A Peculiar Blog

Once upon a time in a small New England town and later in a large city in Oklahoma, I used to fly model rockets.  It was one of those hobbies that tended to make people blink when you told them that’s what you did with your free time during summer vacation.

Eventually as I got older and “real life” interfered more and more I retired the rockets and went about life.  The area that I used to fly them has changed as well.  When I was doing this (in the late 70’s) where we lived wasn’t far from the outer reaches of the city.  Since then the field has been developed and that whole part of town is now a LONG way off from the edge of town.

Once in a while I think it’d be fun to build a few models and get in some flight time but the thing is, doing that means having to A, have a large tree-free field to fly ’em in and B, having to chase after ’em when they come back down.  (No way do I want to spend time building something like that and only get to fly it once.) The problem with this is the lack of a “recovery crew” to do the chasing.  Given the shape I’m in these days (hey, round is a shape), I’m certainly not going to do it.

With that in mind, I started thinking of alternatives.  Model airplanes, lots of people spend considerable time working on and flying them.  The problems there is the “control line” type means standing in one spot turning in a circle as the plane flies around you on the end of the control line.  Absolutely not gonna happen.  I get dizzy WAY too easily to even picture that for more than a second or so.

RC planes look interesting but the problem there is that it’s not an inexpensive hobby to get into.  I understand it’s not bad once you get started but the initial cash outlay can be quite a bit.  Until recently, this also applied to RC helicopters as well.

I was looking around on the buy.com sale page and after a while I got to looking around for what they had in the realm of RC helicopters just for the heck of it.  What I found actually surprised me.

RC helicopters that are small enough to fly indoors (or maybe outside on a calm day).  One of them, the Rider Infrared 2ch Mini RC Helicopter, is actually small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.  This has to make it perfect for indoor flying which, among other things means that weather is not a factor when it comes to deciding when you want to fly.  It’s got an infrared controller and comes with a charging cable.

I’m already looking forward to the fun that can be had with one of those and the household cat.  MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

[Tags]wishlist, stuff I want, hobbies, model aircraft, model rockets, model helicopters, rc helicopters, fun with cats[/tags]