Unsheathing the Sabre....

The FIRST Robotics team has come a long way since its inception in the fall of 2015.  We used to build things out of steel tubing and with only a little planning.  Now its aluminum and various plastics, and almost everything is done in CAD design before the tools are picked up.  But a good design that still depends on hand measuring and cutting is still imprecise.  To take it to the next level you need some form of CNC equipment.

In recent seasons we've outsourced some work.  A combination of milling, laser cutting, water jet cutting.  But there are obvious advantages to doing things "in house".  When speed of prototyping is the key to success you want to be able to design, fabricate, test and revise in a matter of hours.  You don't have days.

For that a CNC router is the best tool.  And while most FIRST teams make do with more humble desktop units, we took a different path.

A big truck shows up....

The contents are substantial enough that a fork lift and a crew of helpful guys are called for:

And here we have it installed.  It's a ShopSabre 23.

The first thing you have to do is put what is called a "waste board" onto the working surface and plane off the surface to be level to an insane degree of precision.  We were surprised, happily surprised, to see how fast it screams through wood.

Of course we'll usually be working in aluminum and polycarb once we learn a bit on cheaper and more forgiving materials.

Nah, lets just go straight to aluminum.  This is 1/8 thickness and the router goes through it like butter.

Oy! Tim the Tool Man!

As in the US, England in recent years has seen a revival in small breweries.  So generally when I'm Over There I try to drink the local ales.  But of course there are also those that are sold regionally or nationally, and in a pinch my go to is the quite serviceable Timothy Taylor.

Actually, my pint here is from a local brewery now sadly about to go out of business.  "Leaky Tap" was pretty tasty but not relevant to our story.

Because right around the corner from the Black Bull pub in Haltwhistle I saw this:

Hardware House.  Is this where Tim the Toolman Taylor ended up after Home Improvement wrapped production?  If I were bold enough to walk up those steps would Wilson peer over the red brick wall and say "Hi - di - Ho, neighbor!" in a Cumbrian accent?

Ah, What's in a Name?

Let me say from the start that I generally disapprove of vulgarity.  It shows a lack of imagination and rarely does it express an idea better than words your grandmother would approve of.  But rarely is not the same as never, and I have an even greater dislike of not calling things by their True Names.

Recently we had the robotics team over to visit one of our sponsors.  They have a new facility and it is awe inspiring.  But I couldn't take my eyes off something up in the ceiling.  It was a fan, slowly turning and something like 25 to 30 feet in diameter.  It looked like this:

When I stood directly beneath it I could read something on the hub.  I'm playing around with a video camera so figured I might get a decent shot here:

Big Ass Fan.  Yep, that certainly describes it perfectly.  

The company that makes these started out being called something else.  But their customers just started referring to their products as, well exactly what they are.  So they changed the company name!  In case you are in need of a ridiculously large ventilation fan here's where to go.

Big Ass Fans.  If that's what you need why look anywhere else?

Robot Barf

I don't know how many people are actually interested in a "look under the hood" at a robotics competition, but there are some odd and interesting things to be seen there.  FIRST events always have a box somewhere with things that fall off robots in matches.  At a recent event it had this title:

I was in busy mode and did not have the opportunity, or decent lighting, to do a full "archaeologist's" view of the contents.  But you can bet that this bit of Robot Detritus could tell a tale.....

A Useful new toy

We are looking ahead to robotics next fall, and in fact to doing another summer program for middle school "prospects" in July.  With the move into the school we have gained much, but also lost a few things.  In particular our access to the metals shop will be limited.  So I've been planning ways to do a significant build with just a few portable tools.

One thing that is crucial is cutting precisely.  Mostly aluminum, with weight limits this is the main building material.  And after some consideration I've decided that a miter saw will suffice.  These are more commonly used for woodworking but with a non ferrous metal cutting blade they are very appropriate for our needs.  I imagine we'll have access to one at the school, but just in case (and to acquire competence myself) I got one for my shop/team use.  And here it is:

Metabo sounds like a generic mutt brand but is actually the new name for Hitachi, a reasonably good manufacturer.  This model can cut miter and bevel, and has decent metal clamping ability.  You do have to mount it securely, here it is bolted down to an old cabinet door and affixed to a portable work bench.

I gear my work to what a total newbie middle/high school student might be able to manage safely.  And the Metabo/Hitachi C10FCH2 satisfied.

It is important to carefully measure and scribe your part before you cut.  At that point you just line it up with this handy laser!

I was able to reliably cut within the degree of precision needed, and will do a bit better still using actual layout paint versus magic marker.  The saw can cut angles from -50 to +50 degrees, although I expect we'll mostly be using 0 and 45.  The laser marker looks a bit off here, but I think it might be refracting off the part a bit.  My measurements of parts cut look true but if we end up using this for the team I'll study up on fine adjustments.

This was an inexpensive buy at Menards.  Easy to set up.  Nice safety features.  It is scary enough that students will treat it with respect; and to be sure, nobody gets to use it without a formal training and check off process.  We'll also have each part inspected both after marking and again after cutting.

Gripes?  Just a few.  The instructions that came with it were lousy, sending me to the internet for a video that answered all.  And my gracious it creates a lot of little aluminum chips.  The catcher bag is useless and it requires diligent sweeping up.  Even with that I'm finding little silver bits tracked around the house.  It is not a tool you can set up just anywhere.

But this, or something similar, should be a workhorse in the robotics season(s) ahead.

An American Doughboy - Still Standing....for now.

Road trips are an excellent way to discover new things.  But there are disadvantages too.  When just "passing through" you sometimes have to get your photos on a day when conditions are not ideal.  As for instance with this interesting monument adjacent to the "Janesville 99" memorial we visited last time.

It is a World War I monument, and actually the dark, swirling clouds above do a decent job of bringing to mind the smoke and hellfire of trench warfare.  The Doughboy is standing defiant, rifle in one hand, grenade held high in the other.  The detail work is very nice, notice the little touches such as the barbed wire near his feet.

I learned that this was one of a large series of such statues from the 1920s and 30s.  Here's another image of one taken by someone blessed with better equipment, eye and weather conditions.

When I got up on tiptoes to photograph the leggings and barbed wire I noticed this plaque, a helpful clue to the history of these sculptures.

As it happens there already exists a website and a related Facebook group dedicated to the history of these "Spirit of the American Doughboy" memorials as created* by an interesting character named Ernest Moore Viquesney.  In brief, these were commercially produced in the decades after The Great War, and found considerable favor as memorials that were generally placed in public spaces with the support of, and in honor of, American WW I veterans.  Approximately 140 are known to exist, although some have not survived the passage of time and perhaps a few are yet to be found in some dusty corner of a storage building.

The majority of known Doughboys, approximately 120, are made of thin sheets of bronze welded together.  Thus they are much lighter and more damage prone than what an equivalent solid bronze statue would be.  Of course this made them far more affordable, and Viquesney was very much of mercantile inclinations.  At least three were done in stone.  And in 1934 due to the economic hard times of the Depression, a version made of cheaper zinc was marketed.  At only $700 each he continued to sell a few although in dwindling numbers as the shadows of a new war grew and as memories of the last one perhaps faded.  Production ended in 1942, at a time when there was likely no extra metal of any kind available.

I do recommend the site linked above.  It is encyclopedic and a fine example of what dedicated amateur historians can accomplish.  It is in its own way a memorial to a time when a scholarly pride in our nation's accomplishments was much in evidence.

The Doughboy Monuments are mostly still in place.  But over the years a dozen or so have suffered vandalism and a few have vanished altogether.  The vandals have been a mixed lot.  The statues are not nearly as sturdy as they look, and not a few drunkards have been very sure they could swing from an arm or from that extended rifle.  A few have been more systematically savaged by people with obscure political motives or by illicit metal scrappers.  Some of the latter have been badly disappointed by the zinc composition and the thin plating of the later versions.  

But what of today?  Is there much left of that "scholarly pride" in our past these days?  Alas I fear not.  

We've had considerable unrest in recent weeks.  Peaceful protests have mutated into something uglier.  Statues commemorating Confederate leaders have been targeted widely, and with at least some logic.  From there it takes so little to throw the ropes and start pulling down figures with ambiguous status.  Columbus, Jefferson.....even The Great Emancipator himself.  And when no convenient target can be brought down by the jeering mob, well, any statue will do.  At least three Doughboys have been damaged since the Floyd protests began in May of 2020.  

Here is the best documented and perhaps saddest example.  Birmingham Alabama, May 31st.  A mob attacks the Confederate Obelisk in a public park.  It proves too sturdy for their engineering abilities, which are likely as rudimentary as other aspects of their education.  

No problem.  Here's another statue.  Let's Mess It Up.

Immediately thereafter both the Confederate Obelisk and the Doughboy were taken down by the City of Birmingham, whose Mayor had actually participated in the protests although not in the defacement of the monuments.

That the Obelisk should go is palatable.  There are mechanisms by which such decisions can be deliberated and done in a proper fashion.  No doubt there are on the one side firebrands who would advocate immediate dynamiting and stubborn obstructionists who would like to continue to enshrine aspects of our history that are no longer considered noble and good.  Our society always functions best when Progress and Conservation can meet, often uneasily, and compromise.

But the Doughboy was just a target of convenience.

I consider World War One to be our last idealistic war.  We took up arms for others, in a conflict that did not directly impact our nation's security.  We fought for the subjugated and abused citizens of Belgium.  We fought for Freedom of the Seas.  We fought because small nations should not be ground under the heel of mighty empires.  Try as I can to appreciate the peculiar mind set of our modern Visigoths I can't see much racism involved in it.  In fact we joined an alliance where black and asian colonial troops were fighting and dying for Ideals, while looking ahead to the eventual freedom that always seems to result when brave men prove they are the equal of their nominal "masters".

The Birmingham Doughboy is now safe somewhere and supposedly will be cleaned up, repaired and restored to his pedestal.  I hope you'll forgive me if the cynicism of these ignorant times has given me doubts as to whether that will in fact ever happen.

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* I will by convention give Viquesney credit for these statues, but the true story of the artists and craftsmen involved is complex and best addressed by the Viquesney website.  I again recommend it.

The Old Mill in Winter

When I posted on this burly industrial artifact last fall there were some things I did not know.

1. It appears to be not so much a milling machine as a gigantic drill press.
2. It's older than I thought.

It is by the way still sitting outside the school.  I imagine it is just waiting for the annual spring scrap metal drive before it makes one last ignomious journey.  But someone in the know told me something interesting about it.

It used to be in an old armory building that had heavy equipment in it.  It was down by the river and long enough ago that water power was still a thing.  In fact, this rugged survivor has rollers on top so that via belts it can be run by water power!  

I'm still not going to offer to buy it at scrap price and haul it home.  It's probably a century old and there's a reason why it is being tossed out.  Many reasons most likely. But if we ever encountered a Y2K, solar flare, robot apocalypse scenario and you needed something to start rebuilding your industrial base in a roots and squirrel meat based economy, boy would this come in handy.

Parking Lot - Left and Right

I am as usual enjoying my time at the local tech school.  I'd say that in general both the students and instructors are a notch up from the average public school environment.  The students, at least at the manufacturing campus, are often older and have done other things in life.  Many are ex military.  The instructors likewise are often of a broad experience.  Someone coming from industry to teach has a different perspective than a person who has never ventured out of the Ivory Tower.  It's good people all around.  The teacher-student gap is much reduced and we can converse as equals.  At least I feel I can, being myself older and of varied experience.

That's not to say that there is no difference between teachers and students.  These are divisive times politically, which is why I seldom use my tag "Just Politics".  But I also want to attempt to understand the times we live in, and to share my observations.  Wisconsin may be the ultimate toss up state, and it behooves those who would have our votes to attempt to understand the sometimes peculiar nature of Badger state politics.

In the tech school parking lot there is one section - on the left - that is closer to Administration and to where most teachers have their offices.  And over on the right side, closer to the main entrance, is mostly student parking.  There is no designated parking for instructors or students so other than perhaps a bit more rust on the student's vehicles you can't really tell.  But a walk through the lot on the way to class is interesting. 

Bumper stickers.  I won't tell you which side of the lot they are from.

Travco Revisited

I mentioned a few weeks back that I was again taking classes at the local tech school.  Just for fun and to learn a few things on a topic of interest.  I had not been there for two years, having opted last fall to take a German class at the University instead.

The class goes well.  Fun, no pressure.  And tech school seems familiar to me now.  Especially when I walk down a hallway and see life sized pictures of my former class and classmates!

You may recall that my mechanical design class had us virtually creating and then 3D printing tricky little mechanisms.  My account of one was called "Designing Bright Orange Machinery".  

Well guess what, here's the bright orange machine being held by one of my class collaborators!  Remember that all these photos are actually of photos.

Another guy working on the project shows up in this picture.

The interesting thing here is that he was once a middle school student of mine in "Machines Behaving Badly".  It is a small world and people with mechanical inclinations tend to end up in the same corners of it.

And what about Travis, he for whom our little collaborative effort "Travco" was named?  Ah, he's around too.  Or at least his picture is.  I feel like I should put a bit of masking tape with the legend "Our Founder" on the bottom of this.  I'd be the only person who would get the joke, but some days that's enough.

The Bronze Fonz - Public Art along the Milwaukee River

We took a little road trip.  It was time to drop in on several generations of relatives and to catch up with old friends.  One stop was Milwaukee.  

Along the river down town there is an array of sculpture art.  Yes, this first one you might know....we'll get back to him in a bit.

Some of it is pretty bad.  This tableau appears to be dumpsters mating.  

But not all entries in the Modern Art category are atrocities.  I rather enjoyed this one when I decided that it should be named "Pollen Count".

But let's get back to the famous one, The Bronze Fonz.

For some reason I assumed that Henry Winkler was from Milwaukee.  He seems like he'd fit in.  But no, Happy Days was simply set in Milwaukee.  Mr. Winkler was born in New York City.  Among other interesting but trivial facts, his family  was Jewish and got out of Germany in 1939; he has significant dyslexia (but went to Yale anyway) and he as been given an OBE for his work with children with dyslexia and other learning disabilities in Britain.

People take their pictures with statues, and like to rub them for luck.  Close inspection shows:

The shoulders of his motorcycle jacket are well worn, a result of people posing with their arms on his shoulders.  This is convenient as this Fonz appears to only be about 5 foot 2.  (The Man himself is only 5'6")

The classic "Thumbs Up" are also well polished.

Umm......

Designing Bright Orange Machinery

The "Man of Steel" category is one I started using last year when I went back to Tech School in my dotage.  It made literal sense then, as I was taking a machining class.  Metal was drilled, turned, cut.

This semester I am taking a Mechanical Design class.  Not much metal involved but I did not feel like making a new category tag.

The last project of the semester had us working in small groups.  We had to design a mechanism with four hinged bars.  It had to move the final bar between a specified set of degree parameters.  There was.....actual math involved.  It had likely been 40 years since I tried to do calculations involving cosines.  

In that area I don't think I was much help to the team, but I was somewhat more useful when it came time to outsource the non printed parts.  My workshop contains anything you could use in a project of this sort and a handful of components from an old Vex robotics kit served us well.  I also, not surprisingly can hammer out a technical report with ease.  You just have to have a sense of how far you can push the humor.  When one graph was put in upside down I decided to leave it there, explaining that we were anticipating the Australian market to be a major sales opportunity.

Anyway, here's the gizmo.  The orange parts were all designed on the computer and 3D printed.

The Trials of Travco

I'm taking a mechanical design class.  This is a hopelessly wide topic and so this is just an introduction.

The most fun part is also the most educational.  We work together in small groups that are in essence little design firms.  I was recently working with three other guys.  One of them being named Travis we dubbed ourselves Travco.

The assignment was to create a wrench that could tighten or loosen various sized bolts inside a tiny cramped space.  

We quickly came up with a variety of designs that we considered too easy.  The final design had 18 parts.  The whole thing was sketched out on paper, then drafted with Solidworks software.  The parts files were sent to a 3D printer.  Here's how things went.....

The wrench worked by having pulleys driven by a belt.  The hex cutouts matched the bolt head sizes.  A hand crank turned it.  There are two different cranks show below..human error, one was made with the wrong dimensions.

Obviously the metal part was not 3D printed.  In an effort to do things "real world" the design had some outsourced bushings made of Oil Lite brass.  It was my job to machine them to the right size.  And a pesky bit of work that was.

Finished product with belt installed.  A keen observer might note that the pulleys have been redone.  No human error this time, 3D printers just have more variation in final dimensions than you might expect.  The pulleys were done a second time with looser tolerances.

Final product in action.  The functional and entirely impractical Travco 
T-rench ready for mass production.  We are patiently waiting by the phone for that venture capitalist to call and offer to buy us out for millions of dollars.

My pending career as a toy bootlegger.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, in retirement I have become a student again.  In a seriously great deal, Wisconsin says that once you hit 60 tuition at both the university system and the technical college system is free.  Just a "thank you" for paying taxes all those years.

So I study course catalogs and if something interests me I sign up.

This fall I am doing just one class, an intro to mechanical design.  

It is interesting.  One of our early projects was to retro engineer a lego.  Get out the calipers, do careful measuring, draft it up in Solidworks and toss it on the 3D printer.

In this view it is hard to tell the original from the "knock off"

But the close up tells the tale.  Note the rougher surface on the example that was 3D printed.  Note also please that they fit together perfectly.

A New Academic Experience at Age 60.

I started kindergarten at age 4.  Hey, my parents had a house full of rambunctious boys and were very motivated to pack us off to Lowell Elementary as soon as they could swing it.

After going straight through from that point to the end of Med School I continued to regularly take CME classes.  Upon retirement I went directly into the local Tech School and had an enjoyable fall semester learning things.

But recently I did something that I had never before done or even considered in a 56 year run as a student.  I dropped a class.

In my Carpe Diem mode post medicine I see time differently.  One one level I have an abundance of it.  Just ask my better half who regards me lolling about the house as an affront to the Natural Way of Things.  But from another perspective we never know how much time we have.  Decades.  Years. Or maybe not.  Time should be considered precious as we really don't know how great a supply of it we actually have.

So when the pneumatics course I was signed up for did not develop as I had anticipated I just dropped it.  I quit.  And that is something I rarely do in any path I have set my feet to.

The instructors were nice guys and the subject matter interesting if not immediately practical for me.  But when much of the learning is on line and the "in the lab" skills test outs appeared perfunctory it got me to wondering if it was the best use of my time.  I guess I am still Old School enough to prefer traditional teaching methods.  Like we had in School.  In Old times.

I might start up classes again in the summer or more likely fall sessions.  But short term this frees me up to do more with robotics and to get back to studying Italian in prep for a spring trip.

Not something most people can say they have become in retirement.  Tech School Dropout.

Back in School - Spring Semester

I rather enjoyed my Fall Semester at the local Tech school.  Machining class proved to be more challenging and more satisfying than I predicted.  And the Solidworks class was quite fun.  I am sufficiently the master of assorted low level tricks in this software now to allow me to teach kids on the FIRST team. One of our students in particular has taken to it quickly and was generating designs for 3D printed parts after about an hour of practice.  I think I shall Proclaim him our Official Widgeteer.

Recognizing that the robotics season and spring travels would cut into class time I am scaling it back this time around.  I am only taking Basic Pneumatics.  And in an "Open Lab" format.

It's a different way to study.  All the information is available on line in an interesting interactive format.  You can just click into existence the cylinders, valves and regulators needed to complete a circuit.  Later of course you go into the lab and do it for real.

This year's FIRST robot will not - barring a late emergency redesign - have any pneumatics on it, so this is just for my own interest and for future smartsies.  

I can do much of my school work in pajamas at 5am.  I can make my annual trip overseas in May and for all I know continue my class via smart phone while sitting in ancient Roman ruins. 

It's rather nice and I think a sensible adaptation to the reality that many Tech students are also working and raising a family concurrently.  

My previous classes have also been more hands on than lecture based but this goes further.  

Good so far, but with everything automated where am I going to get hand graded papers to stick on the refrigerator?

Industrial Tinker Bell

I can't help it, I am just a good sport about so many things.  So when one of my instructors at Tech School asked if I could help in a presentation on industrial safety gear I said sure.  I did ask if there was any chance I might be set on fire, making clear that if the safety equipment was appropriate to the situation I did not regard that as a complete deal breaker.

There were silly things to put on.

But the real fun part was trying out something called a "fall harness".  It is the sort of thing you wear when working up high so that if you slip you will, while having a lot of bruises and such, still be alive to complain about them.   

Naturally you don't put on an outfit like this without having a chance to try it out, so I was hauled about six feet in the air with the big yellow winch system you see in the top of the photo. I was at this point being encouraged to strike a "Super Man" pose but instead I remembered a long ago talk with an acquaintance who had done a lot of community theater and was describing a rig like this.

So here is my best Tinker Bell imitation.  Enjoy, Internet.  Enjoy.

Broaching the Subject

Metal working and Latin.  I continue to be surprised by odd little connections between the ancient world and the machine shop.  I really should not be, we create words in proportion to the importance of objects and activities in our lives.  And the working of metal was at least as important back then as it is today.

Our latest project involves "broaching".  In simplistic terms this is cutting a precise slot on the inside surface of a hollow tube of metal.  If - unlikely I suspect - you are curious, this is to seat a keyway, a precisely sized bit of metal that can mate two seperate parts together.  Think of a wheel and and axle for instance.

This is a broach.

You use a gigantic machine called an arbor press to ram this through the metal, each little tooth taking off a slightly larger bit of steel.  It amuses me that this huge machine sits next to the door that leads into the nanotech lab....where they work with things smaller than a human hair!

Broach is one of those words that teased at me for a few days until I gave in and looked it up.

Walking it back we have:

Old French (12th century) broche, a pointed tool or awl.  Also a spit for roasting
Vulgar Latin broccca, a pointed tool, with the related word broccus, projecting or pointing.
Deeper down it may come from a barbaric Gaulish word, as in the Gaelic brog, meaning awl.

When excavating at Vindolanda I have had the fun, once or twice, of unearthing a brooch. Very similar sounding word.  And of course it is an off shoot (13th century, Old French) of broach that means "long needle".  This actually refers to a feature we seldom actually find in Roman brooches, the bronze needle on the back of them.  The brooch was used to pin together layers of clothing and what is usually left after centuries in the ground is the more robust decorative front parts, not the functional "needle". 

Any word in circulation this long will naturally pick up some side meanings.  When discusing a pointed tool it is not surprising that an Old French version brochier has a rather pornographic meaning.  But we also get the sense of "broaching" a cask or keg,  by hammering a pointed tap into it.  This derivation also gives us the fairly common useage of "broaching a subject", that is to open it up for conversation.

We also get brocade, a Spanish origin word for fancy cloth with projecting nubbins.

And brochure, a multi paged document that in times past was stitched together.

And for those who take a dim view of Wall Street, consider the origins of the word broker.  It also comes down to us from the original broach.  By the mid 14th century it designated a "commercial agent" with overtones of "agent in a sordid business".  This sense spins through various Anglo-French interpretations off of the "broaching a cask" meaning, with a bit of the side meaning of "pimp or procurer".  

I would like to think that the financial services industry of the modern age is focused on providing us with more than watered down vino and doxies best looked at only in dim tavern lighting,  but evidence to the contrary is not hard to find.

The Boring Project

Sometimes in machining you need to make a large hole in a piece of metal.  Maybe larger than the drill bits you have around or can fit into your equipment.  Also, you might need this hole to be accurate to 0.001 inch.  Why I am not sure.

OK, time to deploy a milling attachment called a Boring Head.

It spins around and around shaving off a few thousandths of an inch of metal at a time.  Every few minutes you have to stop and adjust it again.  

This gets rather tedious.  And actually the term "boring" dates from the late 1700s, and is felt to be a figurative extention of "moving slowly and persistently, as a boring tool does".

I can certainly see how a machinist doing this task regularly would have been very happy when CNC milling came along and automated things.

By Grabthar's Hammer!

I have not seen it used but in one of the class rooms at Tech there is this gigantic machine.

It is a Tinius Olsen machine that seems to be for testing the properties of materials under pressure.  Near as I can figure you put things into that big vise on the left and scrunch it down. Presumably the Big Needle then moves on the Big Dial.

And if that does not give you some useful data, well, see on the table top that thing that looks like a war hammer?

I think you just pick this massive lead block sledge up and start pounding.

Perfection in an Imperfect World

I rarely venture into political discussions here.  I have my opinions, others have theirs and the Internet hardly seems a place where thoughtful discourse happens.  Like many I am far from pleased with the options we have before us next week.

Obviously it is not a perfect world.  Far from it.  

But that does not mean it does not contain elements of perfection.  My grandson is walking and talking.  This year at Thanksgiving the Kids Table is where the fun will reside.  I leave photos of The Next Generation in the hands of his parents, but I can show you a couple of other examples of perfection.

A part I was supposed to machine to 3.50 inches.  Two extra "in your face" decimal points thank you very much.

And the maple tree that stands in front of Trowelsworthy Hall.  Perfect not only in its magnificence but in the fact that it always hangs onto its leaves longer than any other tree on the block.  It was a beautiful day, a perfect day.  But I looked up and said, "nah, not going to do any raking today.  Go and enjoy".

May you  find your own personal small Perfections in this Imperfect world.