riparian rap

Lucky me.

Very good things happened at LRRD on Friday, thank you Dayna, Cara, and Jesse.

Kate and I just did normal (for us) weekend things for the first time in months, and immensely enjoyed each other and our space and the weather.


It hit 75F in Carbondale today. We spent a lot of time in the sun, something we have seen little of lately. We waxed our (130 year old salvaged) wood floor; Taki the terrier (he is up for adoption, please) got a haircut, lettuce and spinach were planted. I fixed and cleaned up things that’ve been bugging me for months.


Including the gas leak that dripped onto the exhaust manifold of our Vanagon as Kate drove it all over southern Illinois on Friday. Very scary, potential bomb, and Vanagons don’t usually survive engine fires. One spark would have sent the van to bad German engineering heaven where it would’ve joined a lot of other fuel-fire-expired VW’s.

I am hoping some good person will come and adopt both the Vanagon and Taki the terrier. Both seemed determined to dog me with defects, noises and fluid leaks.


A while back my Carbondale friend Marty Merrill offered me an old, beat up aluminum canoe. Today we got around to picking it up and I was delighted to see it’s a Grumman. Absolutely beat to hell by Boy Scouts, etc. doing runs down the Current River since the 1960’s. As Marty said, it looks as though it was crumpled into a ball and unrolled, but we’ll find a good use for it. Here I am with it, and a detail of the bow, ravaged by Ozark rocks, and Grumman nameplate. You have to be a manly man to wear a pink T-shirt with elephants on it, that’s me.

We’re doing a lot of aluminum engineering at LRRD these days, and I’m sure I mentioned Grumman canoes to Jesse recently, so it was a cool surprise to have one show up like this.