There and Back Again

Back from Oregon, and had a great time! I was down there for work in the Hillsboro area, and spent some time visiting my friends Doug and Lori, who just opened a restaurant in Hood River.

They're doing great! I'm very happy for them. They opened the Sawtooth Roadhouse, which has great, creative, but solidly delicious food and should definitely be visited if you're in the area.

Doug and I had a great time hanging out at the North Oak Brasserie bar one night with owner Mike Caldwell for a great conversation about food ingredients, wine-making techniques and Sarah Palin, of all things. It was amazing to me how many Palin fans there are in Oregon. The discussion outside of Palin really gave me some ideas about experimenting with processes for racking, controlling sediment, etc. in future wine batches.

Upon returning, I realized the domain name for my blog had expired. Ha! Oh well, that's what you get for ignoring it for so long. Anyway, that's been fixed.

This winter has been pretty crazy. Anchorage had a bad cold snap over December/January, and I had some pipes freeze over New Year. Kitchen faucets, and then one of the heating zones. I'm so thankful nothing burst, but it took a long time and a lot of energy to keep the house warm and the pipes thawed. My latest gas bill (for a 2600 sq. ft. house) was $450. Yeah. That would be the work it took to keep the house up to temp with only a subset of the heating zones working - it meant my boiler had to keep going full time every day for a few days.

This winter has been consumed by home improvement projects focusing on insulation. I've been crawling around up in the roof and in my storage crawlspace improving the heat retention. My house is an older one, and it's amazing how energy-inefficient it is. Simple improvements are making a huge difference.

Speaking of homes, I was able to tag along with Doug while he, Lori and a general contractor did a home inspection on a prospective purchase. The house was from the '40s, I believe, and it was great to talk and learn about the house. That's really interesting stuff to me.

Right now I guess we're all a little worried about the volcano, Mt. Redoubt, blowing its top sometime soon. Ash is really annoying. I'm sure we could all do without that, but it is cool nonetheless. But yeah, here's hoping the wind blows the ash out to sea.

Studs on the Bike, Finally!

Put my studded tires on the bike tonight, finally! There was swearing in the garage this eve.

We really haven't had much snow in Anchorage so far this winter, but in the last week we've got enough to convince me that it's time to get the studded tires on.

My winter tires are SO tight for my wheels. It is literally painful to put them on. Imagine me on the ground in a UFC-style battle with these things - screams, things thrown, tire levers flying at rapid speed towards my eyes. Good grief! Anyway, I don't know what you were taught when you were a kid about getting tires back on after fixing a flat, but so hard is my heart towards these things that for that last stubborn eight inches, I press the edge of my shoe against the tire bead (literally standing on the tire) and ratchet the wheel towards the ground, prying the thing around the rim. Yeah, not very gentle, but whatever - it gets the job done.

Record Collecting

A year or two ago I was sitting at my kitchen table staring at my record player on the floor a few feet away, amidst a tangle of power cords and speaker wire, and decided I needed some furniture or something.

I find media cabinets very boring, whether they're boxy or curvy. I started thinking about what else I could do to get the player off the floor and keep everything a little more 'neat'.

Maybe it was the music I was listening to at the time - my mind was leaning towards something industrial but clean. Could I connect everything with pipes? Hide all the wires? I started sketching out some ideas, and the more I ran with it, the more I liked it. I could hook everything to this free-standing frame of pipes, so the speakers, record player and amplifier were all "piped" together with no cords visible anywhere.

It all worked great! I used black steel pipe and fittings and ran all the power cords and speaker wires inside the pipes.

A record player is by definition a more physically interactive piece of stereo equipment than most, and I wanted this design to keep that in mind. For instance, standing in front of it, the speakers and amplifier are all angled slightly upwards towards your ears and eyes. So, changing the record, starting it, etc, you're in the perfect position to also adjust volume, tone, etc, and get a good stereo experience from the placement of the speakers.

I originally started this post to talk about some records I recently found online, which have taken me years to find. I'll post more on this later. I haven't yet received them in the mail, so maybe I shouldn't jinx it all. :)

New Toys!

I just got my new ASUS eee pc 1000h in the mail today. I really love it already. It's exactlyy what I was wanting. In fact, I'm writing this post on it right now. 

The Eee PC (pronounced simply "ePC") is what's known as a "netbook". It's a small formfactor laptop meant for surfing the web, managing email, using Office, google apps, video conferencing. Basically everything except heavy lifting (don't do games, development, photoshop/premiere).

So it's really about personal convenience. No need to drag a full size laptop around anymore when your needs are simple. I was joking with a friend the other night that I probably have a Pavlovian reaction to opening up my Dell laptop - it saps my enthusiasm because I so associate it with work.

I think this little guy weighs about three pounds, or a little over. It has built in wireless - I turned it on, downloaded Chrome and Firefox, Google Desktop, and iTunes and I'm off to the races. I took a photo with my camera of the laptop, took the SD card out and popped it right into the SD slot built into the computer, and uploaded the photo above. It's really just very handy. Great for casually taking notes and writing, too.

I was a little worried about the small size of this netbook at first. My hands are probably larger than most, but I find the keyboard very comfortable. I touch type, and am not slowed down by the size at all. The display is 1024 pixels wide, so you don't really sacrifice much when it comes to web browsing. It is only 600 pixels in height, which makes Chrome a great browser for this device, since it has minimal clutter in the way of toolbars, etc. The computer also has a webcam built in, which I haven't used yet. 

Well, I named my eee (which stands for Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to play) pc Cerberus - the mythical three-headed dog. I think it fits well. This is a great device - no buyers remorse at all, especially because it's so cheap compared to most laptops. 

End of the Summer

Well, Summer's coming to an end, and I finally have time to post something new. I didn't get out kayaking much this year - one of my kayaking buddies had a baby girl in March, which of course has commanded his attention, and Doug & Lori started up a restaurant down in Hood River, Oregon, called the SawTooth Roadhouse. I'm really hoping to get down there and check it out sometime in October.

So, I've spent the summer working on my kayak, fixing the gelcoat, adding some new decklines, and doing some internal surgery on it. I'll be down in Homer kayaking this month at least.

Mark and I finally bottled the wine we started in April. Since then, we've made another couple batches. I think the first will be ready to drink in another three months. We just bottled the second batch last Friday.

In the meantime, I've been considering doing a batch of mead. Because of an unusually cold summer, I hear the Alaskan honey supply has been decimated this year, but I probably shouldn't be using premium ingredients for a first batch anyway. Mead takes a long time to age, so the sooner I start the better.

I also cut a ridge-vent into my roof this summer. Nothing says committed like taking a circular saw to your roof and cutting out a two inch gap along the length of it. This was one of two major goals I had for the house this summer, so am very happy to have it finished.

I ran my first 10-k race this summer as well. I didn't win, but I had a great time running it with a few other friends.

Well, that's it for now. More as life unfolds.

Vicissitudes

This last weekend I drove over 900 miles. This covered almost all of the highways in Alaska, including the Glenn Highway, the Parks Highway, the Richardson Highway and the Seward Highway. Circumstances bringing me to Fairbanks were not ideal, but it was an occasion of family togetherness, fellowship and reflection. I saw family friends I hadn't seen in many, many years. This felt really good, and I really enjoyed spending time with my own family up North. This was the first time I remember all of us being together up there since I was a kid.

This time of the year, the sun is up 24 hours a day in that part of Alaska. The sky gets a little pink and orange, but doesn't seem to truly set before it starts getting light again. It's pretty neat to be driving at 1:30am in broad daylight. I saw five moose (plus one calf) over the course of the weekend, and about twenty rabbits alongside one section of the road. One of the moose was running at full clip alongside the road just behind a row of trees.

By chance, I ran into an old friend of mine, Jacob, at a gas station along the highway. He was driving up from Valdez to Wasilla with his girlfriend to do some mountain biking, and to visit his brother. Both of us happening to be on the road traveling, we spent some time remembering (and laughing) about a time we were driving in his Geo along the Richardson Highway, hydroplaned, and did over a 360 spinning off the road near Paxson Lodge, blowing a tire and missing a collision with a large sign by mere feet that could have dramatically changed our lives for the worse. Jeez, we were lucky back then in so many ways.

My friend Doug and I kayaked down Portage Creek again on Sunday. The water volume was higher than the previous week which made it a little more fun. Kite-boarders and wind surfers were out on Turnagain arm riding the waves.

The Subaru held up well -- a notable accomplishment after $3,000 in recent surgical repairs - struts, brakes, (devilish) electrical work, engine hoisted out, blah, blah blah. Odometer is now at 135k and I expect it will still be carrying kayaks, bikes, cargo boxes, people and gear around Alaska and Canada for at least another 70k miles.

A New Boat's Maiden Voyage!

This summer has been busy! Last week I got my new creek boat in - a LiquidLogic Remix 79! For its maiden voyage, I took it down Portage Creek, about an hour South of Anchorage.

The trip consisted of a drive along Turnagain Arm, a paddle down five miles of river, and a bike ride of about six miles.

Wildlife was abundant. As I paddled down the creek, I saw a moose with a calf that was very, very young along shore. I also got to watch a beaver work its magic on a tree for about fifteen minutes. Ducks acted as guides down the stream. Aside from a bit of rain, I couldn't have asked for anything better - taking my time, smelling the fresh green forest, hanging out with the woodland aminals.

I had parked up at the lake, and launched there at the mouth of the creek. I kayaked south to a point where I had chained my bike to tree around my expected take-out point. When I had arrived at the take-out, I chained the boat to the tree and biked back up the road (about six miles) to the car.

In the photo to the left, you can see that I had started to pile some sticks over the boat to try and break up its profile when I took this picture. The color just screams that it doesn't belong in the forest, and I have to confess a little bit of paranoia about theft being so close to the highway. Anyway, the photo links to the few photos I took along the trip.