A friend of mine gave us an abalone which kenji cleaned and sliced up for abalone sashimi. The preparation involves scrubbing off all the black stuff, cutting of the disgusting organ sacks, 
slicing it with a Deba, 
and putting it in a plate with ice and Kombu. 
Delicious
We had a little scare tonight. Chloe's hands were swollen, which she happened to mention to the doctor on call while she was inquiring about something else. It turns out that she had a few other symptoms of Preeclampsia and they told us to come in to the hospital right away. We headed to Kaiser Oaktown, went into the ER and were directed upstairs to the pregnancy triage area. They were quite efficient there and we were out in a couple of hours after they ran several tests and made sure her blood pressure was fine (well, as fine as it could be when confronted with the possibility of getting induced and having the baby that night!). Here she is in her hospital gown:
Chloe and I took a walk along the berkeley marina and watched people fly kites
There was a guy with a paraglider practicing. He had a few close calls where he almost crashed it into bystanders: not my idea of a good place for that kind of thing!
My college friend Paul and I headed up to the Grouse slabs to do some bouldering today. It was a simple plan: we were going to boulder, head back to Alta to use my new compass to find the property lines and then crash in the cabin. Unfortunately, my crappy memory had other plans, and I managed to forget the keys to the cabin in my car and didn't realize it until we were more than halfway to the crag (Chloe called and asked if I had remembered them). To Paul's credit, he wasn't visibly phased by this development and we still had a great time bouldering. I hit a few dynos which had shut me down before and sent the way overgraded #21 in the new supertopo guide. We were both a little surprised to see patches of snow along the trail and near the landing so several boulders.
After some compassing and chainsawing of paths, we made a fire pit (no access to the cabin=no hibachi!) and grilled up corn and steak while drinking some SNPAs: A great way to end a day of bouldering
After last weekend's cutting board debacle, I went to Adaro in San Leandro and finally took the dive into the world of dismemberment and hospital visits: I bought a chainsaw. I had been avoiding it for a long time because, quite frankly, chainsaws scare me. My dad had used one extensively during the building of our cabin and it had been a source of some pretty near misses. In shopping for a saw, I recently discovered that the saw that he had bought was about as dangerous a saw as you could hope for: non-low kickback chain, no chain brake, no chain catcher and no rear handle. And it was too small and underpowered for the jobs he was using it for. It's a credit to him that he used it so productively and without maiming himself, but I have to wonder if that Stihl dealer didn't have something against Japanese people.
I bought a mid range Stihl saw (ms270) with the new anti-vibration system and an 18" bar. More importantly, I bought the chain jamming Stihl chaps as well as combo hardhat/face screen/ear protection. As per Stihl requirements, the guy at Adaro showed me all of the features, fueled and oiled it up and answered all of my questions.
So today I got to try the saw out for real: After playing the saw like a banjo as the Stihl website recommends:
I started by sawing into some rounds to make sure I could control the saw well and then moved on to cutting slabs for cutting boards. It took around three minutes per slab, so that's an improvement!
The saw is particularly good at cutting down saplings, so I was able to thin things out *a lot* near the cabin. It even makes limbing and bucking easy, although limbing seems like a good way to take a chain to the head.
Last weekend, Chloe and I found a huge tree that PG&E had cut down which looks like a cherry. It's hard to tell exactly what it is because it has been down for a while, but it looks like the "cherry" that we have seen on the property and is also right next to several other living "cherries". I put cherry in quotes because although its leaves and bark look like cherry trees, and some of them produce a small number of mini-cherries, these things generally get to be around 40-50 feet tall, which seems strange for a cherry. My guess is that its a Wild Cherry:Prunus avium.
In any case, the wood looks very nice, and I really hope it is Wild Cherry, because we have a wild cherrywood (Merisier in french) table that we bought in France which we really love. One of the reasons that I bought the saw was to be able to do some rough milling of this and other trees, so I got to work
The boards were a little warped, but I was getting the hang of milling by the end. The ear protection really helped with Kenji's constant jabbering, too.
I also ended up milling a big chunk of oak from a fallen tree. It is a live oak of some kind, and I'm fairly certain that it's a Canyon Live Oak. The wood looks beautiful and seems relatively termite-free.
The ultimate goal is to use the milled wood to make a French farmhouse style table. We weighted the cherry boards down to try to flatten them, so here's hoping it all turns out well. I'm planning on quartering the live oak chunk and using it for the legs.
Have you ever noticed that many asian people turn red when they start drinking? It's a genetic condition caused by an "atypical" (read: mutant) aldehyde dehydrogenase, which causes a buildup of acetaldehyde in the body. Acetaldehyde, being somewhat toxic causes the flushing and other nasty side effects, including wicked hangovers. Being the lucky fellow that I am, I'm the only one amongst my half asian friends who got this special gene, so in high schoolcollege, people would see me red eyed and pink and usually assume that I was enebriated when I was just getting started (just kidding, mom!). Actually, getting red and splotchy after drinking a beer or two is enough to put you off the whole drinking thing entirely. So it was with much interest that I saw a blog entry about how the asian flush might be an evolutionary adaptation to prevent alchoholism. However, anyone who has been to Japan can attest to the fact that asian flush isn't much of a discouragement to most of the male populace there!
Today I had the misguided idea that, rather than waste all of the beautiful Black Oak that Roy the Arborist had felled for us, I was going to make a cutting board out of one of the rounds. I have it from several reliable woodworking sources (one of which isn't the Internet! Can you believe it?!) that the best way to cut the wood is to quarter saw it. Not having any power equipment with me, I started cutting it with our twenty five year old 30 inch Sandvik hand saw. Two hours and a whole lot of cursing later, darkness fell and I started up the lamps and continued sawing. What I ended up with was a malformed and ugly chunk of wood that wouldn't sit down flat on either side. After three hours of sawing. I brought it back to Berkeley for some planing wih Kenji's fancy Japanese tools and managed to correct a lot of the misshapenness, but I'm still not completely satisfied with the result.
baby talk alert
Before we left, we asked my mom to start her work in the baby's room. We had recently had our neighbor build a wall to make a little enclosed space for our soon to arrive daughter. The saga of the wall is a scandalous tale of trust betrayed, massive cost overruns, and general dismay. Privately, I now call this five inch thick structure the "multimilliondollar wall"; during the course of "the project", our room lost two windows and one wall, took two months to complete and increased in price by twofold. Awesome! Anyway, I had just painted the wall (no, not Gold, but tempting) so mom was ready to go. She worked the whole weekend and we came home to find that she had already finished a great mural!
We had a little extra wall space, so Chloe and I added a little bit as well:
and I installed the nice wool rug that mom bought for us and the baby.
On the recommendation of Russell Towle, Chloe and I took the Stevens trail down to the American River. The hike down was easy (isn't it always?!), if a little hot. If anything, the slow rate of decent in the last half was maddening. The sweeping views more than made up for that minor drawback though.
Once at the river, we waded in
and were both surprised by how warm it was. Schools of fish congreated around the small clouds of bugs hovering just above the water
The hike up was kind of painful. Even though we have happily and with relative ease hiked thousands of feet in elevation in not very much time, this felt like a real slog to us. The combination of the low to mid ninety degree temps, the lack of shade and the slow gradient, chloe being 7 months pregnant and my being in appalling shape made it seem more painful than it would normally I think! All in all it was a nice hike, but I can't really recommend it on a hot summer day -- even leaving the car at 9:30 AM as we did. 5.4 miles round trip according to the GPS.
We drove up to Alta this morning and hung out for most of the day. After stopping in Colfax and almost (oh so close) buying a Stihl 270 chainsaw, Chloe and I reinforced the dryrotting pilings of the cabin with pressure and preservative treated wood,
and then I got down to the serious business of chopping up one of the felled incense cedars. The arborist had cut down two cedars -- one living and one long dead. I started on the wet wood and got rejected by the sap laden dense wood; it took all of my effort and a big lumberjack swing just o put a dent in these things! By contrast, the dead cedar was really fun to split -- the rounds were light and practically leapt apart with any of the axes. The best part was the strong cedar smell though; it felt like I was in a japanese Buddhist temple. Heres me getting into the spirit of things in a moment of Zen
After breakfast at the Dutch Flat Hotel, we took a walk around Dutch Flat, then headed back to the cabin, where Kenji was again directing all of us clueless workers. 
I'm not sure what we'd do without him.
That's supposed to be a portrait of me on the left door by the way.
Chloe and I took a walk and finally met the neighbors, who told me that there's a fish farm upstream on the Bear Creek (which runs through our property), and sometimes fish escape. I haven't seen fish in there for years, but the guy we met told us that he's seen up to 18 inch trout down there!
After walking past scary pitbulls and along the canal, we ended up next to the PG&E Alta hydro-power office. They have a mini snowcat with a cab heater and plush seating which I covet:
A little googling reveals that it is a Pisten Bully -- "It’s like a sportscar, for snow". This particular model looks like a 100 flexmobil. Heres a video. I'm no linguistics expert, but judging from the title "Schneepistenpräparierfahrzeuge Kässbohrer Geländefahrzeug AG BeachTech Strandreinigungsgeräte", I'm guessing they are made in Germany or Austria. I don't want to know how much they cost.
I also did some more wood choppin' which really isn't that exciting. We have enough wood for the winter now.
I did discover one useful thing though: When chopping wood, even if you get very hot, leave the damn shirt on. Otherwise irate spiders will swarm you, bite your back and stomach and leave large tomato colored itchy welts that make mosquito bites seem like the gentle nuzzling of kittens.
Heres are some shots of the painted doors and windows
We ran into traffic on the way home but got crazy good mileage
We drove up to Alta this morning in the new used Prius, and upon arriving I immediately got to work finishing the damn roof. It's been hanging over my head for a while and I just wanted to be done with it. With Kenji cutting the cap shingles and complaining vigorously about it, I was able to finish up in an hour or so.
Next came some wood choppin with my new Gransfors axe (I know, EXCITING!!)
I was a little disappointed to find that the old school low budget super heavy axe that we've had for 20 years actually seems to do a better job with the bigger rounds, just by virtue of its weight. I'm not sure what I would have done without Kenji's running commentary:
Later on that evening I grilled some steaks that Gail had brought up. This had two unintended consequences. The first was that the "meat bees" (not bees at all, but yellow jackets) came out in legions, which enraged Kenji, who began attacking them with the fly swatter, hats, napkins, forks (no I'm not kidding) and whatever else he could get his hands on. Here's a picture of him in between deadly swings, corn cob in one hand, broken fly swatter in the other
and some of his unlucky victims
The other unintended consequence was an abundance of smoke: these were fatty and well marbled steaks on a small, hot grill. The smoke easily cleared the trees. In the middle of our meal we heard the whine of turboprops and looked up to see the red and white markings of the CDF on an OV-10 Bronco, probably out of Grass Valley. We didn't really pay much attention, other than to collectivley notice that it was in a high speed banked turn. Shortly thereafter, a CDF Bell Ranger flew overhead. Hmmm. A few minutes later, the Bronco circled back around with the helicopter following. By the third circle, I was starting to get worried, despite knowing that there was no way they were spotting the small smoke trail from our Hibachi. Still, I half expected smoke jumpers to start parachuting in!
Chloe and I are probably going to buy a used Prius (an 05), and before you yell at me about it not being significantly more eco friendly (because of the eco-cost of manufacturing) or ultimately more economically sound (they are expensive) let me just say that I've heard most of the arguments for and against. There is one important variable which is a good tie-breaker though, and thats the HOV sticker. In any case, here are some back of the envelope calculations:
subie: 57.3 mile trip (cant take bay bridge in AM) / 22.8 mpg * 5 days = 12.56 gallons / week * 3.30 (prem.) = 41.40
prius: 50.3 mile trip / 50 mpg * 5 days = 5.03 gallons / week * 3.10 (reg.) = 15.59
for a savings of ~25 a work week.
