riparian rap

Spring, bikes, and (big news) a standpipe.

Kate rode to work today with her Wike trailer. Here she is with JaJa in nice early morning light in front of our house.

I came home today just in time to see our resident Cooper’s hawk kill a snake and take it to the nest just off to the right in this photo. How lucky I am to see such a cool wife, dog, and nature at my place, at all hours.

The Wike people in Canada make some great bicycle trailers, and obviously do it to make things better for us all. They’re wonderful people. An inspiration for LRRD. (We bought this trailer around 10 years ago, not sure if they make it anymore.)

Big news: We finalized our media colors and content and ordered nearly a ton of it today, and committed to order another ton or so. This has taken many hours of work over a few years. We’ll have plastic modeling media sized by color in our Em4 model. This has never been done, and the only similar experiment I know of used painted rocks in a large flume, a pretty crude thing compared to what we’re designing.

And just as big, our carefully designed standpipe mechanism for the Em4 arrived in a not-quite-done but testable condition, and it looks wonderful and seems to work as designed.

Jesse commenced to drilling a few holes in it, and finishing it. We spent many hours on this design and worked closely with a southern Illinois machine shop to make it. Jesse did a great job with the design and working with the machinist.