My dad has his moments of being slightly less awful. Every now and then he'll do something interesting, and this one happened I guess about five or six years ago.
When he was a teenager, he and his friends were big fans of model rockets. Not model rockets as in scale reproductions of real or fictional spacecraft, but those cardboard-and-plastic ones you actually launch into the sky with the aid of some gunpowder. And he actually let my brother and me build a few small ones to set off for a few years when my brother and I were younger and the family dynamic, while not all that great, hadn't developed into the aggressively dysfunctional psychological cancer it would later become. We would launch them from my old school's field on the weekend when there was nobody there and it was one of those fun weird things that enticed friends to come along. Because, hey, how often are you going to get the invitation, 'Let's go down to the old school and set off rockets!!'?
And then we pretty much stopped. Mostly it was because we had by then stopped being able to tolerate one another any more than was absolutely compulsory.
One day a few years ago, my dad and brother decided that they were going to launch rockets again. And somehow someone came up with the genius plan to buy a rocket designed to go several thousand feet and make alterations to it so it would go further and then launch it at an angle (like a missile) to see where it lands. They stuck a couple of our home address labels to the body and waited for a calm day to set the thing off.
After a few days nobody had come forward claiming to have found the rocket so they assumed it crashed or was destroyed. Until the phone call from the guy in DC came.
Apparently this little model rocket made it all the way into protected airspace.
Completely fucking deranged.
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