed. Drama. Destruction. Perfection!

I highly recommend building model rockets with your kids :)  Just maybe ... don't Wile E. Coyote it...

P is for ... Party Games of Survival

My little brother was born on Halloween. When we were little, we'd have his party, then get dressed up and Trick or Treat. But at around ten, he didn't want to Trick or Treat, but we all still wanted to get dressed up and eat sugar. This began big Halloween parties with lots of candy and danger.

First party was in our old farm house with 10ft ceilings. For the game, they put prizes into balloons stapled to the ceiling, which we popped with the aid of metal rods with a nail on the end.

The balloons popped, candy and quarters rained down on us. No one lost an eye, but there were a few light stabbings. Well, light pokings. Some Scrapings. Holes in costumes... But we did alright! No one got tetanus. Good time for all! Oh, and there were also a bunch of holes in the ceiling after that. Whoops. Every little kid loves being given a tiny sword with a really long handle to stab the ceiling with. It was AWESOME. Everyone remembers this game.

A couple years later we had another party, this time in the barn. Mom and my aunt spent a week decorating and converting the barn(it had four rooms) into a haunted house/birthday party. Not just for all the many cousins this time, friends came too! It was actually very impressive. I'm still impressed with what they managed to do to the barn that week. But what everyone remembers is THE GAME.

Open rafters meant a new game. Popping balloons had been a hit, so they tried a new game: spinning metal wheel with balloons tied to it. And a bb gun. For the kids to shoot at the metal wheel. Well, to be fair, they tried darts, but it didn't work so they switched to the bb gun(forgetting the wheel was metal).

After the first shot, which ricocheted, each shooter wore safety glasses and mom shouted... DUCK AND COVER YOUR EYES! Then we'd hear POP... PING! ... OW! (bb's sting even after bouncing off a few surfaces). In short? Another hit! We loved that game too. But I think mom feared having to top it--we stopped having big dangerous Halloween parties after that.

L is for ... Grenade Launcher

Keeping to the theme of ridiculousness for A to Z, it's time for another thrilling post of childhood memories!

If you read about the camper-bus, you may have gleaned that my dad liked to build stuff out of other stuff. Kind of like McGyver, but with less spies and more random danger.

It all started with him repacking his own bullets. If you didn't know you could do that, you can. You get bullet fixins and assemble yourself with a tiny scoop for gunpowder, and a tiny hammer for taptaptapping the slug into the shell (Which freaks everyone out. What's the first rule of bullets? Don't hit one with a hammer, duh.).

From there, it progressed to mixing his own gunpowder. This is also dangerous, so he commandeered a rock tumbler(just the rubber container bit), and then built a little machine to spin the tumbler out of old typewriters and a sewing machine motor (we didn't have that bit for some reason), and took it all out to an old shed in the back pasture--where it wouldn't hurt anyone if, by chance, it exploded. After that, he had lots of gun powder! Which, thankfully, never randomly exploded.

This lead to the idea that he maybe could make his own model rocket engines(coming R post). And from there, the natural evolution . . . the realization that it might explode the rockets. One day all this came together in a flash of I-COULD-BLOW-STUFF-UP brilliance, model rocket engines we already had were added, along with the bent metal tube from an old vacuum cleaner... and later a few smallish holes in the front yard. I think he may have also exploded an old tree stump with it... Good thing we lived way out in the country.

So all that stuff about country people being crazy? Probably truer than we'd like to admit.

But I cling to the fact that no one in the family has fixed a dead deer head to the hood of a car. Yet.