Falcon Heavy
by CJ | Feb 6, 2018 | Journal | 47 comments
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Books
- spoiler potential: caution: book questions.
- Bibliography
- Alliance-Union Guidebook
- Foreigner Guidebook.
- Foreigner Guidebook.
- Gene Wars Universe: Spoiler Alert
- The Map Room
- Book Discussion: all books: spoiler alert in effect…
- Fantasy books: Spoiler alert.
- About the Foreigner series: Spoiler alerts
- Foreigner Series: Spoiler Alerts: Page 2
- WHO’S WHO in Foreigner
Archives
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| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |
| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
| 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | |
I watched the launch all the way through until they cut the live feed after the side boosters landed. I remember reading about things like that in very early science fiction, say, Heinlein/Asimov/Norton. I was totally impressed with the way it functioned, especially the autonomous landing of the side boosters, simultaneously, no less and on their tails. I didn’t find out if the center booster was recovered successfully, as they cut off before then, but that’s a darned good test, and I hope it means the return of deep space exploration, future colonization, etc. It sucks to be a one-planet species as I’m sure the atevi are now aware.
I wondered too, but something had to continue pushing it to Mars. Maybe they didn’t make it a multistage rocket, particularly if it was solid fueled. Solid fueled rockets are so much easier to manufacture, i.e. cheaper.
(Before I moved here, I lived a miles west and half a mile south of their factory, the old Northrop Aircraft plant at Jack Northrop Field. My girl friend at the time worked at Northrop.)
I LOVE the tailfirst landings!
People elseweb were commenting on how that looked so much like animation!
And there’s a screen in front of their “driver” that reads “Don’t Panic”. In large letters.
“… take off and land vertically, the way God and Robert Heinlein intended.”
The math behind it is cool too: aim carefully and drop—literally like a rock—until just the right moment, then turn the rockets back on full-blast; if you’ve done the calculations correctly, you’ll slow down to a complete stop just as you reach the ground. This is the fuel-optimal solution (and IIRC the time-optimal one too) so in a fuel-constrained situation like rocketry (the exponential term in the Rocket Equation is brutal) it’s going to be the one used, with maybe a small safety margin added. But executing it in real time takes steel nerves.
“Back in the day” (perhaps CP/M, maybe DOS) I had a program on my computer called “Moon Lander” that simulated landing with “just enough” fuel. It involved exactly that, you had to let it drop, then brake hard near the surface.
I had a programmable calculator with a “moon lander” program – it was all numbers, and you had to do it just right to get it to a velocity that didn’t go “splat”. (IIRC, something like 1 foot/second would be good. 2 ft/second, not so good.)
Google ‘How not to land a rocket’. Video of the “try, try again” phase of development–and Monty Python music as a soundtrack!
I think my favorite part was the simultaneous booster landings.
Check out also ‘SpaceX landing compilation’. “First you crawl…”
Very impressive work, and the coverage is always great fun. Only glitch is they lost the core first stage, but haven’t confirmed it yet. They may not want to step on the rest of the roadster news, as the orbital burn was scheduled for about 6 hours after launch.
They had about a zillion people asking on Twitter about the core. It certainly got to the drone ship, and then something apparently went wrong. (Still no word, not even on their twitter feed.)
But they have a live feed from the Tesla: you can watch it orbiting Earth for now.
Elon Musk on Twitter: “Live view of Starman https://t.co/gvSlztlE6l“
Latest I saw was only 1of 3 engines fired, hit the ocean at 300 mph. Not a big deal. Nobody else even tries to do this (Blue Origin isn’t operational yet) and everything else was perfect. An amazing accomplishment. Don’t miss the live webcast from the roadster!
But they’ve learned a lot even from the loss of the main core.
I heard that two engines didn’t have enough re-ignition juice, and the third wasn’t enough to get it to land, though it did get to the drone ship.
I’d say they did pretty well for a first test flight.
(The roadster cameras apparently have enough battery power to run 12 hours after launch. Which is pretty good in itself.)
Go Falcon Heavy! For all you history buffs, this isn’t the first time a rocket has made a tail-first landing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X
It was mainly a proof-of-concept, but wotta concept!
One so wants this to become more common…got to see the Apollo 15 launch from cocoa beach, and actually got to tour Cape Kennedy (at the time) as it was on the launch pad…and the Falcon Heavy is considerably more powerful than the Saturn V. Also read that an even more powerful Falcon is in design!
PS: the Falcon Heavy named for another fictional ship, the Millennium Falcon 😉
The Saturn V was more powerful than the Falcon heavy is. The Falcon Heavy is the most powerful rocker in operation by a factor of 2.
Drat, missed it, will have to catch it on YouTube or elsewhere. (I like that term, “elseweb.” Totally fitting.)
Sounds like they got most of what they needed from the test and can find plenty to fix for another test run. That sounds more successful than failure to me.
Wiki has the launch as its topmost news item, with mention of the roadster as a dummy payload. If the car survives, he really did a geometric multiple on the collector value. Heh.
I spent much of the last two days fooling around with a font idea in first draft, and it’s going pretty good, but still a little unclear on some design details, because what I had in mind doesn’t quite do it for me when I drew it in Fontographer.
And — You cannot escape numbers, counting, mathematics, fractions, or trigonometry / geometry in vector drawing on the computer. — And I find I need to look back at trig identities for how to get back and forth between (x, y) and theta, for certain drawing purposes. Fontographer is mostly good about its basic functions, but I really am going to have to make myself switch to the new FontLab Studio VI to get new, needed functions, like stuff for the vast multitude of accented letters, other Latin and non-Latin glyphs, and how to do alternate glyphs (like, say, two shapes for a and g).
No matter what you do, you will wind up with weird fractions and multiples when dealing with font letter proportions in height, width, bowls, stems, humps, capitals, lowercase, and small caps. — And I wish to goodness all word processors (especially Libre / Open / Neo -Office) truly understood and used true small caps if the font has them, could compose both styles of common fractions (diagonal or vertical stacking), and would provide obliging if an italic font is not present. On Mac versus Windows, one or both sides do not offer these, and for someone who’s been designing and writing and editing for ages, it’s a true annoyance. I have not learned Scriptus, the only open source / Libra page layout / publishing app I know of.
It’s funny, but every now and then, for graphics, I need those old trig identities, and I remembered it all during college, for three semesters of calculus (but not Dif. Eq. or higher) which I loved, once I got the fundamental idea behind it. I was out of college and working just long enough that those slipped my mind into “uncertain” territory. I know that’s all stuck somewhere in long-term memory, but the access to it from short-term / current memory slipped away sometime in the late 90’s and didn’t stick again.
My memory says y = r * cos(theta) and x = r * sin(theta) and y / x = tan(theta), and I should be able to derive dang near everything from cos(theta) = y/r, sin(theta) = x/r, and tan(theta) = y/x, where r = 1; I should also (I think) be able to recall the inverse or arc functions to get theta back from that when (x, y) and r are known.
I have no idea about navigation involving either Cartesian or Polar coordinates, except that there’s another angle, so it’s (x, y, z) and (r, theta, phi). But in which plane or axis phi operates, I don’t know. — We never did navigation problems in Calculus class. I wonder why, now, as it seems like such a practical and needed skill. Oh, we did the classic trains going this way and that at so-and-so velocity or acceleration and some destinations or bystanders or cars. We did cars going hither and thither and yonder, for arrivals and crossings and (oh dear) collisions and such. But no navigation of ships at sea or in space. You’d think we would’ve; the space shuttle program was very active at the time. We did only a few problems involving financial interest and earnings, and only a few (but impressive and disconcerting) on how fast bacteria multiply when left to their own devices. I remember thinking it’s a very good thing I was brought up to be careful about food safety. (And yet since then, I’ve also learned people, myself included, will take risks with that, daily, under need or stress.)
— I really wish our American educational and political systems would remember that the liberal arts and STEM (sciences in university-speak) are both entirely necessary to a well-rounded person, and (sorry, younger me) so is physical education. — I am dismayed how much we all need artistic, creative expression both in all work fields, and in personal fulfillment, and yet those have gotten short-changed, even dropped in some school systems. And science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are not all there is to the educational “bachelor / master / doctor of sciences” either. Training to a test is not, repeat not, knowing how and why things work in either the sciences or liberal arts, and we need both.
Er, sorry, somewhere in there, I got up on the soapbox, and just realized it.
I know as a working (or not working) adult, I find more than ever, I need some portion of both, and real depth of knowledge, in order to feel better and do better, to excel at what I need to do, and to enjoy doing it. I went through before there were such things as web design or computer graphics degrees or gaming development degrees. Dang, those kids are lucky. — But dang it, they need languages, literature, history, art (painting, sculpture, anything, everything), cooking, music (singing and playin instruments), and theater. I notice some of our highest paid people are movie and TV stars (actors) and band members (singers, musicians, poets/lyricists), and sports athletes. So why do some people think it’s a good idea to short-change education for those very fields needed to be one of those “crazy artist bohemian” people? Why do they (and many others) not get the same respect and pay and attention as do the people who also make things with technology? Why don’t educators get paid decently? Or (ahem) graphic designers?
Meh. Help, I have become a grouchy old dude before I’m even that old. (Turning 52 in less than a month.) I do not like this unhappy and depressed tendency, nor lacking enough social outlets, so I don’t feel an urge to vent. There must be a better way, and I have got to find it. Some-dang-how.
(I loved the movie, Interstellar, and now I want to see if the old classics like Destination Moon or Rocketship XM are available online from the usual stores for download. I know I have Forbidden Planet. This puts me in the mood to see those.)
I loved Andre Norton’s books, and Heinlein’s, as a kid and teen. I somehow didn’t get into Asimov. (I should read his.) These days, I find Heinlein’s stuff more biased in places, where it didn’t age well. Andre Norton’s stuff is dated in ways now too, but to me, it has aged better. I liked the “ester powers” she used in stories, as a kid, but now those feel more like a fantasy element. And yet, gee, if only. I loved her love for the environment and animals. I loved Heinlein’s juveniles too.
Wow, how long is it since I read any of the books I read in high school, except for science fiction? I need to remedy this. I miss those. (I was a big fan of 19th Century Romantics and Realists, and it probably still shows. But my main love outside of class was always SF&F. That really spoke to me as a misfit, brainy kid.)
Hoping for a better tomorrow, and practically, more personally productive also.
Other way ’round: x = r cos θ, y = r sin θ. And once you get into spherical coordinates… “The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from.” —Andrew S. Tanenbaum
My elderly memories are saying that rho is the radius, and theta and phi are the angles that define the vector for the line that rho is on. Theta is in the XY plane, and phi would be using the Z plane – though I can’t figure what to call it.
(I have a little two-ring notebook with all those notes, the formulas and teeny drawings, and the plane curves and so on, through really simple DiffEq (I don’t “get” much of that), formal logic, and some other basic information – kind of a very condensed version of Standard Math Tables.)
@CJ — What I wrote about Andre Norton made me wonder, has anyone ever thought of continuing her Solar Queen books, or Time Traders, or others? I know one author teamed up with her on one series, when she was past retirement in the 1990’s. But now I wonder what would happen if someone were to write for her Solar Queen series.
On the other hand, maybe I’m just wishing for new books in a similar vein, spacer and starship adventures.
Well, anyway, I’m looking forward to the new Alliance-Union books (2) and the history, when those come out eventually.
Not only do I always wonder about Chanur and the others in the Compact, and whatever the humans are doing, and if that will all end up entangled again — But I also wonder what happens after Merchanter’s Luck. On my last reread, I noticed Sandor and Allison had some kids from Dublin Again in doing cleanup on Lucy, getting her ship-shape again, and I wondered what would happen after that, who would be added as crew, from Dublin Again or maybe other ships, adults or kids, and what they’d make of Lucy’s computers having Sandor’s brother’s recordings in there as a sort of AI tutor. — Or what else might happen with Finity and company after Finity’s End.
(Yes, I’m hankering for more stories. And I’m waiting on a friend who can see, so I can connect my new Kindle Fire HD10 to my wifi, so I can actually use the dang thing. I am very irritated (at myself, at the universe) that I know how, yet I can’t see well enough with their setup interface, to change the interface to suit me, or to go through the setup for wifi and so on.)
But I thought it worth mentioning, about Andre Norton’s series (plural) and about your own several series other than Foreigner.
(And I’d put in a good word for the Riders and Morgaine and Fortress and Dreaming Tree series. I want to reread those.)
I’d also put in a good word for your anthologies. I loved Visible Light’s many stories, for instance.
It is a frustrating thing to want to read, and to have one’s technobabble gadget be uncooperative, due to one’s own physical limitations.
I’m wide awake again and need to do something, fonts or writing, probably some of both.
Yes, there are two Solar Queen “sequels” by Andre Norton &… a Sherwood Smith, that I certainly take to be written by Smith with plot blessing provided by Andre Norton. I adore the Solar Queen series and still frequently reread them, but can’t say I took to these sequels much. They read like fan fiction but, as I have my own mental fantasies of what the Queen’s crew might have gone on to do, unfortunately fight with my own imaginings.
Time Traders is the first Norton book I ever read, at age ten, and I still find it inspiring (I want to travel back to prehistoric eras of Europe: it’s why I got into archaeology in the first place). Norton herself wrote at least one sequel to the book (Sioux Spacemen and I think another). I haven’t spotted a non-Norton authored sequel to it and don’t know how I feel now about reading one if there were.
And then there’s this:
https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/the-astronaut-who-might-actually-get-us-to-mars/
May we all live to see Humans on Mars.
BTW, Elon Musk wants to die on Mars — just not on impact!
“Here he lies where he long’d to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.”
Hah, yeah, impact is only preferable through one’s words and deeds. Not as an actual, fatal or injurious impact!
One wants to make a difference, to make things better. One prefers highly to continue living to enjoy it afterwards. This seem by far the optimum, while going out with a bang is, well, rather unpleasantly final, and one is not guaranteed to be able to enjoy the results after such event.
Life is difficult, but it is preferable to non-life. For in life, there is also the chance, remote though it may seem, that things will get better and people will be there to enjoy it with more fully.
Some folks need to be reminded occasionally that is so. A good hug might be in order for them.
I thought the first Falcon booster tail first landings were amazing, but seeing them happen in tandem is pretty surreal. They’re bringing back memories of 1950’s sci-fi movies and artwork.
They are indeed. Plus saving bundles. How many times they can be reused remains to be seen (data may be out there)but it’s promising.
They overdid the third boost (which was visible in CA and AZ http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Strange-light-over-Northern-California-was-SpaceX-12557080.php ) – it’s going to the asteroids before Mars, well out toward the orbit of Ceres.
The bets now are on how much of the car and driver will actually get there, given the environmental conditions (radiation, temperatures, very hard vacuum). The experts think the organics will go bye-bye first, and the car will come apart.
I’ve already seen some shoops where a picture of the roadster has been pasted into an approach vector for one of the Elite Dangerous space stations. I’m just waiting for someone to have it fly by the Rocinante, since it’s already on a Ceres cometary type orbit.
Oh, nuts. I just wrote a whole raft of text with some good self-realizations, realized in time that it was more personal and I needed to save it and not post it. — And so I promptly pressed the wrong felling button, and Poof! Gone. (Closed the browser down inadvertently, and so the text was lost.)
Nuts. Just one of those things. Well, at least I got some stuff off my chest and think I learned a little. But dang, I was gonna save it. Oh well, such is life. Heh.
@J C Salomon — Thank you! I spent a little time late last night reviewing the Wiki page on trig identities, and find (thank you) that I really need to review more. If I’m very fortunate, my old trig and calc books from college are still in storage. Some, but not all so far, of my language resources have been rescued. Clearly gotta drill some more, re-memorize, so the equations I need stay in memory, to do the (pretty simple) graphics drawing and manipulations I need. (Despite tools like Rotate or Move by (x, y), you still need to know, sometimes on your own, how to move by (r, theta) or rotate, or other such things, and how to find (x, y) and (r, theta) from one or the other of any of those. (Hmm, if I need it to be there, what’s the angle? If I need it to be there, what’s (x, y) if I know (r, theta), or at least two coordinates, an x or y, a radius, or an angle? That sort of thing.)
Note no graphics arts or design course _ever_ taught that useful bit of practical trig and navigation, although I didn’t have a drafting or CAD class. Yet there are plenty of times you need those in doing a drawing (or font).
@P J Evans — Thank you also! Yeah, I had (might still have) a few pages of notes on trig identities and the like, from those classes, and one textbook had a pretty good summary on the endpapers. But a work life in graphic arts and early “desktop publishing” (i.e., page layout, design, editing, graphics, the works) meant I mostly did not use the techie side of my college courses, enough to keep that stuff in active memory.
Over-tired and over-stressed and having trouble getting ahold of less-than-reliable friends.
But creatively, things are going well the past few days. Just…still a long way from finishing any drafts, I need to focus down on finishing one or another draft, so I can get income going.
I’m glad, though, that my creativity is up for a while.
But I’ve got errands that need doing this week and next. Doing a grocery run and a couple of other very practical, simple things have to happen. I’ll get them done somehow.
I feel like kicking my friends’ butts. Politely, of course. (OK, actually, kinda ticked at them. But not ready to lose my temper except in private, venting.)
The other was just a bunch of personal realizations, venting, and tilting at windmills, which I seem to have a real penchant for, even no longer as that idealistic yet uptight college kid.
If I can manage to put that back into words more succinctly, it belongs in a post elsewhere, rather than as a tangent here.
Creatively, doing pretty well this week despite too little sleep and much stress. Working on font drafts and got some draft writing done that is good but needs a fleshed-out backstory and a plot that goes from the opening on through buildup, climax, and resolution.
Successful twin vertical landings – a real, “moment”…
Re: “Nobody will notice.”
There’s a Volkswagen commercial on TV where three young boys ride bicycles up to a pool of water on the path. They stop, and one’s sister goes charging through. “That feeling, only better.”
Watch the positions of the three boys before, and after. Two left, one right. Two right, one left.
(Just one of those things Aspie brains DO notice.)
I watch so little TV lately; I get most of my content online, via YouTube or iTunes. (Hmm, I may re-subscribe to Netflix.)
I will have to hunt up that commercial. That sounds pretty cool. 🙂
If you do get Netflix, give ‘Altered Carbon’ a try. It is a bit slow to get fully into the story, but I thought it was quite good overall.
That was something special to see, and the twin booster landings are everybody’s favorite – that was the footage the evening news here showed on tv.
Off topic: thank you CJ and Jane, for the package that arrived today, in great condition and a very timely manner. And you even signed happy birthday in Dutch! Dad’ll be tickled pink to get this (or is that colloquialism too outdated and/or British to use anymore?); thank you for sending it so promptly.
🙂 Tickled Pink is just fine here. — I am not sure how often the “cool kids” born after 2000 say it, but I suspect they still do. Some things ought to stay around awhile in the language. it’s at least was American as it is British. I don’t know the origin of the phrase, if there is one known, or how recent it is.
The more contact we have by internet and other mass media commmunications, the more likely it is that the US/UK dialect divide with decrease, or that newer words, including slang, will subsume the older differences.
Hah, if he’ll be tickled cherry, that’d be fine too. 😀
Hurray! Grocery run successfully completed. _Finally_ the friends came through.
There is, ahem, a cherry pie for celebration. (I will likely get peach next trip, but oh, the cherry sounded fitting.)
I wanted potatoes, and ran across a bag of “petite purples” from the store brand. These are new (baby) potatoes in the blue-violet / bluish-purple color, similar to Terra chip’s “Blues” potato chips. I have no idea how they’ll look when cooked, but I couldn’t resist trying them. I figure they’ll taste fine. (The Terra brand chips are very good. IIRC, CJ and Jane, you like their sweet potato chips.)
I also found a display with pizza sauce and a pack of 2 mini pizza crusts. While I didn’t get fresh veggies this trip, I’ll keep the crusts on hand, frozen, to use when I feel the need for a fresher than the frozen cardboard pizza.
I am fairly sure I didn’t get everything on my list, and will need a return trip soon. (Please, not as long a wait as this time, ugh.) But I got what I really needed, and another trip, if soon enough, should get me stocked up with a bit of surplus and a few extras for taste and wants.
My new Kindle Fire HD10 is now set up and ready for use. Yay! I can read ebooks again! — once my friend helped with setup, I could increase the font-size and screen brightness to a better live for me, and I find it has a very needed screen magnifier, plus Alexa voice. (A step closer to that Star Trek and HAL voice.)
With luck, I’ll get to go over and renew my apt. lease for another 15 months, this week. Before the end of the month, I will have been here a whole year. Time flies!
So, good stuff going on. Little, simple, small stuff, but so welcome and needed.
Goober and Smokey have a second dry cat food flavor to try. I’m not sure yet how successful it is, but they like the taste. So they think the restaurant quality has gone up around this place. Heh.
@BCS, I’m glad your ereader is now working.
Next time you have something like that, you might ask a neighbor to help with it, both so you don’t have to wait this long, and as a way of opening communication with them. You’ve been saying you wished for more contact than just saying hello on the stairs, but that means that someone has to start that conversation.
Just take the reader or whatever along, ring the doorbell, say “Hi, I’m Ben, your neighbor from number X, and I need some help with these instructions from someone who’se eyes are better than mine. Could you help me with this?” and it gives you a start at a conversation – maybe they ask you in and help, maybe they’re too busy at the moment but could come by and help later, or if they can’t help you maybe they can advise you who best to ask for this sort of thing.
I know guys don’t like asking for help, but it’s a good way to start a conversation going – someone asking for help doesn’t generally come across as a threat. Then offer to help them in return if there’s ever something you could help with, like a stuck lid or reaching something high without a ladder, you’re just down the hall in number X.
You could also, if you threaten to run out of something essential like bread, ask a neighbor if next time they go shopping they would pick up a loaf for you (don’t start with a whole shopping list, no more that 2 or 3 easily-found staples), and explain that you’re dependent on friends to drive you to the shops because of your eyesight (do explain that, so they don’t think you’ve lost your license for being a drunk driver or something bad like that), and that your friends have been too busy to take you for a while. Me, I’d chatter something like this: “Hi, I’m Ben, from number X down the hall, and I’ve got a bit of a silly question. I’m almost out of bread, and the friends who usually take me grocery shopping (because of my eyes, I can’t drive, you see) haven’t had time for a while now, and I was wondering if, next time you go shopping, you might be willing to pick up a loaf for me? I’d give you the money for it, of course.”
A busy family (at least in town) will often go shopping once a week, and if she knows you’re dependent on your friends for the grocery run you might work up to an arrangement where you can come along.
And next time there’s a party or just a bunch of people at the pool, you can go over and greet your neighbors, and they can introduce you around.
Then maybe later you can help them by contributing a bit of gas money for those trips when your finances stabilize, or cooking a meal for them now and then, or feeding their cat when they’re off on a trip, or something like that (but being a guy, you can’t offer to babysit/ watch the kids, unless they ask first).
Is the person who was recommended by other people here helping your disability application finally go through all the government hoopla?
Did anybody else catch how the camera viewpoint of “spaceman” also replicated the “Radar Rider” opening scene in the original Heavy Metal movie?
Yes, a couple friends over at our house Thursday spotted the Heavy Metal visual reference too, although not me.
You know, I am not really sure how I dropped the ball on that, but I did. When I first moved in, and for a few months thereafter, anytime I’d see anyone, I’d say hello and try to say something extra in greeting that might extend the conversation. But this always seemed to be in passing. They were going somewhere and so was I. So I never really met anyone.
I missed people arriving or leaving, and I didn’t try to knock on neighbors’ doors to introduce myself, and none of them did either. (That surprised me a little.)
I somehow did not get myself out there to meet people, either the bunches of kids who play outside, daytime or nighttime, whenever the weather is good enough, or the adults who will occasionally be outside to talk or party. The partying is not generally too rowdy and any drinking is not usually too bad. One thing I’m still not used to is how late both kids and adults are up. Many people work all hours, so there are people coming and going at any given time of night, and over the summer, kids were up late (with older kids/teens or adults). The partying sometimes including kids around. All of which means, families feel safe letting their kids hang out and play, and they care enough to have at least some attention to what’s going on. This is good, and it feels safe and friendly enough around here.
There have only been, in the middle of the night, a couple of domestic disputes, but that’s all. (One was handled by family / friends, the other, I think got police there.) Those are the only two times I’ve been worried or on real alert around here.
So I somehow have not really gotten to know and make friends with my neighbors, and they haven’t gotten to know me. Somewhere in there, I dropped the ball. — So yeah, I need to find a way to do that. — The funny thing is, I still have the feeling people are nice and would be friendly.
At some point between late summer and the start of school or after, the older guys (dads, brothers, etc.) who were out playing ball with the kids went back in or their work hours changed, so that it was just the kids. Up until about then, I’d thought I’d get out there at least to watch and to cheer and meet people, but somehow, I didn’t, and then I felt it might be awkward if I was the only grownup out there when the current bunch of kids were out there to play. (Maybe I’m being overly shy or too cautious in that, I don’t know.)
I somehow did not get myself out there when adults were talking or partying, which sometimes includes teens or kids. I’m not sure why I didn’t.
I’m also not sure why when I’ve tried to greet people, it hasn’t resulted in introductions or someone pausing to get to know each other. Maybe it’s just that they were going somewhere, it looked like I was, and so people went on their way naturally. :: shrugs ::
There is one woman (a mom or grandma) who is always calling for her son (or husband or other relative), either his name or Junior. She seems to be pretty active around here, but despite initial tries, I have not seen or met her or the boy or man. (I think there’s a husband and at least two boys and maybe a girl. In other words, I hear stuff fairly often.) I don’t know for sure which apartment. She seems to care a lot (too much?) about getting them to come back around when she calls, and sometimes I think maybe they’re hen-pecked or she’s too clingy. But then, I don’t know about any small kids or older/handicapped family members or her own personal situation, only what I hear outside. I think, though, that she is involved, the family sticks close together despite whatever there might be, and I get the feeling they’re nice enough. I’m alternately amused and wonder what’s going on there, and curious. I am sure she’s opinionated. (And yes, this happens enough for me to hear a little through my windows, closed, from her or them outside. Not fighting, just everyday things.) Hah, but the times I’ve gone outside, front or back, thinking I’d catch them to say hi, nope, I’ve missed them. Dunno how; a couple of times, I should’ve been able to run into them. But now, I’m used to hearing the boy’s name. (I’m still presuming that’s the boy, but I hear her calling both his(?) name and Junior, during the day or school hours, at which point, I got confused about how true my assumptions / first impressions were. But initially, the boy’s voice sounded like it was in the middle of changing, and there are the two names, and at least another boy and sometimes a man.
I would not have thought I wouldn’t know them by now.
My friend from the trip yesterday had said we’d go by today to pick up anything (mail, packages) from the apt. offices, and to go by so I could renew my lease in person. But he must’ve gotten busy this morning, and so maybe I’ll see him late this afternoon…or else it will get postponed until next week. He over-commits, I think.
Oh, one thing: The apartments here (in fact, most apartments in town, unless they are high-rises) are units with the stairways outside, two story buildings (some other places, three or four stories), so instead of a fire escape, each 2nd / upper story has stairs and a landing, right by the apartment below it, and no connection to the next apartment over. In my complex, they have these accesses front and back, and the “front” faces into the square for an outside living space / patio / pool area, including a grassy space. The front face of each apartment has a half-height little fence to give a sense of ownership or privacy, though it’s just as public, and a porch. I had to laugh to myself when I first saw this. They were still adding the little fence planks. So everyone gets a miniature picket fence, as if it’s trying to be that idealized American dream, haha. The fences are not painted white, though, so I guess it’s all right. 😀 But it struck me as funny in an off-kilter, satirical parody sort of way.
Anyway, yes, I need to find a way to meet my neighbors and make friends, push myself out there a little bit. I’m surprised I don’t really know people yet and they haven’t really met me. — But at least I feel like it’s a good place to live…even if getting a cab in, or getting the mail delivered to my door is still catch as catch can.
By the way, I intend to talk a little to the managers about that, to see if there are better ways around it and make doubly sure I am and they are and the delivery guys and cabs are, most likely to ge through fine. There must be more ways around this. I have a small list of repairs to make and one installation, all of which shouldn’t be any big deal. — So we’ll see. 🙂
Hide nor hair, did not see or hear from the friend today for the promised short trip. Sigh.
I may just take the office up on their offer to have someone walk the contract over to me, rather than me going to them, in order to get that done, next week, so I don’t have to worry about not getting it done before the lease term expires and the price goes up. :-/
But I would have rather heard from my friend, a phone call to say he couldn’t make it. This is what keeps happening, and I don’t think he and his business partner (in-law) realize they keep doing that. Aarrgh.
Do you have any other friends who can be prevailed upon to sometimes run you to the store, or pick up a few comestibles if convenient? It sounds like this friend doesn’t know how to say ‘no’, so is taking a passive-aggressive way out of helping. Shoots, if I were in the area, I could give you the occasional lift…:D