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

The Sierra

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!

A birthday card for my dad

woot

We bought a used (2005, 42k miles) Prius!

Saving gas?

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.

Alta, roofing, Smart's Crossing

We headed up to Alta for some roof shingling, wood splitting with my new Gransfors Large Splitting Axe and hanging out with some of Chloe's friends from UCSD (Becky and Fred)




I decided to use the subie as a shingle carrying device since I was getting sick of the heavy 20 packs tipping the wheelbarrow over. You see, there is a magical moment in which gravity takes over, the shingle packs are expelled from the barrow and the barrow itself is dumped sideways. It's a remarkable phenomenon for which I have coined a term: "the Falling over point", and I expect to be writing more about this soon. Anyway, I got the car to within 30 feet of the cabin and even managed to drive it back up the hill without getting mired.



After a long day of laying down shingle and chopping a few rounds of oak (The arborist did a fantastic job, by the way) we all took Rotenburo baths. Unfortunately, a mouse had fallen into the bath right before Becky and Fred used it

But was saved from a nasty death by Fred.



We walked down the road to Smart's Crossing for a brief swim. The water was FREEZING, and made for a quick exit. Someone has made a nice rope ladder to get up onto the log with.





After heading back and eating lunch at the cabin, a very unwary deer and her two fawns came within seventy or so feet of the cabin.

=
I spent the rest of the day trying in vain to finish the roof. I got pretty far though.


It doesn't look like it in the first shot, but there are actually four more rows needed just to get to the top. The shingles around the chimney were also a big pain in the butt to get right.

Salt Lake City

I was at a conference for the whole week. Besides the conference itself and the oppressive heat, there isn't much to report about other than my being very grateful and relieved to have been scheduled to talk on the first day. I think the local mormons were excited for all of the fresh blood available for conversion (that's my theory for why the SLC convention center is so plush). Here they are working their wiles on an unsuspecting American Crystallographic Association attendee


I was also in town for Pioneer Day which is apparently the biggest holiday in Utah.