Three… Two… One…

Jack spent about a half an hour last night chatting with someone who teaches robotics and rocketry to middle school students at a local school district event. At one point (reported via Kitty, I was cleaning the pool at the time) he turned around and started telling the assembled other elder kids who attend this guy’s class how the rocket he’d just learned about worked. One, of course, that they’d probably shot off a few times. Everyone thought it was cute, of course.

When I was old enough to ride a bike, my local crack dealer (that’s a joke, son) was a guy named Mike who ran Mike’s Comics, about eight blocks from my school. The bell would ring, and a small cadre of fourth graders would pop on their Huffy bikes and zip over to Mike’s instead of going home, and pick up the latest issues of whatever our personal addictions were. Mike had a small gaming section, but basically if you wanted to pick up RPG books you had to take the bus and head ‘way off towards one of the closer regional malls, or bike about 2 miles to Comics & Fantasies. Comics & Fantasies had a better selection of D&D stuff than Mike’s, but it was still mostly a comic book store. The only other hobby store nearby was a rinkydink place that was also within bike range, but they sold only models, model paint and glue, and water weenies. I was not the type to get into model construction, myself.

In retrospect, until high school, almost all of my hobbies were at least partially dictated by the range of my bike. If I couldn’t get there, buy whatever, and cart it back on my backpack and get home before 5, odds were pretty low I was going to be very interested in getting into it, whatever it was.

Once the Automobile skill was acquired, I discovered D&J Hobby & Crafts, which remains awesome. It’s so awesome, it’s still around now, 24 years later. Almost every other hobby, comic, or nerd-focused store I know of folded within a decade, but D&J is still there, still warehouse-sized, and packed to the gills with everything from military historical models to scrapbooking and needlework stuff. They had a huge collection of RC stuff, and rockets.

It was too late for me to get into model rockets. I was stuck on a $30/week comic book habit and a $25/month RPG rulebook kick that I couldn’t shake. Model rockets were an expensive hobby (nothing next to model train nerds and HAM radio enthusiasts, but it’s an expensive hobby in its own right), and I couldn’t take on any more recreational habits.

One of the completely awesome selfish side benefits of having offspring is that it gives you an excuse to find new hobby shops in your new town that cater to the whims of your kids, who appear to like things that you always thought were pretty cool but never quite prioritized high enough to get nerd status points.

I think we’ll be shopping for rocket engines some time soon, now. We even have a good park for settin’ the suckers off.