A walk with Zoe

I took a walk up in Redwood Regional park with Zoe after picking her up from day care. Here's my reward for lugging the little sack o' bricks up and down the hills

Berkeley Farmers Market

I've driven by the Berkeley Farmer's market at least one hundred times since we moved back tot he bay area. I checked it out from afar, and despite missing the markets in France, never ventured in. A hyper allergy to all things crunchy was what kept me away, but I have become more and more convinced that eating local organic food when you can is the way to go (from a nutritional standpoint, at the very least). Well it turns out it's awesome. I bought some great carrots, chard and potatoes, as well as some farm fresh butter and $4 eggs. Yeah that's right: four dollar eggs. Some dudes show off their earning power with BMWs and Swiss tourbillon watches, but it's all about the beta carotene rich free range chicken eggs for me.

Cow ordered

I finally ordered a split quarter from Chileno Valley. We're going to split the cost and meat three ways. Hopefully we won't end up having to buy another freezer. Thirty pounds is a lot of meat, even subtracting enough for the massive BBQ that we're planning.

The next headlamp

I'm probably going to go with Cree XR-E's, Q5 bin ... I'm torn as to whether I should run at 500 mA or 1000mA. These LEDs seem pretty amazing:

107 lumens at 350 mA
171 lumens at 500 mA
214 lumens at 1000 mA

compare that to my Luxeon I Stars:

45 lumens at 350 mA

At least on paper, thats waaaaay more efficient!

I also learned that "JB weld" is a good way to attach the star boards to the heat sink. Now I just have to round up another one of those!

Mega headlamp

I switched to headlamps from flashlights around the time I started climbing. I was flush with cash from living a .com moonlighting funded grad student life, and I poured the excess into gadgets for my new sport. I bought a lot of devices of questionable utility, but headlamps are one class of tool that I have continued to find very useful. In France, I had a friend who did ski de randonnee at closed ski resorts during the night. He was able to do this through the use of a mega headlamp with a gigantic battery that lived in a backpack. I've wanted one ever since, despite not having very much justification for buying one, but could never really figure out why they cost $500.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when I found a post by one of the Squid Labs brainiacs on how to build a mega headlamp with a relatively small battery pack and newly available ultra bright LEDs. I spent some time agonizing over how to improve on his design, but in the end just decided to build it as specified. I sourced my parts from Future Electronics and Battery Junction, and bought the rest of the parts at Al Lasher's Electronics on University (my childhood haunt).

Overall, I followed the instructions, but went with a potentiometer instead of switches to fixed resistors. I used 10x 2600 mAh Tenergy AAs and white Luxeon Stars (I don't believe the whole blue/green thing being better for night vision). The heat sink was off a pentium III and the head harness was off an old and extremely useless Princeton Tech headlamp. I hacksawed and drilled some aluminum stripping to mount the light assembly to the harness. Once I had the parts, I finished all the soldering and assembly in a few hours, and figured out how to mount the lights to the harness in another half an hour.


I'll post pictures, but this thing is BRIGHT! I've been blinded by it a few times, and it leaves a pleasing blue ghost image burned into my retinas (that's good for them, right? Survival of the fittest rods and cones?)





Things that I learned:
I SUCK at soldering
you don't need very much thermal paste to make a gigantic mess
The curing time of some silicone sealers exceed the maximum limit of my patience

Things to do next time:
Use an audio/log pot for power control -- linear is ridiculous
Use less glue
do a better job attaching the star plates to the heat sink
Use fancier LEDs -- the ones I use are about half (if that) as efficient as the cutting edge in LED tech.

edit: added picture

Baby spit up!

"spit up" sounds better than "baby hurl", doesn't it?

The smile that can only come from sullying grandpa's pants:

A hike in Redwood Regional Park

Chloes Dad and step mom arrived, and we all went for a hike in Redwood Regional Park


Along the way we saw a chossy looking outcrop of sandstone,

which I bravely fought my way through the brambles to check out. The rock had Fontainebleau-esque textures

and I was surprised to find a piton and four bolts on the top!

Sibley

We have grandparents in town all month to help out with little ZZN, which should be fun. Chloes mom came in on saturday, and we went up to Sibley for a little hike

Comfort food

Made an old favorite of mine last night: polenta (heavy on the parmesan) and poached eggs with fresh nutmeg and steamed chard. oh yeah.

(terrible photo)

Hook us up!!

Chloe and I entered a contest to win an uber-dream vacation at Conde Nast. It involves uploading images and descriptions, as well as roping friends and family to register and give our photos five stars (we will of course reciprocate if you upload photos too!). Here are our images:

Riomaggiore
Vathi
Les Ecrins
I dont know who this "chloez" character is, but she sure left a nice comment!

english dialects

I watch a lot of British TV and comedy, and often wonder where various accents come from. There was one accent that I heard which I was always curious about: a kind of long drawl frequently involving the word "Like": "laaaahk". I found a cool site with mp3s of various dialects here. It seems like its closest to a Northwest accent.

!

Whatchu talkin bout willis?

Mr Mom part two

I admit it: I was pretty worried about taking a month off to take care of little ZZN. It wasn't for professional reasons but simply because I didn't think I would be able to keep up with her (particularly if she rejected the bottle!). Now, almost two weeks in, I frequently find myself looking towards March 1 with sadness -- I won't have all day to go on walks and talk to the baby anymore!

Yesterday we went to the SFMOMA with the parents for her first visit to the museum.

We visited the permanent collection and a photo installation, but the highlight for her seemed to be the Olafur Eliasson exhibit. It wasn't terribly compelling to me, but she loved the colors of the One Way Colour Tunnel and the 360° room for all colours. As usual, what she liked most of all was the trail of "Oh my god did you see that cute baby!" that she leaves in her wake and random passerbys making googley eyes, jumping up and down and smiling at her.

Earlier, I ran into an old friend of mine randomly in the cafe. He was in town to cover the Game Developers Conference

I also developed a high tech remote baby feeding system: A thermos full of hot water and one of those ubiquitous brushed stainless steel mugs. I put the chilled baby bottle from the cooler into the mug and filled it with hot water, thus warming the contents to non baby tantrum inducing temperatures. I tipped the deck by bringing real milk instead of formula of course. Here she is enjoying a field heated bottle:

The Backpack

After getting bad back and shoulder pains from the now not so little baby in our Baby Bjorn,



we did a little research on baby backpacks and headed down to REI. We plopped the baby into several packs, including the Kelty Pathfinder, the new version of the pathfinder, and the Deuter packs. She seemed most comfortable in the Pathfinder, immediately starting to slobber and gum the front of the baby cockpit. I've been using it for a few days now, and LOVE it. It adjusts quickly to different torso lengths too, so we both get to play baby sherpa!

Day three of Mr. Mom

It's now been three days of taking care of little ZZN and I'm starting to get into the rhythm of things. The major accomplishment was getting her to take the bottle -- we bought several Adiri bottles, which she really seems to like. That was actually my biggest concern, so I am *very* relieved about it. We went for a long walk up in redwood regional park today (madrone trail to starflower, to ridge) which was really beautiful. Its only 10-15 minutes away, so I have a feeling we'll be going there a lot. I need to find something better than the baby bjorn though! My shoulders are aching.

Driving Home

We had a largely uneventful drive back to the Bay Area. It took us 6:40 door to door, so fairly quick. One piece of advice: make sure you have enough gas to *not* stop at Lee Vining


$4.19 for premium! We stopped at a promising looking Basque restaurant in Carson Valley, but they weren't serving lunch until 11:30... bah.


Lesson learned:
+The hot tubs around Mammoth rock
+Keough sucks
+The Vagabond Inn is awful
+Motel 6 rocks .. and El Rancho, Comfort Inn look decent as well
+Whiskey creek 5-6pm half price food in the Saloon is good

Hot springs

After last nights disappointing experience with Keough, we did a little internet research on our fabulous working free wifi connection (yes, it really works!), and decided to go to the tubs near Benton Crossing. The drive is only 30 minutes, but because there is still three feet of snow at that higher elevation, we had to walk the last 1000 feet or so to the tub. It turned out to be beautiful: panoramic views of the Sierra and White mountains, hot water and no shady characters. We took turns taking dips and taking care of the angry little baby.




After tubbing, we tried to get up to the Buttermilks. We made it most of the way, and actually were only around 100 feet from the Peabody boulders, but I didn't want to risk getting stuck. Unfortunately, there really wasn't any room to turn around, so I did a little donut on the slushy snow, pointed the subie back down the road and fled.

More unfortunate still, I must have hit a pothole or rock on the way out, because I started getting a strange and troubling sound out of the front left wheel well. It almost sounded like we were dragging something metallic. After a few fruitless minutes of trying to figure out what vital car-part we were now dragging, we called AAA.

The towing service showed up 20 minutes later and the driver was able to quickly diagnose the car: a bent heat brake heat shield which was rubbing against the rotor. Fortunately, as far as things that can be damaged by rocks, this is pretty minor. He gave it a whack with a hammer and the noise went away. Just to be sure, I headed to the local service shop. The mechanic got the subie up on the lift and double checked all the shields, confirming that the front left shield had been bent slightly inwards. I was pretty surprised to see how much plastic there is under there. Maybe its time for an aftermarket aluminum skid plate. I probably need one that protects the rear diff though. It was now three o'clock, so we had a few more hours for bouldering... off to the Happy Boulders again!


When we were done, we took a few minutes to take in the glory of the Eastern Sierra at dusk

A new hotel, Eureka Dunes, Keough

A cold wind blows through
our Vagabond motel room
Google? page not found

-- a motel haiku


After another night of incredibly annoying HVAC noisiness, Chloe and I had both had enough. As soon as I got up, I started calling around to other hotels and we settled on the Motel 6 right across the street. The manager must have thought we were a little strange when we demanded to turn on and listen to their heater before accepting the room.


After transferring all of our stuff (mostly baby stuff, actually -- I had somehow only brought one pair of pants for the whole trip) to the motel 6, we set off for the Eureka dunes. We had passed the dunes a while ago one our way to bishop from Death Valley, but it was dark and we were both too tired to camp. The lady at the BLM told us that Eureka was only 45 minutes away, but then corrected herself and said that it was only 45 minutes with her boyfriend driving. "We'll see about that!" I thought to myself. The drive turns out to be around 63 miles from the edge of town to the dunes parking, including some dirt roads, so unless her boyfriend is Colin McRae I'm calling bullshit. That would mean an average speed of more than 80 mph. I would say that its do-able, but requires a fast car with good brakes, or a complete disregard for ones own life. In any event, we arrived at Eureka Dunes 45 minutes (okay, more like an hour) after leaving Bishop.


We Baby-Bjorned up Zoe and headed up some of the smaller dunes on the North side (Google maps link here )
Here Zoe and I are, assessing the situation

We had initially planned on hiking to a higher dune with Zoe, but the sand turned out to be too soft for that. Instead, we took turns guarding Zoe from vultures and walked up by ourselves

and ran down (which is SO much fun!)

Zoe was starting to get a little irritable, so we got our dune jumping in while we could


after I built a makeshift baby tent out of our jackets and my tripod:

You can't see her face in this shot, but she is not at all impressed by my ingenuity. She seemed to enjoy being up there well enough though:


I took a few film and digital shots, before baby entered DEFCON 3 and Chloe started bringing her back to the car




On the way down we got buzzed by an F-18 (probably from China Lake or Nellis)




Flying a $40 million jet low through the desert must be a pretty good job.

Here we are in front of the dunes, and with our footsteps leading up one of the lesser dunes:



From the dunes, we headed back to Bishop, got some sandwiches at Schatt's and headed to the Sad boulders for some steep chossy action:



That last one is a beautiful line, but pretty painful on the fingers. I got to the second to last move, but kept falling off. Next time.

I had heard and seen pictures of the hot springs around Bishop since the first time I came here (around 2002 I think) but had never really had the motivation to go check them out. After a few days of bouldering however, Chloe and I were both ready to find them. There is one right near town called Keough Hot Springs, which is an actual spa with a pool, refreshments etc. I'll leave it to Chloe to describe this, since she went in for a recon mission while I stayed out in the car with ZZN. Suffice it to say that we were unimpressed. There is also the runoff from the hot springs, which I had sometimes heard described as being "scary". After a little hunting, we found the spring, but one look at its denizens convinced us to go somewhere else. A brown 1970 Econoline Van "Serial Killer Special Edition" was parked in front of the springs, with the tailgate open. Inside was a floor to ceiling stack of plastic milk crates of undetermined contents, and a dog was circling the van barking at invisible intruders. Shangri-laaaaaaa! Needless to say, the bathtub in the Motel room was looking pretty good.