Category: life

Running, rain, hike

Two weeks before CIM (California International Marathon in Sacramento) in December, Aja texted me saying that she and Misha were sick. Misha tested positive for Covid. We’d all been training hard for this marathon, and Misha had missed it last year due to injury, after multiple missed Boston marathons due to the Covid pandemic. So this was supposed to be the comback, but it was not to be. We all cancelled. “Besides”, I told myself, “it’s forecast to rain on the morning of the marathon”. (It did not rain, and I continued training through the rainiest winter I remember in California.)

Instead, we ran the Mesa marathon. For me, while I did not run as fast as I’d hoped I would, I did get to run with Misha for the first half. If anyone had suggested, ten years ago, that I would run even a mile in a marathon with Misha, I’d have laughed at their ignorance. Yet, here I was running alongside my athletically far superior sibling. Most of this was due to Misha’s misfortune at catching Covid right before CIM.

Here we are the day before, posing in front of the only growing thing in Phoenix. The rest is concrete and asphalt.

That the US has made the utterly ridiculous transportation pattern of Phoenix the dominant one in the whole country speaks to the power of money in this country. Here we are, stuck in traffic trying to get to a running race. Madness. But at least we were smiling.

We started in the dark, so the photos were not great, but here it is: Evidence. I ran with Misha! Yes, and every photo of Misha shows them floating in the air:

I managed to keep a grin on my face to the end, even though it was a hard marathon for me. It got so much hotter than I thought it would, and I just felt like I could barely move at the end.

Here we are at the end – that was a tough race. Even though the organizers and volunteers were fantastic, I don’t want to do this one again.

And that’s it for the marathon stuff. On to more interesting things: Janeen and I on a huge (13 mile!) hike around San Francisco:

Electric

I just realized that my thinking on electric cars changed dramatically over the last two years. Two years ago, we had to buy a new car, and at the time I was perfectly happy with buying another gas car. In fact, if it hadn’t been for mole’s veto, I’d have even bought a non-hybrid Honda Fit. At the time, my thinking was: Most electricity is generated by CO2 emitting technology (and I include Nuclear in that, because the mining, transportation, storage, safety backup systems, etc all rely on fossil fuel) – therefore it is more efficient to just use the energy source directly. Two years later and it feels almost absurd to think that someone now would go out and buy a vehicle that’s not electric. I was missing the point.

I think a few things have happened to push me that way:

  • One was the morning in September 2020 when we woke up to a burned, dark sky and no sun. This hit me at a much deeper emotional level than even Greta Thunberg’s speeches and Friday strikes, and left me feeling hopeless and depressed.
  • On top of this came the dramatic demonstration by Russia that reliance on fossil fuel is an ongoing security issue for the world. One despot in control of the oil-drug we rely on and we’re lost.
  • Talking to people who own electric cars it became clear that electric cars are so simple mechanically that they are inevitably more reliable and require much less maintenance.
  • And also the general noise and stink of internal combustion engines became very obvious after the brief hiatus we had from them during the pandemic.
  • And, and, and we got solar panels! I now see first hand the layers of self-serving inertia in our electricity monopoly. They cause delays to the installation, delays to allowing us to connect, and constantly (successfully) lobby the state regulator to reduce the amount they pay, even as they cause wildfires that burn down whole communities. But much of the inefficiency and weakness in the electric grid is that it relies on single point generation of electricity. Electricity is distributed over many miles to many different places, wasting energy for every mile it travels. Distributed solar could change that – in California the electricity could be mostly generated and stored near where it’s needed. The loss of one electric plant, or power line, could be negligible.

I think electric cars are most certainly not the answer to our environmental crisis. They do not address urban sprawl, or the massive waste of money and energy building huge roads. But they are so much better than gasoline cars, that I now compare them to the steam engine: Clever technology for the time, but now very dated.

It was a bit of a process to get solar installed: When the garage was dug out in the 1960’s, they put a post in front of the electric panel. This violates code, so the building inspector would not approve any work until it was moved. Besides, it was completely full with no available locations to connect the solar electric system. Contractors were so extremely busy that I could only get two bids – one of which I had to pay them for. And the prices were twice what the solar company had estimated for the cheaper bid. But now that it’s all installed, we’ve become obsessed with trying to time our electricity usage with the middle of the day when we make the most. Better to try to use it here than get pennies on the dollar from PG&E.

But I digress: I mentioned in the last post that I made a door and a new temporary wall. This door I made out of old wood that was wall paneling. The mistake I made on this door is that the two stiles (the thicker pieces on sides of the door) are too narrow to install a lock. Maybe I can find an old surface mounted lock.

But it looks nice, and now the bikes are completely hidden from view when the garage door is open.

I also got the new steel moment frame delivered. The main beam weighs over 800lb. I couldn’t figure out how to lift it off the truck: Even if we got four people, it would be over 200lb per person, and it’s very difficult to share that load among all those people. It would have been a disaster. Luckily Beronio – where I ordered the moment frame – agreed to have the frame delivered to them, then they drove it to my house on their truck that has a mobile forklift. Now it’s sitting in my garage, waiting for the next stage.

It rolled around quite nicely on a couple of moving dollies. I got it tucked in under my workbench, so it’s not too much in the way while I work.

Oh, but there’s still something else: The space where the new steel beam needs to go is a spaghetti jumble of wires. They all need to be moved.

So the last few weeks I have been identifying which circuit the wires belong to, and figuring out how to re-route them so that they don’t interfere with the new beam.

I’m going to have to repair a lot of floor joists that were notched by the previous owners.

I started removing the old siding in the space under the stairs. But I need to take these stairs out completely before I can get the rest of the siding off. I’ve been delaying on it though, because it’s been raining non-stop. I’ll need to build a temporary wall where the steps are right now, and maybe a temporary roof.

When mole and I were out walking, we saw this fun mural on someone’s garage door. Made me think of my brother!

And look at this security gate. Instead of an uglification of the house, as most of them are, it’s a piece of art. Even the vertical bars represent kelp. I love it so much.

How about this for public art sculpture? My nephew riding a sand dragon.

Oh, and when Misha was in town, we managed to get friends together to go for a run on one of my favorite trails.

Purrrrr.

Photos while running

Sometimes I just have to stop and take a photo.

Another type of bench

Well, I did one more thing in the garage first: There was a wall around the back of the workshop area that prevented me from putting long pieces of wood through the table saw.

  • This is where the opening will be
  • Our resident inspector says “remove this”

The only tricky part was that there was a concrete curb I had to chip out. No this wasn’t a load bearing wall – but I think it was the edge of where they excavated to when they put in the Garage in the 1960’s.

OK, on to the main topic: My neighbor’s son died in February of 2021 and at the time I decided to make a bench to commemorate him. Something solid (strong and heavy) would both represent him well, and prevent someone walking off with it. Here’s my initial sketch.

I made the whole bench out of old wood that had come out of the house when Nick and I demolished that strange room on the back of the house. The seat and the posts I made by laminating smaller pieces together with glue. The seat back is one of the shelves that had been in the garage; it is a single piece of redwood measuring 2 inches thick, and over 14 inches wide – I doubt I could find another piece of redwood like that these days. The strongest connections are mortise and tenon – so that’s what this bench must have. I had a lot of fun carving these connections.

Oh, and while I was making this bench, mole was working on a piece of furniture too. She’d sanded and urethaned the wood parts, and now was on to the part she actually enjoys:

The most tricky connection was the front to the posts, because the posts are skewed. The tenon enters the post at approximately 7 degrees off perpendicular. Once I’d got that all fitted, I cut the mortises for the sides as square tenons – one of which goes through the front mortise, locking it in.

Here’s a test fit of all the connections – don’t mind the compression socks 😉 The seat attaches at the front with tenons from the front posts.

Even that large piece of redwood wasn’t quite wide enough for the back rest, so I glued another piece to the bottom. I didn’t come up with an elegant way to attach the back rest, so I’ll just screw it in from the back. The screws will have oversize holes to allow the wood to move.

Final glue-up:

I used a clear stain on the seat and the back rest, but the frame I stained a bit darker. Some of the wood on that is pressure-treated, so has a green color. The stain made things look better.

Here I am putting the bench in the front. I placed it on four bricks, and added some anchor straps to the wall, just to make sure it doesn’t walk off somewhere.

The only remaining part is a nice solid cast brass plaque to attach to the seat rest. I’ve ordered it, but it takes about 5 weeks to make. I love how the tree shades this bench during the hottest part of the day.

Benchmaking

Yet again, I didn’t plan on this being a permanent change, but once I get into it, I can’t help myself: I built in a bench, shelves, cabinets, electrical…

But before all that, I ran a really tough half marathon in September – “Bear Creek Half”.

Bear Creek Half

At the beginning of the race, I noticed that nobody else seems to wear bright colors. So it’s pretty easy to spot me in photographs. After the first climb, the view at the top was incredible – and there were cows everywhere. I started wondering if it was really true that red makes cows angry? Or is that bulls? Either way, they didn’t seem to care. It was an incredibly strenuous race, and the 80+ degree weather didn’t help. But I finished in the top ten overall (6th) – and my fancy new Garmin watch suggested I rest for 66 hours. The girls were quite happy to rest with me.

So back to the point of the post. I’m still trying to reuse wood, so just to start making the cabinets I had to glue a lot of smaller pieces together. Then I used the special cabinet jigs Misha gave me years ago to drill all the holes for adjustable shelving.

OK first base cabinets going in – because the floor slopes in every direction, and the wall isn’t square, it took a while to get this all lined up.

These cabinets we’ve had in the garage for a long time. Finally they are in a good place – I’ll fill them up with things that don’t do well getting dusty.

Now I need some shelves…

I decided to make the work top stepped down so that I can use my miter saw here. The height of the step is exactly the same as the height of the miter saw base, so that wood can be supported on the bench top at the left side. But first the old bench top is too short, and has a piece cut out of it. Need to fix that.

A bit hard to see here, but this is how it works. I still need to use spacers to support the wood on the right side of the saw.

Oh, and there was a lot of wiring to do – it all got pulled out when I was putting the plywood up.

Shelves for all the paint cans I’ve accumulated.

On the right of the photo below is where I plan to put my dust collector. When I re-wired, I added a three-way switch so I can turn the dust collector on or off from different places in the garage…

… and dust collection means I have to put together all the ducting for it. This is turning into a major project.

So here’s the problem with doing all this:

The electrical panel is currently partially hidden behind that wood post. I had some electricians come over to look at moving it (because it’s not to code here). One of the electricians said “why don’t you just get the post moved?” Exactly.

These stupid wood posts are at best a temporary structural solution that I should fix, and I have been planning to (for years). They support beams that are undersized and sag, and they are not properly braced for earthquakes. But to fix them – which I absolutely should – I need to get the foundations replaced here… Which would involve tearing out all the work I just wrote about.

Seismic

Dad always joked that the cobbler’s children go without shoes. This house has been a bit like that: We’ve been here for almost fifteen years, and I’ve barely done any seismic strengthening on the house. So I finally decided to pick the most vulnerable wall, and make it a bit better.

But first: Mole almost finished the photo wall… and did I mention she made a rainbow cover for her keyboard?

Oh, and with all the masks, mole perfected her mask strap technique: This allows her to hang it around her neck, or loop behind ears. Super easy on-and-off without the mask-beard that seems to be the vogue right now.

When Arwen isn’t relaxing on the couch…

… she’s decided that oatmeal is one of her favorite treats.

Bella found the new power position in the bedroom…

OK, the garage door: It’s been begging for some attention for decades, and I’d just been ignoring it. Too many other pressing things, and besides: Who looks at the front of our house??? (not me, obviously).

It took about a day to get the door sanded and prepared for painting. I decided to paint it, instead of staining it. Stain and polyurethane may be nice, but they don’t last as long as paint. And it’s a garage door. I’d rather not be doing this again soon.

It took a couple of coats of primer (the door is made of redwood).

I tried to match the rest of the house somewhat. Still need to paint the walls on the sides of the door (I also want to put a couple of lights up)…

Now to the project at hand: I took off the old random pieces of wood, shelves, etc to get down to the studs on this front wall. And I found some rather nasty surprise: Looks like some termites have been living here.

I drilled and installed all the anchor bolts, but had to pause on putting up the plywood until I could get a pest inspector to look at it.

He said it was old damage. But I soaked it all in wood preservative all the same (made the garage stink).

Hmm, it didn’t happen this quickly, but here I am putting up the last of the drywall.

The amount of electrical wiring in the ceiling is quite mind boggling. And I added to it by putting in an additional four way light switch so we can turn off the garage lights as we leave with bikes.

Don’t hire me to be your electrician, OK?

OK, now almost ready to start putting shelves and cabinets back in. Got to make them first, though.

Arwen has been really enjoying the overgrown back yard. The area she’s sitting in gets watered by our shower and bathroom sink, so it stays lush and green.

Bella prefers her cat tree – like everything, originally it belonged to everyone, but now it’s exclusively Bella’s: She rules the house like a despot.

Oh, and instead of the wire shelves, we now have a beautiful fancy wood cabinet with a full height mirror. The first time we’ve had a full height mirror since we lived at Rousseau St!

July fourth weekend this year we took a trip to Tahoe to escape the war zone fireworks on our street. The girls still hate the ride, even with their thunder shirts on.

You didn’t think this was going to be a vacation, did you? What’s that?

After we finished putting in a new water heater and fixing a pipe broken by freezing last winter, we were up scaffolding installing sheet metal over holes that woodpeckers had drilled into the house. Lesson learned: Get enough scaffolding to cover the whole wall. Then you only have to assemble and disassemble it all once (instead of four times).

We didn’t realize what we were making…

The girls really like the rock cabin – particularly the spiral stairs. They even got to go outside for some walks in the rocks.

I also managed to get a run up to the ridge trail in. This is lake Tahoe on the morning of July 4th (click on the image for a larger picture)

On the way home, Bella got a bit better at traveling, but it was still traumatic. I can’t decide if the fireworks, or four hours in the car, are worse for them: Might be a wash.

How d’you like our matching jerseys?

Watching ice melt is fascinating… for Arwen.

She is a good car

Nothing lasts forever, but she almost has. For twenty years, I’ve been thinking Mole’s 1982 Honda Civic would not last another year. And there were things we had to fix, but then she’d just keep on going. At the end of last year, the car had been getting progressively harder to start, and would sputter and hesitate for the first few blocks when first started, but still she kept going. As the year turned the corner, suddenly she started overheating, and would issue clouds of white smoke when started: Blown head gasket. Time for a new car…

But I couldn’t let this wonderful little car just be towed to a junk yard and get torn to pieces; or be crushed for scrap metal. So I bought a head gasket kit and had to clear out some space in the garage to work on it. The bike rack I’d made a few years ago jutted too far out into the garage to fit a car next to it.

I put some hooks in the wall, and hung the bikes up on hooks. Mole’s city bike is just too heavy to lift up, though, so it will need to be wheeled around…

Plenty of room! Now, to rent an engine lift, and get out the ’82 Civic shop manual.

The most difficult part is keeping track of all the vacuum hoses: A car of this age does not have a computer – or fuel injection. It has a carburetor, and the emissions are controlled mechanically through miles of vacuum hoses. I think there are about fifty hoses to label and keep track of before the head of the engine can be lifted out.

This is the “head”: I left the carburetor and intake manifold attached, so there’s less to reattach later.

No mystery here about what the problem is! One cylinder is completely filled with coolant that has leaked through the broken head gasket. In the few weeks the car’s been sitting in the garage, some rust has formed, too. The oil was an emulsified gloopy mess: Mayonnaise!

This absolutely felt like open heart surgery. Poor little car was hoping I knew what I was doing (first time).

The photo below shows the old head gasket. To contain the forces inside the cylinders, they embed a metal circle in the gasket around each cylinder. The second from the front one had rusted through – should have been more careful changing the coolant!

Mole caught a picture of me slowly lowering the head back in. Then the time consuming part: reconnecting all those hoses. If I were planning to keep the car, I would have replaced all those rubber hoses at this time. A tiny leak in any of them makes the engine run poorly.

When reconnecting the timing belt, I discovered that the mechanic who had replaced the timing belt (not me!) had set the valve timing off slightly. At first I didn’t believe it, but true enough, it had been wrong for years! This engine is so magnificent it can even compensate for the valve timing being one notch off! With the correct valve timing the engine now started even easier, and had more power, than before I replaced the head gasket.

So she’s back alive, and I was using her to get plywood, gyp board, and as a general SF runaround car. While going to American Ace to buy electrical parts for the garage, I ran into someone who wanted to buy her. He was so excited about the car, he was willing to buy it right outside the store (how would I get home??) He came over later that afternoon, and gave us cash: Years ago, he says, he had one. He loves the car.

So long! It’s been 32 years since mole learned to drive in this car. We’ve traveled to Canada multiple times, to Colorado, Tahoe, Arizona, and countless times up and down the coast of California in this car. Take care of her, Charles, and she’ll last forever!

fancification

A friend of mine was remodeling his house, and planned to replace all the appliances, too. He offered them to me – stainless steel commercial grade stove, refrigerator and dishwasher. Considering one burner on our stove never lit without a match, I think it was time for the stove to go…

Still usable, but not great. It’s done it’s part. Of course, nothing goes perfectly smoothly: The old gas line interfered with the new stove, so I had to move it.

But wow, this thing is fancy.

And the ‘fridge: It’s been making some funny noises, but still works fine. But a free new stainless steel fridge, with the freezer on the bottom…

This one wasn’t as easy: The new fridge is not as deep as the old fridge, so that will fit better next to the table, but it’s six inches wider, and has an ice maker (needs a water hookup). We barely use ice, so really don’t have a use for an ice maker, but I still plumbed it into our water filter. I moved the cabinet on the right side of the fridge up, so that the bottom aligns with the cabinet next to it. Things are starting to look spiffy down here.

And I made a new cabinet to fit on the right side of the new fridge. Actually, I made two cabinets: a smaller one above, and a new one below.

Oh, and I got a great new addition to my workshop (Christmas present). It may not look like much at first, but on the right is my dust collector with a new high efficiency air filter. It used to be a fabric bag that allowed fine dust to get into the air: Effectively it was only collecting the large dust, and blowing the most harmful fine dust particles into the air. It should have been called a “dust circulator.” I had to work with a respirator on if that thing was running, and eventually everything would get covered in dust. Mole bought a cover for the car, because she got tired of the dust coating. Oh, and the new filter is so much more efficient than a bag, so it picks up the dust at the tools better. I attach a plastic bag to the bottom, and the bag fills up with all the dust – none in the air. Thank you John and Judy.

Here I’m clamping together reclaimed wood to make a butcher block top for the top of the new cabinet. Beautiful fine vertical grain douglas fir saved from the dump.

Sometimes there were nail holes in the wood: I filled them with wood plugs. The picture above is before I’ve drilled out the hole and added the plug.

More reclaimed wood for the cabinets. This is before it’s gone through the planer.

Comes out beautiful afterwards.

Here are some of the pieces for the cabinet doors. I made them with mortise and tenon joinery. You can see all the tenons cut above on the left. The pieces on the right will be the panels for the doors.

Here’s a close up of the mortise cutter: It’s an attachment for my drill press. It’s a square chisel with a drill bit in the middle. The drill bit drills out most of the wood, and the chisel squares up the hole. You cut a longer hole by joining the holes up next to one another. Much faster than by hand, but still it takes a while. The fastest way to do it is with a floating tenon machine, but I don’t have one of those.

Here are the doors after the first coat of polyurethane.

This is the new lower cabinet in place, next to the new fancy fridge. At last this corner is not an afterthought.

And sad news: My neighbor’s son Nick died. He helped me many times working on the house when we first moved in. His mental illness got a lot worse over the years, so he no longer was able to help, but I have some blog posts in this blog about the work he did. He was one of the strongest people I’ve ever known; single handed he picked up and put my 200+lb drill press on my workbench, carried thousands of pounds of concrete into the back yard to make the footings for the back stairs. I made some picture frames from two thousand year old redwood for some pictures of him working on the house. This piece of wood came out of our house; the density of the grain cannot be matched by any redwood you can buy now. The picture below is him working on our front steps. I feel the imperfection of this piece of irreplaceable wood represents Nick well.

catification!

If you haven’t heard the term: “catification” is the process of making a house designed with only humans in mind into a more three dimensional space that allows cats to feel comfortable.

Ever since we moved downstairs, the girls have not been getting along very well. The space downstairs is comfortable from a human perspective, but for cats, being stuck on floor level is not optimal. Ideally, they need to be able to traverse around a room without even touching the floor: Hot lava!

So of course, I had to play them some rock music on my massive electric guitar:

No, that’s a shelf. The triangular piece is an offcut from my desk. Perfect to make the corners into better hangout spots. I painted it to match the walls, and put up a shelf I made about twenty years ago at Rousseau street.

Well, it’s a start. They can go from the air filter, up to the shelf, along the wall, and down the cat tree. The bedroom is slightly more catified.