Bob Space

Happy St. Andrew’s Day!

… no. You don’t want to know. Trust me, though, it’s remarkably entertaining to have after a a day eating less than 2 ounces of food.

… and if y’all aren’t bored to tears of this, think how I feel.

Took the last dose of prescription cough syrup sedative last night. And ran out my bottle of Mucinex DM. Good thing I’ve still got a couple of albuterol inhalers, ’cause those seem to be the only things that moderate the cough. (Yes the doctor said to use it for this.)

Still feel a touch feverish, appetite is nil. Dizzy occasionally. What fun!

I’ve been fighting a cold for most of two weeks now. Last night after dinner I finally sprouted a fever. From 2 AM I was tossing and turning with aches and the occasional cough.

I got out of bed at 6, the better to let The Lady have some sleep-in. I have a headache and I feel feverish, but the other symptoms which had plagued me for the previous 11 days are gone: no sinus discharge, and a mild cough which is positively welcome compared to the nagging hacking cough prior.

I’m not really sure what to make of developing a fever late in a cold. But I do know that the errands I’d planned for today — some mailing, some hobby store scouting, a smog check for the wagon — must be deferred to the morrow. I want only to load myself up on painkillers/fever reducers and go back to bed.

Assorted dishes came out well and tasty, despite me being extremely puny and whiny, and wife being achey and sore.

Letting matters digest a bit. I’ll probably skip dessert.

So lately I’ve been revisiting this Bookclub Omnibus edition which contains two of my favorite Heinlein novels: “Double Star” and “The Door Into Summer.”

“Double Star” is just fun. A little atypical of Heinlein heroes, I thought, in that he wasn’t broadly skilled and confident but instead utterly brilliant in a very narrow skill and confident beyond conceit within that scope. He matured nicely through the book.

“The Door Into Summer” — well, the hero didn’t really change much here from beginning to end. This actually plays more like a mystery novel than sci-fi, but it plays well.

I said “trio,” didn’t I? ‘Cause I haven’t re-read the third book in the volume since I was in my late teens/early twenties. It’s so vivid and scary that it gave me nightmares, and I’m praying they don’t revisit me. This novel is “The Puppet Masters,” and it is a fully brilliant work. I haven’t missed rereads, but I’ve braved it one more time and found it rewarding and perhaps less intense that my younger reader. Maybe I just have been experiences to buffer it with now.

I feel sufficiently recharged to tackle Dinner Support.

You’re going to see a LOT of posts from me today, generated as I come back to sit down between holiday chores. To kick off: In our area, eggnog is not generally sold any time except these holidays (except in liquor stores). So, when offered the choice of eggnog or orange juice with the traditional sweet roll breakfast, Jackie asked, “What’s eggnog?’

“Just give her the eggnog,” I said. “She’ll figure it out.”

A few minutes later, a loud proclamation from in front of the TV. “Oh, NOW I remember eggnog!”

And less than a minute after that, “More eggnog, please!”

(Yes, I know it’s easy to make. Go ‘way. My waistline doesn’t need it that often. In fact, I’m trying to go through the whole season without any eggnog.)

… set aside for the giving of thanks (in the U.S.), I must give thanks for my friends and family, near, far, and amazingly far (yes, that’s you, Jan, David and Glen). Thank you for your support, your encouragement, your (often well-deserved) criticism, and especially your shared joy and laughter. I’m blessed to have y’all in my life.

In conjunction with global GIS Day events, our 4-H team hosted an exploration event for your people. A dozen signed up; ten were able to attend (two were ill). They got to play with maps, and computerized geography systems, and got to see a model rocketry demonstration, and then got to navigate around the events center using handheld GPS receivers.

As you might expect, the rocketry was my special province. I brought out my Estes Blue Ninja and hastily built an Estes Liquidator to demonstrate payloading a bit more similar to the Delta launchers used for NavStar-GPS satellites.

The set-up went well, the patter to show off the rocket was fun, was a fun bunch of young people. The Blue Ninja went first, flawless flight into the 500 to 600 foot range. The parachute was slightly tangled … one shroud line was actually looped around the shock cord, so the chute only opened to about 85% of diameter. It was still enough for it to descent slowly and safely enough. It came back ready to fly again.

So I picked up the Liquidator to do a compare and contrast … and a fin fell off. A deep sense of foreboding latched onto my soul, sinking its sinister talons deep into my expectations…
In the morning before leaving, I’d had to do an emergency repair on two joins which never took, connecting the two halves of the body tube to the shock cord anchor ring. There was one other join just like those on the rocket — connecting the fin can/motor mount to the lower body tube. I pulled at it, and it seemed to hold. But I’ve never been happy with Estes’ instructions to use plastic model cement to bond polystyrene to cardboard.

Meanwhile one of my 4-H superiors provided a bit of duct tape. (Ah, duct tape, we love you.) So, I set it on the pad, hooked up the igniters … and recognized to my extreme embarrassment that I’d left the safety key IN the controller. Had anyone been playing with the button, I could have been seriously injured.

So we did the countdown. I tipped the launch angle a bit anticipating some strong-ish upper-level winds we saw on the first flight. It ascended straight (yay for the duct-tape fin repair). Arced up and the ejection charge blew…

… and where I was ready to watch two parachuting objects, I instead had to quickly assimilate that I was watching one parachuting object (nose cone and payload) and two free-falling objects (fin can and body tube-without-chute). The fin can was down first, breaking on impact into 5 separate pieces… only one glue join held. The body tube bounced nicely, not materially harmed. My two emergency repairs of the morning held perfectly well. Around a minute later, the payload drifted back.

So, it was a wonderful object lesson in how rocketry sometimes goes and sometimes doesn’t. But I got every piece back… there’s no reason I can’t put them back together, preferably better, and make it fly for real.

Here’s what happened: When the ejection charge fires, it pressurizes the body tube. Normally, since the nose cone is not affixed, that pressure finds release by pushing out the nose cone, the recovery system, and the recovery wadding. On this flight, those, the pressure found a second release when the fin can/body tube bond failed. The nose cone (and its independent chute) ejected, and so did the rocket’s tail. With the pressure released, there was nothing to deploy the recovery wadding or the body’s chute.

I’m really at a loss to explain how I did such a pathetic build job. I don’t remember doing that much differently from building the Ninja (which uses identical materials and almost identical parts). But pathetic build it must have been, and I must address those faults during the rebuild. I also learned I need to reorganize my field supplies to better accommodate on-the-spot repairs. Happily, there’s ample space for such in one box since I relocated the launch pads to another.

Bright spots, tho’: The Pratt GOBox launcher performed flawlessly, as did the AeroTech Mantis pad. And everyone (me, too, truth be told) enjoyed the experience. Can’t really ask for more.