Our tour has nearly come to a close.  We have one more conference, but we’re driving there (CHEA in Long Beach), and it isn’t for two weeks.  We can happily store all our stuff out of sight and reconnect with our families!  It was such a LOOOOONNNGG trek, and I’d do it again, but not right now.

The WHO conference was such a blast!  We were stampeded with parents, kids, and everything in between.  At one point, the kids took the rocket (all 11.5 feet of it) and carried it around and around the hall, announcing a rocket show at our booth.  I think we gave other vendors a heart attack.

One vendor wasn’t too keen about us – he said that after kids went to our booth (where they are allowed to touch everything), they would visit other booths and assume they could do that there, too.  He seemed a little upset by this, so I took a look at his booth.

He was selling microscopes.

Ah.  Now THAT makes sense!  With a quick word with the kiddos, we worked it out and everyone was happy.

I wish I could put into works the experiences we had and what they meant to me… but I don’t think I can.  It was such a challenging (steep learning curve!), strenuous (heavy boxes!), wonderfully loving (compassionate attendees!), amazing time that it only seems appropriate to sit back and smile, reveling in all the incredible moments we shared with people… the moments when the kid’s eyes would light up with an AH-HA! moment… when parents were floored when they watched their kids’ teach them (the parents) how to wire things up and make stuff work… how wonderfully amazing my assistant, Amy us (I couldn’t ask for anyone better!)… how supported we felt by our staff who were waiting back at the home office (who got us anything we needed, no matter what time of night!)… to the beautiful people we met on our journeys… it was a truly magical, magnificently perfect first cross-country Supercharged Science Tour.

And the most thanks goes out to you, the readers, the audience… for it is you that put me up there on stage.  It’s only because of you that I am up there, blowing things up and lighting fires of curiosity underneath it all.  Thank you.

So this happened before, but I don’t think I mentioned it. At MACHE, the rocket nose was lost in shipping, and I had to make a rather hokey-looking replacement out of silver spray paint and posterboard. From a distance (like a mile), it wasn’t so bad. Fortunately, the next day, the nosecone came and we ditched the fake.

It happened again.

Only this time, the ONLY thing that arrived was the nosecone. Where did the body go?

So, after a quick zip over to Home Depot, we had orange spray paint and SONO tubes for the body. It was nearly accurate (the real body used the same tubes thankfully), except there was no engine mount inside (which we told people if they asked). Here’s the funny part – I remember the rocket being about 8′ tall, and since the tubes came in 4′ lengths, I bought two. I forgot to add the height of the 3.5′ nosecone, so we were staring up at a 11.5-foot screaming-orange rocket for the entire show. With cardboard fins (way more hokey than the nose at MACHE).

The rocket body was eventually waiting for us back at our house. Seems to have taken the wrong flight.

Okay, so that just really sounds odd… but WHO is the Washington Homeschool Organization, I swear.  We’ve had to get skinnier than we were before, as our stuff won’t make it from coast to coast in time for the show (FedEx charges over $2,400 to get our equipment there in time!), so we’ve shipped some of it back to the hometown office, and the rest is on the airplane.

We just got a call from the rental car agency… wait – I didn’t tell you about that back in PA, so let me get you caught up – this is so funny!  I rented a car to drive our equipment (and myself) from GA to PA (GHEA to CHAP) back in early May.  The car stopped working and we had to get on a plane, so we left the keys for the car at the hotel and called the rental car agency, who said ‘no problem’.

It’s nearly a MONTH later, and we just got a call from the car rental security office, issuing a case for a stolen car.  When I heard that, I replied, “First off, if I was going to steal a car, it wouldn’t be a minivan (which is what we had rented), and second of all, the keys are at the hotel…”  The investigator actually laughed on the phone.  I nearly had a criminal record!  *grin*

So Amy tells people she’s got the best job in the world – where else can you get a boss (that’s me) who gives you a shopping list of:

1 Propane Torch
4 Diaper Genie Refills
2 Toilet Plungers

And believe it or not, I’ve got a boss, too!  But he doesn’t give me shopping lists… he gets me headed int he right direction so I can make the biggest impact on people.  He’s been on board since the beginning, and he’s been the CEO of an engineering company, is a CFII (he teaches people how to fly airplanes, and also can do charter work), and invented a really cool part for a car so that (for older cars) you can replace the carburetor with his EFI (electronic fuel injection) system and drive around the block, and it makes the emissions go WAY down toward zero.  He sold this invention to car manufacturers in China to help clean up their air (and to Moss Motors here in the US race car industry – turns out that it boosts horsepower, too!) , and now he works with us!

So… about HEAV – they were the first people to acknowledge that we  were in fact, blowing things up and politely asked if we could “keep the fire on the floor”.  They didn’t say stop, however, so of course we didn’t!  Although it was not the largest (in attendance) it was certainly the busiest for us.  We never had a moment to sit down, but thankfully a whole troop of boy scouts volunteered to help us out in our booth, answering parent’s questions, fixing broken models, and helping kids make stuff work that it really just flew by!

We did have a few complaints, though… usually, just before the workshop, several kids will go around and holler “Rocket Show!  5 minutes!!” and lead people to the workshop area.  We do talk about rockets, oxidation, burn rates, and all these have live demos, and we fire the crystal rocket near the end, and have the kids popping off their smaller versions of rockets, but a few people came to Amy after the show and complained that I didn’t fire off any rockets.  Amy asked them which rocket they meant, to which they pointed to the BIG rocket.  (We have a BIG EIGHT-FOOT rocket in our booth – it’s real, but it needs a FAA clearance to launch, as it goes up about a mile.)  Amy asked them where we did the talk, to which they answered, “indoors”… Smothering a smile, she politely pointed out that I was probably more than happy to light more things on fire, if that’s what they were looking for, but unfortunately, we couldn’t blow any holes in the ceiling.  I really think they were disappointed!

Okay, so this conference has a funny name, but it’s really the Home Educators Assoc. of Virginia, and it’s in Richmond.  We’re just wrapping up the final edits from the FPEA conference and changing only a few things this time.

During the last few hours at FPEA (Florida), we were slammed with people, all wanting to ask questions, wondering where their rocket valves were (it was a free gift), and what on earth we had in the booth that made all these kids hang out with us all day.  The best part was that we had “hired” out help this time – this was one of the many changes from last time – I often spend too much time fixing the models instead of talking with people, so we hired two teens (15 and 16 year olds) to work in the booth in exchange for a science kit.  What we didn’t anticipate was that attendees were asking them questions -  “How long have you known Aurora?” (Two days!) “Why are you hanging out here in this booth?  What’s so great about it?” and on and on.  It was great that the people felt comfortable enough asking the kids these questions, and since they’ve only just met us, the responses the kids gave made us both look and feel great!

I miss home a bit, and really miss just playing with the kids.  My true passion is getting into the field and teaching science, not working conventions or conferences as much as we have lately.  When we get back, we’ve got a weeklong workshop scheduled, so that will feel great to get back into doing that.

I remember when I was teaching at the university, how I despised the “meetings” and “requirements” and other hoops faculty had to jump through – it took all the fun out of teaching.  That’s when I decided to be an instructor, not a professor.  You see, as an instructor, I had a bigger workload (more classes to teach) and wasn’t required to participate in any of the planning or research or meetings or things like that.  I could just focus on “teaching”.  So I down-shifted, and it worked well, until I noticed how bored the kids seemed to be in the classes.  That’s when I started asking better questions, like “How can you be bored?  I get to work on rockets and jet engines, and stuff like that… why are you bored? How were you taught science in high school before you came here to college?”  When I found the answer, I realized that my place was not only in the university, but I had to catch these kids BEFORE they hit college.  That’s the day Supercharged Science started.