The next installment in a series of daring arboreal adventures: you might remember last year when I pulled a a giant limb down with a football tied to a rope (I included the photo if you've forgotten) and now, once again, I have conquered another neighborhood tree-- this time (ironically just after we watched a Peanuts episode about the Wright Brothers, in which, as usual, Charlie Brown has a mishap with a kite) we were flying a giant Styrofoam glider and after Alex and Ian took a few turns, I wanted to show them how far I could throw it, so I wound up and winged it, just as the wind gusted, and it shot straight up and into the limbs of a tall sweet gum tree, sixty feet up (we were launching from a hill) but I brought the soccer ball to the park and, after twenty tries or so, I punted it loose . . . but then it got stuck in the same tree in nearly the same spot the next day, but miraculously, the next morning, it fell to the ground, unharmed, and though we finally broke it yesterday, we certainly got our seven dollars worth.
My dad got one of those gliders when I was about 6 and he's an engineer so he pushed a very big nail into the nose of the glider to give it weight in the front, then he adjusted the wings to do loop-de-loops, then he heaved it with all his might and it did a giant loop-de-loop about 20 feet forward and then soared spectacularly upward about 50 feet and we both watched it with wide-eyed awe as it came back down to earth, and then it stopped looping as the weight of the big nail took effect so it just fell straight down accelerating an 9.8 m/sec^2, and we both continued to stare upwards at this monster foam plane barreling downward like a kamikazi, and it finally hit my dad directly between the eyes with an audible "DONK" noise, then the foam plane actually bounced upwards a good 2 feet before falling to the ground, and it must have really hurt because my dad had a huge bruise and cursed for an extended period of time, and all of this made me laugh uncontrollably to the point of teary-eyed exhaustion, and this made my dad even madder than he already was and he stormed into the house.
ReplyDeletewow! i may steal this sentence for a later date. i put the tail on backwards and it did two loops-- on the first it just missed me and on the second it hit my son alex, but your incident is fantastic-- a funniest home video winner.
ReplyDeleteThis picture was was too far away to critique your attire like last year. You should link to that post -- it was one of your funniest.
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