Mom always amazes us with how quickly and easily she figures out local public transportation systems. She is already at home going to and from the center on various buses and trams. She's been exploring a bit and brought back a small selection of desserts today!
Took Keith and Mom on a tour of the synchrotron and to la Frise before dropping keith off on the train to Paris
We did a little Vercors tour today by way of the col du mont Noir, then through Presles, to Pont-en-Royans and then back over the plateau and down to the valley again. We stopped at a nice little cafe for drinks in Presles and had some outstanding ice creams in Pont-en-Royans. We also stopped at the cheese co-op and bought some bleu de Sassenage as well as some Vercorais (not impressed). It was a beautiful day, tje wildflowers were everywhere and I did not fly the phantom into a cliff. What more could you ask for?
We went to Zoe and Alex's end of the year school performance. Apparently they practice quite hard for these things! Chloe and I were satisfied that neither Zoe nor Alex had to be pulled screaming from the stage.
So I've had a rough few weeks. So rough that I didn't really even have a chance to celebrate my birthday (actually, I was on a plane) so wanted to have something cool and new to play with. I've actually wanted an RC airplane since high school, but figured that it would be an endless frutrating stream of broken wings and props. Enter the quadcopter: a RC flying machine with a much more shallow learning curve. I have been reading about RC drones for a while, and recently a company called DJI that sells the flight control "brains"used in many multi rotors copters released their own quadcopter which is called the Phantom. Everyone seems to love it, even if there are a few things that they got wrong. I did a little research and at least in my opinion, for a quad carrying a HD Hero, the Phantom is the best deal going. The GoPro is not the best for stills, but excels at video. I picked one up from a local shop on the other side of town (http://www.flashrc.com/, HIGHLY recommended) , started the thing charging, picked up the kids, asked who wanted to see daddy's new helicopter, and interpreted their YAAAAAAY YES ME I WANT TOs as an affirmative. I had watched all the tutorial videos except the advanced guide multiple times and started off gently. I did not, however notice the fact that when you get an imperfect GPS lock, the copter does not use GPS to correct its flight, so hands off the joysticks=copter continues to coast. So, long story short, on the second flight a mild puff of wind starts the phantom going towards the forest. Worse still, it gets turned around so all the directions controls are now flipped. It lofted slowly over the fence and crash landed in an immense stand of bushes. Nice. I put the controller down, and with the kids in tow began bushwhacking in my shorts and sandals. That's when I noticed that this was no ordinary stand of bushes, but chest high stinging nettles with some blackberry vines weaving through them for. Zoe tried to follow me without my noticing and she was soon crying from a nettle sting, and my arms and legs were starting to throb. I brought the kids back to the chateau, got on my Carhartts (the ones I used to use when I was chainsawing stuff) and headed back into the sea of pain. After stomping down a large area, I eventually found the thing deep in a nettle. So not the most auspicious of starts, but it could have been a wall, I suppose.
Since then (Monday) I have done at least six flights and am getting better and better but still have moments of terror when the copter gets turned around and the controls are shifted by 90, 180 or 270 degrees. I have to say though that this thing is amazing. It will climb, drop and glide as fast (ok, much faster) than I am comfortable with and gets around 12 minutes from a fully charged pack.
Tonight I showed it off to Franck and managed not to crash it or injure either one of us, despite the lack of GPS lock again and a bit of wind.
I can't wait to do flyovers of cols, cliffs etc. This is going to be amazing.
I was combing through eBay looking for prints of some of my favorite local spots, when I found a beautiful print of La Berarde. It was only $20 and I almost bought it immediately, but was so intrigued by it that I did a little research on it's provenance. It turned out to be a litho by Thornton Oakley from 1927. Unfortunately, it was a plate that had been sawed out of a book (Cloud Lands of France) by someone. I think most people who like engravings know that many antique books get chopped up and sold individually by dealers. Even large and very famous places like Graham Arader did it at one time. It's called "Book Breaking", and I think it sucks. Not as bad as breaking library books, but still pretty lame. Anyway, the big argument that book breakers will make is that they make artwork that would be impossibly expensive as a book accessible to most people as individual plates. i.e. very few people would be able to afford an atlas, but many people can afford to buy one print chopped out of an atlas. I guess I can kind of buy it. Anyway, as soon as I discovered that the Thornton Oakley print came from a book, I immediately decided to find and buy the entire book. I was girding myself for an astronomical price, but within five minutes had found a first edition in very good condition for ten USD. Thats right, a first edition book from 1927 with lithographically printed drawings for ten bucks. I bought it immediately (and am thinking about trying to buy up more copies to keep them out of the hands of the book breakers). A few weeks laster, I received it in the mail. Let me cut to the chase: It is a revelation. The drawings are beautiful. The writing (by Amy Oakley, Thornton's wife) is fabulous and contains much fascinating history of the region. Last, but not least, I just fell in love with the story of a young American couple from Philadelphia arriving by boat and exploring some of our very favorite (and quite remote in 1924) places in the Alps.
Here are some terrible scans
a friend sent me a link to a video in which some dudes attach a rocket engine to a bike. It was entertaining, but fortuitously at the end there was a link to a video on "How to turbo your car" . Being a long time turbo enthusiast, I couldn't resist clicking on it and found a fantastic new (to me) car show. Don't get me wrong: I love Top Gear, but their "idiot car guy" schtick is starting to wear thin, even if Clarkson is still very entertaining. Also, I am kind of getting tired of looking at "films", as they like to call their little video clips, of impossibly expensive hyper cars. That's a big part of the appeal of this new show. It's just a couple of very enthusiastic, hilarious and skilled Aussies who show people how to modify cars in various ways. Their latest feature was a how-to guide for turboing a mazda Miata. There's a guy that they call the Turbo Yoda, who welds them together a new exhaust manifold! Anyway, I love the show, even if I will never do anything like that to our Honda. Old dog, new tricks after all. The show is called Mighty Car Mods.
Many more on their channel
http://www.youtube.com/user/mightycarmods?feature=watch
extra points for them being Australian, because Aussies are the best!
Zoe's second tooth came out today and thankfully did not end up getting ingested. In France, it is a mouse, rather than a fairy that exchanges cash for teeth, but since Zoe is a bicultural girl, she managed to get visited by both the tooth fairy *and* the French mouse. Happily there were no turf wars or other unpleasantness over the tooth and the tooth fairy and mouse came to an agreement on the distribution of teeth.
It's been a tumultuous few weeks, to put it mildly. I have another week of business, and then I will hopefully be able to start catching up, and post some stuff retroactively. In the interest of not getting too backed up, I think I will just start posting as usual and then fill in the past few weeks little by little. The big news is that my dad died on the 13th of May. I had flown in the previous night and so I was able to see him before he passed away. We had a memorial service for him shortly afterwards. He has been in my thoughts every day, but I have luckily been incredibly busy, so it has taken my mind off of things a bit. I miss him a lot.
I did a big ride yesterday with some expats and locals, organized by Russell, the guy behind www.grenoblecycling.com. It was some of the most beautiful and empty countryside I have ridden in. It always amazes me how sparsely populated some of these areas are despite being a short drive from Grenoble. We spent most of the time in the Trieves, winding through small roads and a few familiar places like Mens. The English guys would sprint for almost every town sign, with me usually getting dropped, but I got a few of them at the top of climbs (after the strong climber herd had been thinned a bit!). There were options for 100, 130 and 150 km (a bit over 90 miles) and it took a lot of motivation to keep choosing the harder option, particularly because my legs felt like lead weights after around 90km. The last half was pretty intense, with a group of three of us alternatively running out of gas and then getting some new power and contesting town lines.
Along the way, they had feed zones, where the organizers had set up stands with water, juice, oranges, cakes, bread, and of course wine. They seemed very surprised to see so many English guys, and even more surprised to see an American! At each feed zone, you get a stamp (above) on your card.
It started raining pretty hard in the last 10 or so km, so we were totally soaked by the end, but the mild discomfort of the rain was eclipsed by the leg cramps.
All told, a great day in a beautiful area. 150km and 3000 meters of gain. Best of all, no debilitating knee pain, like my last big ride.
Here in Grenoble, trimming trees apparently involves shutting down roads completeley for almost a week. Of course the road in question is the way we drop off and pick up the kids! The alternative is the main road, which is a mess of construction and traffic lights every 10 meters. So today I decided to pick up the kids in the bike trailer. It's not far, but there is a little hill in between our place and the nounou, which it turns out is pretty damn difficult to ride up with a trailer and two kids. I did get some "A-llez papa!" chants though, which helped
Having sharp knives was always a matter of pride for Kenji, and later on myself. Kenji's favorite test was to slice a sheet of newspaper of paper towel in half with one of his newly sharpened blades. As he got older, he had less inclination to go through the rigourous three stone sharpening that he always used to, and it made me happy to tsk disapprovingly at his dull knives and then sharpen them all for him. The knife sharpness thing, despite causing a few accidents in the kitchen was something that we shared, and I was happy to see the appreciation in his eyes when I showed him his yanagi (and occasionally deba) knives brought back to a mirror polish. After coming home, I was dicing an onion for risotto when I noticed that my knives were in a deplorable state: bruising the onion instead of slicing through it. I stopped what I was doing, soaked all my stones and got to work sharpening. I used the technique that Kenji had taught me many years ago, and a few new tricks that I had learned myself. It was a bittersweet mix of happiness at the memory of our shared obsession and sadness.
