Friday, January 30, 2009
Fun new blog
My sister in law told me about this great blog. It is www.inevergrewup.net. They have lots of fun things but the best is the wonderful giveaways. The current one is a double stroller from Bumbleride. Those of you in the market for a stroller should check it out.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
New Year's Eve: Don't try this at home
We had a great New Year's Eve get together with our friends Ginger and Elliot Parker. As part of our festivities I (Bill speaking) decided that it would be really fun to stand out in the cold and launch a rocket to welcome in the New Year. Sounds innocuous, right?
Not really. You see, this wasn't just any rocket. This was a homemade rocket. The problem with store bought rockets is that you put a rocket engine inside of a rocket and then you launch it. Not a problem in the daylight because you can see where it's going and get it back. But if you want to launch the rocket at night to celebrate the New Year, then you won't be able to see the rocket land. It seems like a big waste to put together a rocket just to lose it. So I came up with a brilliant idea--why don't I just slap fins and a nose cone onto the rocket engine itself? I can just skip the rocket part altogether and just launch the engine. Genius. You may be asking yourself, "why haven't I ever seen a rocket like that before?" You may also notice that NASA has never done this either. Read on to find out why.
Armed with my brilliant idea, I made a small A class rocket to see what would happen. For those of you who aren't rocket nerds, an A class rocket is about the size of a chapstick container and only has about a half an inch of solid rocket fuel. These little guys only launch about 300 feet in the air when done correctly. After completing a successful launch of my A class test rocket it would be time to scale up the experiment. Now this is where I see that in hindsight I show a little lapse in judgement.
When I say "scale up the experiment," I'm not joking. I bought E class rockets. Again, for those of you who are not rocket nerds, an E class rocket is about the size of a roll of quarters with about 4 inches of solid rocket fuel. Still, that doesn't seem very big, but let me quote what the back of the box says about E class rockets. In the United States you "must be 18 to purchase in CA and NJ" and in Canada these rockets "may not be sold to a person under 18 years of age." The warning on the back of the box goes on to caution "do not launch model rockets in a manner that would endanger flying aircraft." You get the idea. These rockets are meant to go about a mile high. I thought that would make for a pretty cool nighttime launch and a great way to blast into the New Year.
The problem is, during my small scale launch the A class rocket went about 20 feet in the air, lost all of its fins and nose cone, spun around our heads shooting sparks everywhere, and crashed somewhere in the back yard. This is when NASA scientists go back to the drawing board, analyze what went wrong during the launch, reconfigure the rocket, and try again. But I didn't have that kind of time. I did my test launch at 10:30 p.m. and I didn't have time to reengineer a rocket in an hour and a half.
So, onward and upward, as they say. Except, this rocket didn't really go up. The first video is the setup, and the second is the actual launch. As you will see by this video, homemade rockets can be fairly dangerous.
Not really. You see, this wasn't just any rocket. This was a homemade rocket. The problem with store bought rockets is that you put a rocket engine inside of a rocket and then you launch it. Not a problem in the daylight because you can see where it's going and get it back. But if you want to launch the rocket at night to celebrate the New Year, then you won't be able to see the rocket land. It seems like a big waste to put together a rocket just to lose it. So I came up with a brilliant idea--why don't I just slap fins and a nose cone onto the rocket engine itself? I can just skip the rocket part altogether and just launch the engine. Genius. You may be asking yourself, "why haven't I ever seen a rocket like that before?" You may also notice that NASA has never done this either. Read on to find out why.
Armed with my brilliant idea, I made a small A class rocket to see what would happen. For those of you who aren't rocket nerds, an A class rocket is about the size of a chapstick container and only has about a half an inch of solid rocket fuel. These little guys only launch about 300 feet in the air when done correctly. After completing a successful launch of my A class test rocket it would be time to scale up the experiment. Now this is where I see that in hindsight I show a little lapse in judgement.
When I say "scale up the experiment," I'm not joking. I bought E class rockets. Again, for those of you who are not rocket nerds, an E class rocket is about the size of a roll of quarters with about 4 inches of solid rocket fuel. Still, that doesn't seem very big, but let me quote what the back of the box says about E class rockets. In the United States you "must be 18 to purchase in CA and NJ" and in Canada these rockets "may not be sold to a person under 18 years of age." The warning on the back of the box goes on to caution "do not launch model rockets in a manner that would endanger flying aircraft." You get the idea. These rockets are meant to go about a mile high. I thought that would make for a pretty cool nighttime launch and a great way to blast into the New Year.
The problem is, during my small scale launch the A class rocket went about 20 feet in the air, lost all of its fins and nose cone, spun around our heads shooting sparks everywhere, and crashed somewhere in the back yard. This is when NASA scientists go back to the drawing board, analyze what went wrong during the launch, reconfigure the rocket, and try again. But I didn't have that kind of time. I did my test launch at 10:30 p.m. and I didn't have time to reengineer a rocket in an hour and a half.
So, onward and upward, as they say. Except, this rocket didn't really go up. The first video is the setup, and the second is the actual launch. As you will see by this video, homemade rockets can be fairly dangerous.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
A Happy New Year
Bill speaking here: One of my New Year's Resolutions is to be much better about updating our blog. We're also planning to expand the focus of the blog--instead of just updating family and friends about what's going on, we're also going to use our blog as a way to document the past. You may see some stories about how Sarah and I met, or how I proposed, or what it was like to find out that we were having triplets. I hope that including those things will make our blog much more exciting and it will give us things to write about even when nothing exciting is going on in our day to day lives.
Also, another goal of mine is to learn how to make our blog a lot cooler. It's pretty boring right now, so I'm going to try to learn how to spice things up a bit. So, here's to a Happy New Year and some great blogging. Hope you enjoy.
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