Rotenburo, Alta

The parents came up to Alta with us for the weekend (although we ended up leaving early because of non stop rain) and they were able to enjoy the rotenburo

Chloe and I got up there early on friday, and tested out the rotenburo soon after our arrival. Unfortunately, we discovered fairly quickly that our precious tub leaked like a sieve! We got down to work patching, and decided to put a mostly ornamental rim of smooth river stones around the top. It turned out very well, but the rain and the mortars setting time precluded having a warm bath ready for the parents. They seemed to be impressed anyway:

Kenjis show at the Triton

We went down to the opening of a a show at the Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara which had a few of kenji's paintings on loan from his gallery in San Francisco.

. Chloe and I were famished and quietly inhaled most of the pizza served at the reception, as well as the mini chocolate muffins and wine. As part of the reception, a docent was leading a tour around to the various paintings, and Chloe and I were surreptitiously spying and waiting for a description of Kenjis work. It took a little longer than we expected, and by that time the docent got near kenjis paintings, Kenji himself had shown up and was perusing the little blurb that they had written about his work. The docent herded the tour group a little closer Kenjis work, did a double take at Kenji and then somewhat self consciously started describing Kenjis work. He described Kenji of one of the bay areas "treasures"! Here is some video (4 MB, with terrible audio)
video

Rotemburo

Today Chloe and I started a secret project which we will surprise Gail and Kenji with on their next visit to Alta. The idea came from our stay at the spa at Asamushi. The spa had an outdoor tub made of smooth river stones. When I stepped in, it was still raining from the storm that had caused us so many problems. It was dark out, and the light rain falling into the rotemburo, the wet black rocks and steam rising out of the tub was beautiful and relaxing. I decided that we should try to build something like it, but on a much smaller scale in Alta. I knew the perfect location too: right next to the river so that you could compose Haiku, sip sake and wait for inspiration while the water flowed in front of you.

The engineering of it was another matter however. I didn't want to have to spend the same amount of time designing it as with the other tub, but one major advantage we had was that we already had a source of hot water: Tub #1! In fact, we already had a hose running down from the first tub to the site where I wanted to build the rock tub. In theory, all we would need to do would be to fill the other tub to the very top, get it very very hot, and drain it down into the rock tub. It remains to be seen whether that will work or not!

As far as the tub, as usual we under estimated the amount of mortar we would need and only bought two 80 pound bags initially. On the first day we dug a hole in the ground, which turned out to be back breaking work. The soil is full of stones and required a lot of hands-and-knees-cursing work, but we eventually had a hole that was big enough (notice a selection of the stones that we had to pull out by hand at the lower left):



Next came the mortar, the carrying and mixing of which also turn out to be back breaking work. We poured a ~1.5 inch floor and pressed smooth river stones into it, and were able to build a row of rocks before we ran out of mortar.

Exhausted and dirty, we took baths in the working rotemburo on the deck. I used our new Hinoki bathing stool and bucket to wash off japanese style before getting in the tub. It's a beautiful time of year to be up there, and even more enjoyable to be in a deep bath! We grilled sausages for dinner and walked up to the oak forest to see the light in the trees


The next day after bouldering we went back to Hills Flat Lumber in Colfax for FIVE eighty pound bags or mortar. Let me tell you, it was no picnic getting these down to the river. We built up the walls, and got a lot better at choosing rocks and mortaring. It's a shame there weasn't some way we could have practiced beforehand, because the bottom is a lot sloppier than the top. Oh well.




The real questions now are a) is it big enough and b)will it leak. As I said, the bottom wasn't done all that well. I guess we'll find the answers to both questions next weekend. We might have to build it up a little higher, but we have the mortar to do that. All in all it was pretty inexpensive: ~$40 for the mortar, the stones were free, and $18 for a small stainless steel drain pipe. I managed to get some mortar into the drain so I'm hoping that it isnt clogged! I don't imagine Drain-O can dissolve concrete.

Rainbow Boulders

We got an early start and headed out to the Rainbow Boulders today.

this one will have to wait until my rotator cuff heals... but it's a very cool looking problem

Google Earth Winds

I've been trying to find places to snow kite near Alta along I80 for this winter, and the idea I had was to look at historical wind data and overlay it on google earth via placemarks. The first version of the program was a bit crude, and only supported METAR data grabbed from weather underground. The problem is that the number of sensors in quite limited (they are mostly at airports). For the next version, I used the university of Utah's RAWS data, which includes over 1700 sensors in california alone. However, I was unable to find a nice comma delimited (or something like it) data stream and had to write a HTML parser for their pages. Additionally, their web site is slow, so most of the work was in making a caching system rather than getting or processing the data.

Since weather patterns shift a lot with each season, I restrict data to December through March during the day. You tell the program how many days backwards you want to go, and it starts picking random days in that range, downloading and caching the data and generating KML files for Google Earth. Because this can be a long process : 1 data point per hour, 8 hours per day, N days, 1700 sensors, data is written out incrementally. It's pretty frustrating encountering a divide by zero which you forgot to trap three days into a run! Also, to save time, the output is only done every few thousand data points or so. This is important considering how large the cache files can get.

The KML file which is generated has averaged sensors wind speed sorted by value, makes extruded polygons with heights proportional to their average wind speed, color codes them and makes a link to the current wind and weather conditions. It looks like this:



the latest KML file is available here

RAWS

I've been playing around with a program to download weather data (specifically wind speeds) and generate a KML file for Google Earth. In the course of this, I discovered a cool device called a RAWS, Remote Automated Weather Station which various agencies install in ... well, "remote" locations. The stations run off of a solar charged battery and transmit data in real time to satellites. pretty cool.

wood hopper, donner

We spent the morning building a hopper for firewood

and taking baths
.
Alta is beautiful at this time of year, and it sometimes feels like you're in new england, what with the clapboard houses, apple orchards and turning leaves


We decided to get a little bouldering in up at the snowshed boulders at Donner. There's a project that I haven't been able to complete, and although I still couldn't send it, it was a good time in the crisp mountain air and sunshine. Here's Chloe looking warm:

From there, it was back to the cabin, picking some apples near the fire station (which are excellent)





and then home to the presidio

Alta

After a long hiatus, Chloe and went up to Alta this afternoon. We were both worried that the local rednecks had broken in again in our absence, but happily the cabin was intact and nothing had been stolen. Unfortunately, a bat was roosting behind the shutters again

And didn't seem to want to move even after whacking the window frame with a broom handle. Since it was cold and dark and we didn't really want to deal with a pissed off bat fluttering around us, we just let it stay there and, with the exception of the occasional worried look up at the window, ignored it.
We started a fire, walked down to the river and then went to sleep

Switching to blogger beta

I switched the blogging software over, so there might be glitches. Also, I've scanned in some of the japan photos and put them here

The presidio

five minutes walk from our apartment

newlab

it still puts a smile on my face when I drop my film off at NewLab and they ask me if I want it that night. Ahh the advantages of being near a pro lab.

Last day

Today was our last day in Japan. Chloe and I had breakfast with Gail and Kenji near the hotel and then said goodbye, since they had an earlier flight from Narita to China. Chloe and I decided to head to the Ginza to wander around before our 2:00 bus to the airport for our own flight to SFO, and ended up getting a little confused about which trains to take. We made it in the end, and with only a few wrong turns. Our first stop was the basement of the Mitsukoshi department store to find food for lunch. We made at least two full circuits of all the stalls



To yells of "Irashaiiii" -- what's the polite way to respond to this, anyway? Anyway, we ended up settling on some tempura and chinese food Bento. From Mitsukoshi, we went to the waffle shop, visited the Temple of Sony and headed back to Iidabashi. We walked down the street towards the Yasukuni shrine and found a little green space in between the buildings, where we ate our bentos

Soon we were on the bus, going over the endless sprawl in between Tokyo and Narita. The soundtrack was two american dudes behind us having a loud conversation about their MLM (multi level marketing?) business. Whatever it was, it must have been working since they got in the line for business class and we got in the very long economy line.

We looked out over the planes sadly as it sunk in that we would be heading back to the states in a few hours

Yasukuni, Yabu Soba, Imperial Palace, the Ginza, Kayoko

We started the day by ... sleeping in for once! This was a nice change after getting up at six AM the previous day to go to Tsukiji. We got picked up again by Kozo and Shitomi and went to the Flea Market at the Yasukuni shrine.

I selected two hundred yen rabbit tea cups, and Chloe found a pair of Japanese dolls for 500 yen. There were all sorts of things on sale: tea kettles

Masks and hatchets

Sword guards, etc. etc.
Here are kenji and Kozo taking a break

and us, with a crazy Japanese dude in his world war II soldiers uniform behind us!

The Yasukuni shrine is significant in that it is a source of some controversy, which stems from the fact that convicted war criminals are enshrined there (more on the linked wikipedia page). In addition to crazy world war II dude, there were these handsome fellowsfascist looking thugs

and later on, a parade of vans with loudspeakers


From the shrine, Kozo and Shitomi took us to one of the most famous Soba places in Tokyo: Yabu Soba.


When you place your order, a woman sings the order to the chefs! I have some video of this which I'll try to upload soon. While we were waiting, Kozo told us that the way to look cool (if you are a man) is to go to Yabu Soba alone, order a bottle of sake and Soba and eat and drink it alone. He added that this was cool during the week, but maybe not quite so cool on a Sunday! Anyway, the soba

was fantastic. It makes me hungry just thinking about it.

After Soba, Kozo showed us another famous Soba place around the corner, as well as a famous sweet shop and then dropped us off at the imperial palace, where we wandered around for a while


then went back to the hotel to rest for a bit

and took the JR to Akihabara to buy rechargable batteries for the new Canon.

Akihabara always makes me a little crazy, but the people I'm with rarely have the patience for anything more than a half hour or so. Personally, I could spend days on end there, just gazing into the mesmerising blinking lights

Next stop was the Ginza again, where we went to a waffle shop

and Kenji and Gail went to Kenji's gallery in the Ginza to talk to the manager and owner. Chloe and I left to wander around the Ginza

And happened upon the Sony showroom, where I got a chance to look at some of the new super light VAIOs


which I covet. 2.8 pounds, built in wifi, standard ethernet, bluetooth, VGA port, multimedia slot, memory stick slot... this thing is amazing. The Ginza Leica store was around the corner, and I stopped in but wasn't impressed. It was more of a shrine than a serious photographic store IMO. Listening to some british guy coo over the way a tri-elmar lens looked "Oh it's just so beautiful" made me want to puke. It's a CAMERA, not an accessory to complement your Gucci shoes! Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of respect for the legacy of the Leica M and the images that have been produced by them. That said, I feel pretty sure that Cartier-Bresson and Capa would be shooting digital today.

From the Ginza it was time to go back to meet my cousin Kayoko and her husband for dinner.

They had scoped out the neighborhood around the hotel and found a great and inexpensive underground izakaya, and we ordered a lot of plates -- most of which were only around 350 yen! If we ever have the chance to stay at the Grand Palace again, I'll be eating there again. It was a good time and I was happy to see them again.

Later that night we saw that another typhoon was in the vicinity of Japan, but was thankfully moving east rather than west


yes, that says 35 meters per second, which is almost 80 mph.