Climbing Wall

Because I foresee fewer visits to the gym in the coming months, I finally decided to buckle down and start building a home wall. Also, when will we ever have 12 foot ceilings again? I cajoled Paul to come by and help plan and build the wall -- thanks man! The most time consuming part was just anchoring the damn base board into the cement: the guy at Economy Lumber steered us wrong on the correct masonry bit size. After another visit to the lumber yard (Ashby Lumber this time), we got bigger bolts and the base board is now very solidly attached to the floor via 1/2 inch expansion bolts. Paul and I managed to get the basic frame, as well as one diagonal support up yesterday. Between yesterday evening and tonight I put in some cross bracing, painted the plywood sheets (I added some anti skid silica to the paint for roughness) and screwed two panels into the framework. I got the plywood sheet up with the help of our neighbor and some clever clampwork -- that guy has some cool tricks up his sleeve! There's still a decent amount of work to be done, but I couldn't resist bolting some holds on and taking it for a spin. It's very solid with no perceptible flex so far. Next comes the second panel. Before I do that, I need to find a cheaper source of T-nuts though.

yesterday:

Today (added cross bars)

The tape measure in my hand somehow lost a chunk of steel, turning it into a spring loaded finger slicing razor blade.


Note the clamped 2x4 under the overhang and the pushing device to the right. The trick is to clamp the 2x4, slide the plywood sheet into the small gap, then push the sheet up with the pusher. Once up, the pusher braces the sheet against the ground. Smart, but I liked my idea of getting enraged, turning into The Hulk, and throwing the plywood sheet into place better. Next time.


Sheet up, holds on:


First vertical section screwed on:

Due date

Chloe is due tomorrow. I have the sneaking suspicion that our lives might be about to change.

In other news, I had a dream that we walked down to the waterfront which had become a large Alp, and I discovered that there were beautiful bolted limestone and granite cliffs waiting to be climbed. But no, I don't miss France at all.

Dopo

After seeing a favorable video review of Dopo in the paper, chloe and I decided to treat ourselves to a dinner there. The line was pretty ridiculous on a Saturday evening, and like many other restaurants in the area, they don't take reservations (WHY?!). We waited for about an hour to get in, during which time we were treated to the view of a woman's ass crack squeezed up against the window. I mean really: if you're going to wear those hideous lowrider pants, DON'T lean too far forward, and DON'T take the seat in front of the floor to ceiling plate glass windows.

I didn't know what "Speck" was before eating here, but I wasn't very excited about the name. It sounded like some kind of German animal by-product. Luckily, I googled it while we were waiting, and it turned out to be a lot better than the name would imply. It's a juniper smoked ham, and I say "luckily" because it was excellent, and you could really taste the juniper.

Chloe ordered the mozarella pizza, which was also very good, but don't let the heaping boulders of buffala (i.e. real ) mozarella in the video fool you: They are much less generous when they aren't on video. You could barely tell where the cheese was!

Overall, the food was excellent.

Tofu hauuuus

I had lunch with Taras at the Todam Tofu House in San Bruno (better than the yelp comments would lead you to believe), and while we were enjoying our molten tofu soup and bulgogi, we overheard a funny conversation. A dude walked in with a woman and was on the phone within minutes (his companion seemed slightly chagrined by this). His phone conversation went like this:

Guy at next table on cell phone: Hey man! I just opened up a Massage parlor!
GANTOCP: yeah!
GANTOCP: yeah, you should come by, I'll give you a discount!
GANTOCP:
GANTOCP: Noooo man, it's not that kind of place... its a good place!

iphone camera

I love the iphone, but let's be honest: the camera is a piece of garbage. I like this image though.

no distortion at all!

Chloe crushes

5.10b with only a few weeks before Z-day... not bad!


okay she's posing on the 9, but she's climbing the ten in the first shot!

chisels!

need a japanese chisel? I would recommend the Japan Woodworker in Alameda:

abalone!

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

eek!

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:

berkeley marina

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!

Bouldering Grouse

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

The Saw

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.

asian flush

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!

A hard fought cutting board

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 room!

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.

hiking to the American River

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.

Alta!

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

more Choppin

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