Day 1: $16.7 Million

I’m safely in Santa Cruz after a windy ride down Highway 1.

At the opening ceremony they announced that this year’s ride has raised $16.7 million. Thank you for being a part of that. That money is the single largest source of funding for the SFAF and LALGBT in their work to support people with HIV/AIDS as well as advocacy and prevention of future infections.

Before the ride out my friend Mike was there at 4am volunteering handing out route sheets to all 2000+ riders

The ride out was an unusually sunny Daly city morning. The sun lasted until we got to the top of Devils Slide to head down into Pacifica. Almost instantly the sky opened up with rain and wind.

But Stef was there with a group dressed up as lumberjacks – well, Santa lumberjacks (?) to cheer us on.

The ride down the coast was hard because we had headwinds the whole way. Usually the wind blows from the north, but today we had special treatment.

The lunch stop was absolutely gorgeous.

Here are a couple of photos to show the level of coordination that a camp for 2300 riders +600 roadies takes

Day Zero: This is what 2000 bikes looks like

I just finished dropping my bike off at bike parking. This is what 2000 bikes parked and ready for tomorrow morning’s ride-out looks like.

I got my tent assignment and they gave me my own tent! After the orientation meeting and finishing registration we have multiple wristbands that we have to keep on all week. The green one is so that I can go in the vegetarian food line:

We also get a tag with our tent grid number which is the same as the number that goes on our gear bag. We wear it around our neck all week. One less thing to keep track of. It’s become a tradition to keep your tags from previous years on that chain necklace. I have four on mine. Some people have over 20.

So now I just need to finish packing. I’ve got most of it done. Because things become so overwhelming as the week goes on, one has to be very organized about packing. I put a separate kit for each day into a separate plastic bag with a number on it. The less thinking I have to do at 4 o’clock in the morning the better.

Here is the first leg of the journey: Home to cow Palace with a slight detour along the way!

Less than a week to go!

It’s Monday evening just over five days before aids lifecycle 2019. As of this evening we have raised almost $7500. I plan to post daily updates here during the ride.

ALC 2019 Road Ahead

Here are the photos from my emails this year:

Ride photos of 2018 (and 2017!)

I wrote a bit about why I’m obsessed with cycling in a post during our 2017 Festive 500, but here are some photos from last year to show a bit of what I enjoy.

Allrides

Brother Visit

I had a beard for a month or so around the time I turned 40. It’s been almost a decade, so I decided to grow one again: This time, it’s grey.

Misha came to visit for the week around my birthday, so I took time off work. We took a trip to Santa Cruz:

Went on bike rides:

Went to visit our niece, sister and brother-in-law in Concord:

But mostly we went on lots of runs.

Happy birthday to me!

Oh, and we all dressed up as princesses for Halloween. “Costume” made from rope and hot glue:

I’ll Just Quickly Fix The Fence

Haha. Nothing goes quickly. So what’s happened since May? Mark moved out of downstairs, my mum came to visit, we went to visit my brother, I rode my bike a lot, my brother came to visit here, and… I finished the railings on the stairs and deck, and started replacing some of the fence between the deck and the neighbor.

It’s Arwen–wearing her medal: 1st place cuteness.

But before I got to the fence, Mum came to visit. And we went to Taos, NM.

Misha and I managed to get some running in: My knee seems to have healed itself with all the cycling I’ve been doing over the past few years. Before I started cycling, even running to the bus would make my knee swell up the next day.

In Taos, we stayed at an ‘earthship.’ The one we stayed at was beautifully decorated with some intricate tile work, and bright, colorful paint. Mum loved it.

We also spent some time in Santa Fe. It was really hot while we were there. I can’t resist taking photos when I see bright colors – this is outside the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts.

And back near home, I went for a walk in Santa Cruz on the beach with both my parents. Haven’t done that in 40+ years!

Oh, and before I get to the house work, I did do a couple of Santa Cruz rides this summer, too. One of them round trip, the second I stayed overnight in Santa Cruz before riding back the next day.

Two sisters and nieces for a Dad’s pre-birthday while my sister was in town.

Oh, and I love this sign:

Lots of bike rides with friends…

Alrighty then: This post was about the railings on the back stairs. We built the stairs years ago, and I never got around to finishing the guard railings. So they were quite dangerous, but we got used to it.

So this summer I finally got around to making the balusters to fill in the railings.

Quite a production effort because there are so many of them. And of course, I’d started making them with a routed detail on the bottom, so that had to continue. On the side of the stairs, the balusters have to be spaced away from the side of the stair stringer. Whenever wood is held tightly together, it stays wet in the joint, so that’s where the rot starts. So I figured I’d fill the gap with waterproof glue: I glued and clamped spacers on all of the balusters.

Here are about half of them when I was staining them:

Mole and Arwen: The railing and balusters at the top landing are all white, because I made those balusters back when we built the stair. At the time I’d planned to paint all of them white.

Here I’ve got balusters on one side of the stair:

Both sides done:

The finishing touch is I added an Ipe plank on top of the railing. It strengthens the rail, but it also looks better I think.

The next project is the fence. It’s very rotten, plus my neighbor doesn’t walk their dog: He just goes out back to do his business. Sad and stinky.

When I took down the old fence, this is what their deck looked like: Utterly insect infested and rotten through. I added some temporary shoring under there so it doesn’t collapse while I’m working, and warned him.

I had to take down my stairs at the bottom to replace the fence. Arwen figured out how to climb up and down the ladder quite quickly. Also, I decided to change the stairs so that they are slightly steeper: This will make it so that there will be more head room at the bottom of the stairs.

Even though I was just changing the stairs slightly and then re-painting, it took a really long time. Stairs are painstaking work because they have to be very accurate. Any unevenness can be a trip/fall hazard.

Oh, and to add another wrinkle, the drain pipe was in the way of the old fence. Rather than build the fence around it, I decided to move the pipe over. Which which meant I had to break out out more concrete: The ever expanding project.

While I had the jackhammer, I decided to expand the bed for the rose bush. This was waaay more work than I’d bargained for, because there was an old concrete footing there, full of rebar. Really hard to break up. Before on the left, six hours later on the right.

At the deck level, I built the wall up tall enough that we can’t see over to the neighbor’s side. If the stink still comes wafting over, I’ll put windows up at the top. Still need to add the finishes to make it look more like a fence, but the wall part is done:

I think mole snapped this photo of Arwen while mole was riding zwift in the garden room. It’s a bit worrying riding on the trainer with the cats in the room: There’s a fast spinning back wheel that could really hurt them. We don’t usually let them in, but sometimes they insist.

Oh, we had a party: Mark, who’s lived downstairs for about five years, is going to Lithuania. So we had a big leaving party/birthday party for him. We strung lights up in the back yard, and it was a great time.

We put a Lithuanian flag out front, too!


On hot days, Arwen and Bella stretch out to try not to over heat. Looks like they are flying:

Mole and I stopped in at Davenport on the way down to Santa Cruz for dad’s birthday; wandered around a little. I guess you can have great views even when not riding a bike:

Bella says: “why are all your photos of Arwen?”

Ooops, one more Arwen photo.

Garden room: Finished!

Wow, another project that started out as a “quick” project is finished (two years later.) But it came out quite nicely.

A checklist all checked off: satisfying.

More recycled wood used on the window trim.

The only problem I had was I bought some different polyurethane by Minwax for the counter top and it’s garbage: It didn’t stick – and I only discovered it when I used tape to mask off the edges while I caulked the joint at the wall. The tape pulled the top layers of polyurethane off the wood! I had sanded between coats, even (and on the can it said that’s not required). Had to sand all the way down to the wood again to get rid of it. I’ll stick with Bona Mega from now on.

Arwen decided she needed to do some inspection when I was plumbing the sink faucet.


Here’s the faucet installed: I offset it to the right slightly, so it’s not in front of the window, and hopefully it makes the sink more convenient for cleaning the large 6.5 gallon carboys. It’s still the brewery room, right?

I also sanded, resized, and stained the old front door (that I’ve had leaning around in our garage for years) to close off the space from the garage. Had to also replace the acrylic glass windows because they were scratched and had been painted over.

Popo left behind a daybed/couch and it has also been sitting in our garage for years. We bought a cheap mattress at Ikea and I put it into the garden room. That’s mole’s bike on the trainer.

… and mole testing it out while I made the living room upstairs stinky (more on that later).

When I first started working on this space, I was thinking of it as potentially a cat-free space for visitors. Little did I realize, but when you live with cats, there’s no such thing as a “cat-free” space: They own the whole house.

Here’s Arwen checking under the day-bed: She’s not happy until she’s checked every square inch.

While mole was riding on the bike trainer, Arwen brought down her favorite wand toy for her.

And Bella just waits patiently on the stairs.

Oh, and here’s the sink in the toilet room, with the tile grouted and finished. Looks neat.

When we moved in (ten years ago!), our plan was to take out the carpets. But we’ve lived with them ever since. I recently decided to take them out: I’m convinced that all that wall-to-wall carpet is not good for air quality. As we took it out, we found that the underlayment had started to decompose, and left sticky red pieces all over the old floor surface, dropping them everywhere as I carried it out: Looked like dried cranberries, but definitely not as good. Lots of work scraping and scrubbing them off.

While tearing out the carpet, Arwen enjoyed the new furniture layout.

This is the old floor tile after we had removed all the old carpet and underlayment, pulled out the staples, scrubbed and cleaned it up and polished the tile. I damaged a lot of it back when I was working on the wiring for the lights downstairs.

So we covered it up with a rug.

This bit was still exposed, though. And Bella did not like it: She started picking at it and broke off part of a tile.

So I decided to replace the broken tiles with some cheap self-adhesive vinyl tile. It was a total pain getting the old tile off (had to use a heat gun). Yes, I’m certain this tile is “hot” (asbestos). Didn’t use protective gear: Hope I don’t regret it. Sometimes I’m just plain stupid lazy. Mole and the cats were downstairs hiding in the garden room.

Done (using the stool my godfather made for me as a weight to glue the corner of an old tile down).

“FEED US! (We are only going to look cute for 30 seconds, then we’re going to melt down and start fighting)”

We got a new rug for the bedroom.

Arwen!

“Helping” with my calculations at the office.

“I’m going to take a nap here, OK?”

Prrrrr…..

Bella loves this box. We stuck eyes on the box – it comes alive when Bella gets inside it. One lesson I learned the hard way: Don’t stand near it – claws will fly out of the corners and grab toes. The robot has lightning-fast reflexes even through its eyes usually get pulled off or rearranged.

The box robot lives!

Nap time.

We volunteered for the AIDS/Lifecycle “day on the ride” in April: It’s a one day test ride for the people planning to do the week-long ride to LA in June. We’re not riding, so it was fun to dress up and help to staff rest stop one.

Trim and tile

I’m adding the finishing touches to the garden room. There was still some trim around doors, and baseboards to finish.

I really like the curved piece I came up with for the transition from tall baseboards around the foundation wall, to lower ones around the garden room (above).

Now all the trim in the back room is also finished.

I also put some shelves into that space to store things like bottles (this is going to be my brewery room, right?) I added removable fronts on the shelves so I don’t have a disaster of broken glass after the next earthquake, hopefully.

 

Arwen came down to inspect the garden room while I was working on the cabinet and counter top.

I sanded the old cabinet (from the kitchen on the ‘downstairs’ floor), and painted it.

Arwen likes tools, except power tools.

I’ve had trouble with the compression fit piping that’s commonly used under sinks. The plumbing book I have recommends the above alternative. It’s certainly easier to install, and seems quite a bit more sturdy, too.

Here are the cabinets after paint, and new handles. Also, I’ve installed the sink I got from building resources (the local recycler of building materials — construction is responsible for about half of all landfill). I’m going to put the faucet in after the tiling, and a few more coats of polyurethane on the counter.

My godfather sent me a cycling map of San Francisco, and I’ve finally found a good place for it. The garden/brewery room serves mainly as a workout room these days.

Getting started on the tile, I wanted to make it similar to the kitchen in Downton Abbey (white tile with small black squares). The photo above left was the more labor intensive option (I had to cut down the black tiles to about 1.5cm squares). Guess which one we went with.

Here’s the tile after it’s grouted. Not quite as extensive as Downton Abbey, but neither is the brewery room!

I also added a tile backsplash at the little sink in the toilet room.

I had to do some plumbing in the shower upstairs (hair clog!) and the girls both joined in to help:

The Freesia seem to love our back yard: They increase every year (whereas there are only a couple of daffodils left).

This back yard needs some inspiration: Big pile of rocks still there–volunteer Nasturtiums have covered them. Arwen is trying to figure out what to do about it all:

It was a rainy Friday, so Mole’s friday ride group got together to celebrate her birthday. And there was a trip to get vegan donuts, too.

And yesterday Mole’s mum made vegan apple pie for her birthday. It was a triumphant success. Everyone had seconds.

Here are Arwen and Bella pretending to be constellations.

Smorgas-baseboards

Oy vey, so much miscellany: Baseboards, door, water heater, carpet…

But first things first: Kitteys! Synchronized sleeping anyone?

I still have quite a pile of old wood, so I’ve been planing and reusing it to make the molding in the garden room.

There is a stem wall that is wider than the walls above in the toilet room, so I boxed it in with wood. The wood in the toilet room is stained dark red-brown, so I also did that with the base boards.

Here it is ready for the toilet to go back in.

A fully functional toilet in the garage. Such luxury. Except there’s no door yet: Details.

I put a planter box outside the toilet room window, and planted a variety of plants that I think can handle the low light. We’ll see.

Another project that used quite a lot of old wood: I needed to make a table for the laundry room to fit next to the dryer.

Here’s all the wood, planed to width and ready to make into a table.

I glued boards together to make the top.

Here’s the top clamping together.

Here’s the base of the table.

I also made a drawer to go under the table.

This is the finished table.


Here it is, in the laundry room. Doesn’t look like old throwaway wood.

Back to the toilet room (what, you thought I was done already??)

For the rest of the baseboards and trim in the toilet room, I decided to just paint it white instead of deal with staining and polyurethane, etc.

Well, this was instructive: I did such a nice job of fitting the strike plate for the door (above left). Pity I measured wrong. Sadly, I measured wrong not once, but twice. As usual, I do everything three times.


Above right is the door that used to be on the toilet room upstairs. I tried to give it to building resources, but they wouldn’t take a hollow core door. I was planning to cut it up and throw it away, but I needed a door for the toilet room: So I sanded and stained it.

The picture above is after the remaining baseboards and trim were finished, and door is on the toilet room. Now it’s really a functional bathroom.

Recently, a friend mentioned that they had to have their water heater replaced because it leaked all over her garage. That reminded me: Most water heaters have an anode rod that must be replaced every few years to prevent the inside of the hot water tank from rusting. And I’ve never changed the anode rod on our water heater in the ten years (!) we’ve lived here. So I ordered one:

I also had to get a large socket to remove the old anode rod.

The old rod had completely been used up. Ooops. Well, I think most people don’t replace them, so they buy a whole new water heater more often. Hopefully this will make ours last a bit longer.

While draining the tank, lots of rusty sediment came out. Looks like the inside of the tank has been rusting.

Back to wood re-use: There were a couple of solid oak boards that I saved from the floor of the “tear off room” (remember that?) I planed them down to smooth wood, and cut a rabbet into them for trim around the door into the garden room.

There were some pretty large knot holes and rusty nail holes.

I’m getting quite good at making wood plugs to repair holes (above is a knot after it’s filled).

For the baseboards, I planed, glued, filled about 180 feet of old wood subfloor. I also routed an ogee into the top edge. Getting a bit carried away.

Here are a couple of the baseboards installed. It’s quite time consuming installing baseboards over this floor because the floor is so uneven. I have to place the baseboard into position, then mark the baseboard for the shape of the floor, cut along the baseboard with a band saw, and seal the wood before attaching it.

One additional wrinkle: In the garden room, there is a concrete stem wall behind the base boards, so I have to use concrete screws. To fill over the screw, I countersunk it, then filled with wood plugs made from the same wood as the baseboards.

Here is the hole in the baseboard before I’ve filled and sanded. You can see a completed plug at the bottom of the photo.

Upstairs in our bedroom, we still have the same wall to wall carpet that was in the house when we first bought it ten years ago. Mole has been having a lot of allergy issues lately, so I decided, on a Friday evening, to tear out the carpet in the bedroom.

It’s much easier if everything is moved out – but we just shuffled things around while I pulled up the carpet, cut it into manageable rolls, and dragged it out. The hard part, actually, is pulling out all the thousands of staples in the underlayment. I was done by midnight!

Here’s the room without blue carpet: There was tile under it: That will have to do for now with a rug.

We brought the rug into the bedroom from the living room. It had deep dents in it from the furniture: I read online that you can put ice cubes on the dents, then once they melt, fluff up the fibers. Not sure why the ice cubes, not just spray it with water — but I follow directions.

And the girls love ice cubes!

Doubling back in SF – 510km

We’d completed most of the mileage this week already, so this was supposed to be a simple loop around San Francisco, with an early stop at the Greens restaurant “to-go” counter. We slept in, and left about an hour later (waiting until Greens opens at 9am). We got there at 9:30 and the doors were locked — there was a note on the website that brunch was starting later today. Janeen was super disappointed, and kept talking about how much she’d been looking forward to this. But we headed on. Instead of doing the full SF loop, though, I figured we could double back when we hit half way.

The sun was out as we rode up to the Presido, and Janeen’s legs were clearly not interested in doing much more cycling this week. Surprisingly, my legs felt strong today, so I did a couple of all-out sprints up the two short bumps on the route.

From the Great Highway (along Ocean beach) we turned left into the Golden Gate park, and wound our way through. Part way along, we stopped into the Polo Fields bike track and did a couple of laps, before continuing on.

Then we cut back over to the Presidio, and went right back to Greens: To-go counter closed today and tomorrow 🙁 Luckily the farmer’s market was on, and we got a very tasty Falafel plate to share. I’d been planning to get a coffee, also, but the line was out the door at Equator. I made an espresso when we got home. #festive500 completed!

This has been a difficult year both personally for many of our friends and family, and politically. Riding our bikes has given me some time to reflect on the year, to try to put some of the losses into perspective, and to be thankful, also, for the good fortune I’ve had in life. Next year, I’d like to focus on doing something positive. Maybe we will ride and fund raise for AIDS/Lifecycle again. Maybe we’ll travel to visit our friends and family more. And hopefully we’ll get to ride our bikes just as much.

Happy New Year!