snowshed bouldering

We got an early start from Berkeley today and headed up to the Snowshed at Donner for a little bouldering. The problems were fun, even if there weren't very many of them, but there was one beautiful and inspiring line which I threw myself at for an hour or so without too much success. With cooler temperatures and a little more power I might have a chance this fall!

We also put some finishing touches on the hot tub: specifically a lid for the heater and some hasps.







As it got dark, the bats came out and were swooping in near the deck to catch the bugs that were swarming us. I sat on the deck chair and managed to get a great picture of one of them, with the dark outlines of cedars in the background


after thirty more minutes of sitting in the dark with my finger over the shutter release, getting attacked by mosquitos, I managed to get one more bat shot:

air

After the usual out and back session at Alameda, I headed downwind to see how Chloe was doing. Along the way I noticed that the water was pretty flat, so I decided to take the plunge (literally!) and try to jump. We bought a beginners kiteboarding video called "Progression" which includes a long section on jumping, but I had been too focused on actually staying on my board to attempt it until now. However, watching the video allowed me to visualize all the steps, and I had been mulling it over for weeks. The first attempt went poorly: edge hard against the kite, steer the kite up hard... woooOOOOOP (sound of getting shot into the air)... SPLASH. IT was exhilarating, but a little painful. The second and third attempts were equally painful. Finally I managed to land one, and it was amazing. I repeated it several times, and soon I was way down the beach, looking at a long walk back to the launch.

no GPS track because I didn't press the "on" switch hard enough :(

A walk to Crissy

Some finishing touches

Chloes sister amy arrived on friday and we all went up to the cabin yesterday. We stopped at Hills Flat Lumber for our twice-a-weekend $100 Torx screw and various other parts fix. We also got a replacement for the dangerous and leaky 20 year old gas can that my parents had found. I'm no safety officer, but even I draw the line when you end up with only one third of your gas in the generator gas tank and the remaining third on the power cord and control panel of the generator. We all water sealed the existing structure, and most importantly the lower deck onto which water will spill.

While Chloe and Amy went off for a little hike (they found some really amazing tasting blackberries!) I put in some diagonal joists to support the decking around the corners of the tub. This is what the frame looked like when I got started:

Next, I cut redwood decking and attacking them until I ran out of nail and screws AGAIN. Here's the deck sans nails

I also made a pine lid for the tub as well as a pine door for the Chofu water heater. Thankfully, Chloe and Amy came back and offered to go back to Hills Flat to get some more lumber and screws. While they were away I cut the rest of the redwood for the deck and attached the final diagonal joist. When they got back, we nailed all of the decking, attached the pine lids, and water sealed everything. We also attached the pine siding. This is a shot showing the hinged lid


Today Chloe and I carried the last sheet of half inch plywood down to the cabin, measured and cut it and fired up the bath. While the water heated up, chloe attached hasps for the lids and I made a redwood railing.





I've been impatient to get the tub and platform done, so I've relied mostly on modern building techniques an materials, which has meant no Japanese style joints. All of the important joints have been Simpson Strong-Tie which have the added advantage of making leveling easy. However, I wanted to make at least one set of nice joints, and I decided that the railing was a good place for that. I didn't try anything too fancy

The only thing left now is to attach some more supporting crossbars, and make a cover for the water heater... but apart from that it's almost done! we all got a turn soaking in the tub before packing up for another four hour drive back to Mill Valley (We had dinner with Amys aunt and uncle). We were a little more careful about how much wood we put in this time, and closed the door at 95 degrees. It still ended up getting pretty hot, so next time we'll try closing at 90.

This is the almost finished deck:

3rd ave kiteboarding

I tried out my dream board today: the Underground FLX. As usual I hadn't adjusted the foot straps very well, but man can that thing eat chop. It felt like I needed to edge a lot harder than my gigantonoob board, but I imagine that that's just a necessary step in getting better. After a few futile attempts to switch the board for my own I ended up with barnacle shredded feet, so I rode downwind to the cove, where Chloe was waiting for me with my other board. I was definitely happy and grateful to have her there today supporting me: 3rd ave still feels pretty rough to me. I did manage a few small jumps of waves and stayed upwind for a while. Unfortunately my GPS was too shielded under my impact vest, so I don't have a trace to show today. However, Chloe took some photos of me boarding


here's me getting in with the Underground FLX 128 in tow:


then some random other shots




The good news is that even in somewhat higher winds than I am used to, my kite (Cabrinha Switchblade 12) performs well enough in its detuned (lower knot) setting.

Ode to Torx

I have switched over completely to Torx for the moment; Torx screws in combination with my Dad's MAkita drill made our lives much easier this weekend.

First Heat!!

It was perhaps the most significant day of the new century: today we obtained hot water for our stock tank soaking tub.

We started the day by attaching the excellent drain that we had bought with the Chofu heater from The Island Hot Tub Company.

Then we attached support 1x6s to make sure the plastic tub wont bend too much when sat in

Next, we drilled ports for connection to the hot water heater with our newly acquired hole saw, and added self-adhesive foil/foam insulation to the tub

And connected up the ports to the heater

We hooked up the water pump, crossed our fingers and ate lunch


Unfortunately, we soon had water leaking out of most of the connections that we had just hooked up; our fancy new drain was dripping slowly and the lower cold water intake was leaking at two places. We moved the heater closer to the bath to allow us to slide the port assembly further onto the pipes, re-clamped everything and started filling again. It required one more iteration of tightening, but we soon had the tub quite full with no (okay maybe a little) leaking. After a heroic effort by Chloe, we (well, she mostly) assembled the eight foot tall chimney, drilled holes with a cobalt bit, and sunk screws into the heater collar and the pipe sections. Finally, we clamped the chimney cap, put some oak (The same oak that I had cleared from the roof the previous weekend!) into the stove and waited, biting our nails as we dipped our hands into the water


(Notice the bucket of water nearby in case of problems)
I calmed myself by continuing on with the upper deck



It started heating slowly at first: we would dip our hands in occasionally and exclaim "hey, that feels warm!". We were all a little doubtful that it would work, so the first assertions of warmth were met with a little dubiousness. Soon however, the stream of hot water coming out of the upper port was undeniable. Indeed, it got extremely hot and was painful even to stir. The design of the heater, since it has no pump, causes an accumulation of hot water near the top of the tub, which needs to be mixed in with the colder water below. A normal person would use a paddle, but since I am not normal and didn't have a paddle, eventually resorted to using a shovel to stir it, but only after cooking my arms. After a relatively short while, the water was really, really hot and I decided that it was time to inaugurate the tub.

When I was little, my dad took me to various hot spas in Japan, and I remember the water seeming unbelievably, almost painfully hot. Since then, I haven't really experienced that same level of heat. I should say "hadn't" because that water in our tub was excruciatingly hot, and it was only getting hotter! The instructions state that the heating rate will decrease when you close the door to the stove. This is true, but because of the tremendous rate at which the water was being heated, it still was cranking out almost boiling water. In fact, I screamed a little when I got in, but gritted my teeth and subjected myself to the crab cooker. Soon after getting in I asked Chloe to start up the generator to pump cold water into the tub. After a period of pumping cold water in and letting the hot water drain out we were able to withstand the heat and soaked for a while

My face was red for about a half an hour afterwards from the heat. Gail and Kenji also took baths. Heres Kenji doing his best mountain monkey impersonation:

After hammering a few plywood boards on the top and sides we called it a day and headed to Auburn to try out a restaurant that we must have passed a few hundred times: "Lou La Bontes". The food was fine but nothing special, and a bit overpriced. On the way back we hit very bad traffic. We arrived in SF around 11:00 pm, roughly four hours after leaving Alta.

Climbing and Building ... AGAIN!

Today we bouldered at the Grouse Slabs again, near Sugarbowl and Donner. We found a really run but difficult problem down the hill in the main area and threw ourselves at it until we figure out the sequence. I have to admit that my mind was more on the tub than the rock! After a few hours we set off back to Colfax to buy some fasteners and *another* hole saw, since the one I bought couldn't actually be used in either of our electric drills. Just on a whim I bought some more Torx head screws. Earlier in the week I had gone to South City Lumber to buy some more 4x4 brackets, drill bits and insulation for the tub... While I was waiting in line I made an impulse buy of a box of Torx head screws, since I've stripped about 40 Phillips and regular head screws so far. I know, this is fascinating stuff. The thing is, when you are putting literally hundreds of these things into wood, any little improvement goes a long way. Anyway, we headed back up to the cabin, and the first thing I did was test our $100 Little GiantPump. Now, I had done a little research on pumps, and I had been agonizing over this for weeks; it was the only piece of the puzzle that I was really concerned about. On paper, this pump looked like it could do the job, but you know how that can go. So it was with a little bit of surprise and a great deal of jubilation that we saw water pouring out of the hose we had run down to the creek! We went on to attach the second level 4x4s (the thing my hand is on)

and 3/4" plywood sheets to support the stove and tub. After this, we put the tub down on the plywood

to decide where to attach the ports to connect the tub to the heater, as well as where to put the drain, so we could drill a drain hole in the support platform


After an excellent Parentally prepared steak dinner, we retired to our tent and went to sleep at 9 pm

Kiteboarding pt II

I started off the day fully intending to be good and not kiteboard today. I even took the important step of not packing any of my gear, however fortune smiled upon me: The wind picked up, my shoulder stopped throbbing and Chloe had a doctors appointment so she brought my gear to Alameda. For once, the traffic wasn't horrendous and I got to Alameda in good time. Strangely the wind hadn't died in between when I checked it on the web and when we arrived so Chloe and I suited up and got into the water. It was a perfect day: lots of wind, and I immediately went upwind without too much trouble. I watched Chloe get up on her board quite a few times on both port and starboard tack. I tried out her GK Sonic and was having a blast with it until I dumped it in the water and couldn't get it relaunched. I'm hoping it was simply because the kite wasn't pumped up enough or because the wind was dead near the beach!

I was wearing my GPS and captured today's session from a bird's eye view. The path is color coded by speed, but it clearly isn't correct for the maximum values!



After dinner at my parents, we drove up to Alta and collapsed in the cabin

Kiteboarding

Today was my first day out on the water at 3rd ave, and unfortunately I forgot to adjust my footstraps to accommodate my new booties; this turned out to be a major pain in the ass and I ended up getting tossed on my back so hard that my shoulder got a little tweaked. I found out later that my board actually doesn't appear to be able to be used with thick booties, so I'm not sure what I'm going to do. In the mean time, its lots of ibuprofin and ice packs for my shoulder... argh!

Taras very kindly grabbed an image from the 3rd Ave webcam and sent it to me:

More Building, Sue and Barbara

After our usual breakfast at the Dutch Flat Hotel, we went to Hills Flat Lumber for another $75 of nails, screws, bags of concrete and bolts and then headed back to Alta. Shortly afterwards we were visited by Sue and Barbara (Chloe's step mom and her sister), who had been enjoying a vacation at Lake Tahoe for the past week. We showed them the streams, the blackberry patch and of course the cabin. It was a nice break from all the hammering, drilling an cutting and fun to show off all of the work we've done over the past month! After I had given them directions to Dutch Flat, we got back to work and put screws into all the brackets from yesterday (we had run out of screws and didn't have the correct sized bolts so there were quite a few brackets which had only been nailed). We also put in the 2x8 joists, mixed three 60 lb bags of cement and poured them around the piers for more stability.


The last order of business was to chop pieces O' tree off of the oak tree which had fallen onto the roof of the cabin. I'm not sure when this happened, but it's been up there long enough to shed a mat of leaves and branches on the shingles. I climbed the ladder up to the roof, swept it off and then sawed off some of the dead branches.



There was a LOT of detritus up there. Here is what the deck looked like after I swept one side of the roof:


I can hardly wait for next weekend, when we will put the second layer of the deck on and hopefully start working on the plumbing issues (i.e. test our new pump, cut holes in the side of the tub for connection to the heater and install the drain).

Foundation

After some beautiful bouldering up at the Grouse Slabs near Donner Summit

we headed back to the cabin, measured and cut the individual pressure treated 4x4s, screwed them into the cement pilings, attached metal brackets, cut 4x8s and screwed them into the metal brackets. We also put two 2x4 joists in



Shortly after putting in the joists, over a beer I realized that we had put one of the 2x4s too close to the edge. argh.

3rd and Alameda

There is a local kiteboarding spot which is generally thought of as an intermediate area near the San Mateo Bridge. In contrast to Alameda, which took me an hour and a half to get to last Friday, 3rd Ave can be as close as fifteen minutes away from work. I'd been putting off going there for a variety of reasons, most significantly that I couldn't stay upwind and didn't want to get dragged into the pilings of the San Mateo Bridge. Today I finally got up the nerve to go to 3rd, but it turned out that the wind was completely dead, and slightly offshore (impossible kiteboarding conditions). It turned out not to be a total writeoff because a local kiteboarder named Ian very graciously showed me where to pump up my kite and rig, so I'll be ready next time.

After a long drive to Alameda, Chloe took my 12m kite and got up on her board first try. It appears that all the trouble that she's been having was due to her kite!

kiteboarding

someday I will be skilled enough to kite the Golden Gate... someday

Photos

I got back a couple of rolls of film today and did some quick scans.

Crissy field:




Maine, near Five Islands

Hunter S. Thompson

Despite the childishness of it, I enjoy reading about cars, engines and so forth. Direct Shift Gearbox? I'm all over it. New Audi motor? Where's the link? It's a guilty pleasure in these gas starved globally warmed times, and I'm not proud of it. I'd like to blame it on driving a Renault Clio for almost four years, but the truth is that I've been hooked since high school and still (I think) have a picture of a Ruf Carrera CTR C4 hanging in my old bedroom in my parents house to prove it. Anyway, these days I frequent Jalopnik for my daily fix. A few days ago they linked to an article by Hunter S. Thompson called "Song of The Sausage Creature" about riding motorcyles and the Ducati 900SS. Now besides seeing "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", which I loved, I never was very interested in HST's Gonzo writing style. It seemed a little too bizarre and poorly crafted for my tastes. After reading this article though, I realize that that was a grave underestimation of his skills as a writer an humorist. As I read the article I developed an actual sharp pain (you know, the one from the cliche?) in my side which I had to physically clamp down on with my right hand to suppress the laughter induced pain. I LOVE this article and have sent it to almost everyone I know, and have even accosted my friend Taras on gmail chat and made him read it. Now I need to go find everything that he's ever written. And buy a Ducati.

New Grill

My mom gave Chloe and I a grill for our second wedding anniversary, which I finally had the chance to assemble. I celebrated by grilling some tuna, Japanese sweet potato and Okinawan purple sweet potato.

Tub Foundation

Today was a day of back breaking work. We carried all eight cement bags down to the cabin, put up posts to survey and align the piers, dug holes for all six posts,

carried gravel up from the river in wheelbarrows, mixed cement with river water to pour into the holes,

aligned the piers on the cement pads and carried down a whole lot of wood (all of it except the plywood).

Earlier in the day the wood delivery went perfectly, except for the driver of the delivery truck accidentally ripping the shifter lever off of his truck

at the end of the day we washed off in the river and my parents took us out for dinner at the Monte Vista Inn. I hadn't been to the Monte Vista Inn in quite a while and was pretty disappointed by how rude and useless the waitress was. My dad asked for his hamburger medium rare, to which she replied "Well, I'll ask the chef, but the best I can do is ask ; that's all I can do". That would be a fair response in a greasy spoon or your local redneck barbecue, but not when you're paying $10 for a burger. Seriously, walk through those fake "Wild West" swinging saloon doors to the kitchen, explain to Cletus what "Well done", "Rare" and "Medium Rare" mean in monosyllabic words with accompanying hand gestures, and next time you'll look a little less like the dull witted yokel that you are.

Climbing

We got a late start and drove up to Big Chief for a morning climbing session. After getting a little lost and having to bushwhack, we got on a horrible "10a" slab on a pillar "North Pillar?" and then on to the fabulous "Half Baked", "Under Cooked" and "Bun in the Oven". By this point, it was getting pretty hot, so we plodded back to the car and headed to Colfax to order materials for the Hot Tub. The basic idea is something like this:



the plans were drawn up in Google Sketchup

we ordered the following things to be delivered tomorrow:

1 4'x8' sheet 3/4" CDX plywood 30
2 4'x8' sheet 1/2" CDX plywood 40
2 4x8s 8 foot doug fir 60
3 4x4s 8 foot doug fir 44
3 4x4s browntone pressure treated 30
3 2x8s 8 foot doug fir 24
14 2x4s 8 foot doug fir 46
12 1x8s 8 foot pine 96
8 2x2 8 foot redwood B 53
2 2x8 8 foot redwood B 60
3 1x8 8 foot doug fir (tub support) ??
8 60 pound bags of cement
2 more pre cast cement piers
Assorted brackets

which should be the bulk of the materials needed, barring unforseen events. We brought three of the cement bags and the piers with us in the Subaru and whellbarrowed them down to the cabin. Of course, we also had to rent a pair of bolt cutters to liberate the wheelbarrow because Kenji had lost track of the key to the lock which locked the wheelbarrow to the cabin. Having carried four cement piers down to the cabin the previous weekend, I can say that a wheelbarrow is really a must-have tool for this kind of work.

kiting

the wind was good enough for a nice after work kiteboarding session at Alameda, after which we drove up to Alta and got set for the first big weekend of hot tub construction.

Another trip from hell

Today was my flight back to San Francisco, and I was very worried about having more problems. My flight wasn't until 2:15 PM, and I was at the Portland Airport by 10:00 AM, so I didn't think that there would be a problem. However, shortly after I arrived, I noticed on my computer (Yes, I paid the $6 day pass for wifi) that my flight was delayed 10 minutes. It was still 11:00 AM, which was even more worrisome. Then gradually it got later and later until suddenly it wasn't leaving until 4:00 PM, which would mean I would miss my connection in Dulles (AGAIN) by an hour or so. Of course, none of the displays in the airport reflected this change so I walked up to the podium, just as they finally deigned to give us the information. People were upset to say the least. It turns out that many of them had already spent the night in Portland because their flights had been cancelled the previous day. The United agent turned out to be a complete moron, but he seemed to know what he was talking about when he firmly said that there were no seats until Monday morning, and I should be happy to take whatever he gave me. I asked if there were any flights out of Logan, in the hopes of avoiding problems the next day, and after a lot of furrowing of his neanderthal brow and exasperated sighs he managed to find a seat for me the next morning from Logan. Fine. Would they at least pay for a bus to get me there? "Well, the flight isn't cancelled, so no". So I took a taxi to the Portland bus station, then a 2 hour bus ride to Logan. The bus ride on Concord Trailways was actually the best part of my trip all day. The driver was the bus driving equivalent of Norm from "This Old House", and when he wasn't smiling lasciviously and raising his eyebrows at the luggage handlers whenever an attractive woman got on the bus, he was cracking jokes and generally having a good time. You know how sometimes an airline attendant will get on the PA and say something "funny", which usually elicits laughs because many people get nervous on airplanes? The ones that you would normally react to with a groan? The ones that you can tell have been said by that person about five hundred times? Well he wasn't telling any of those. Additionally, there was a big chiller full of free water bottles and snacks that we could grab on the way into the bus. AND there was a movie.

So we arrived at Logan, and just for kicks I went to the United ticket counter. You see, I really did not want to have to find a hotel and pay $200 for a night, and I had the sneaking suspicion that the Portland Maine United agent was, in addition to being a jerk (he shouted down two old ladies who were concerned about missing their connections!), incompetent. This time I got an excellent agent and she got me a seat on a plane leaving in twenty minutes! Would I like it? I could barely thank her enough before rushing off to the plane. Unfortunately, an arm of a tropical storm was sweeping through the airport, and huge amounts of rain and lightning were strafing the runway (Portland, by the way, was sunny and clear). As a result, the flight left around 2 hours late, which really pissed people off... but I was too elated to be getting away from the east coast that night (and not having to stay in a hotel) to care. Chloe very nicely picked be up at 12:30 AM at SFO.

HEAT

We drove up to Alta this weekend to star scouting the group and buying materials for our wood fired hot tub. After a little internet leg work we had found a farm supply store in auburn called Echo Valley Ranch which had exactly the kind of stock tank/tub that we were looking for: a 100 gallon plastic stock tank!. The temperatures along the way were ridiculous (the highest we saw was 115 F (46 C)) and the Subarus AC was struggling to keep up! We also stopped at the excellent Hills Flat Lumber Co in Colfax.