Flying in the winter is cold.
The full Rocket armor feels warm even in the worst weather, probably because Grandpa spent a lot of time flying during the winter. By contrast, Grandpa’s main focus when he created the stealth suit was for it to fit under clothes. Even after pulling the supplementary jacket, pants and gloves over the basic suit, the stealth suit still felt colder.
Adding a guitar to the mix didn’t make things any easier.
Continue reading Rattling Cages: Part 14
Jaclyn started moving a couple minutes after the door shut.
I could hear her push herself up, fall once, push herself up again, and then I saw her black, heeled boots on the floor in front of me. She stopped for a moment, looking (I assumed) at the people on the floor, and then ran to the window on the far side of the room.
I heard the kitchen door open, followed by a gasp.
Continue reading Rattling Cages: Part 13
“Well,” I said, “it turned out that you could find uranium on Amazon, but they sold it in such small amounts that if you wanted to do anything interesting you’d have to buy a lot of it and I don’t think we really have the facilities for working with it anyway.”
I started to tell her exactly what sort of things I’d need to buy, but then I stopped, because sometimes I do notice when I’m telling people more than they’ll ever want to know.
Continue reading Rattling Cages: Part 10
Christmas day. In any other year, getting out of the house would have been a challenge. When Grandpa Vander Sloot was alive, we always seemed to have one of Mom’s brothers’ families at our house for Christmas. This year everyone had done their own thing. I suppose we could have gone to visit Dad’s family, but we’d visited Grandpa and Grandma Klein in Wyoming last year.
Wyoming is a long drive from Michigan and it doesn’t get any better in the winter.
We stayed home.
On Christmas day it turned out to be just the four of us. After we’d opened presents, gone to church, had dinner, and hung around the house for a while, visiting Haley’s family cottage sounded like a good idea.
Continue reading Rattling Cages: Part 9
Sorry about the lateness of this one… I’ve been pretty bad on the consistency front lately. For better or for worse though, I found that my posts have also been growing longer. I may have to think about how I’m doing this and try for more consistency there. The current installment verges on a size more typical of Tales of MU.
Continue reading Rattling Cages: Part 8
After supper, I sat on my bed and started to read “The Ringworld Engineers.” I’d intended to read it earlier in the fall, but I’d been too busy to get much reading in. With Daniel generally busy on Friday nights and Haley scheduled to work, tonight looked like I had a good chance of getting somewhere in the book — provided I could concentrate on it.
“Nick, do you mind if I come in?” Rachel stepped through the doorway.
So much for reading.
Continue reading Rattling Cages: Part 7
You would think after all that that we were on the edge of some sort of attack, that the Executioner would just start killing people, but you would be wrong. Nothing happened.
December continued its steady march toward Christmas.
I finished off reviving Cassie’s dad’s normal motorcycle (even though she wasn’t going to do much with it during the winter), worked on the prototype for the guitar, and logged a few hours on the flight simulator that Isaac assured me would be a close match to the Heroes League jet.
Continue reading Rattling Cages: Part 6