Category: life

where everything else happens

Apologies to my readers…

I have not done a very good job of keeping this site updated during the past week on the Going To The Sun Rally. Not up to my usual standards. I managed to get the JagCam movies posted almost every day, but really haven’t been able to keep up with writing and photo editing. I will admit to having some serious challenges with JagCam footage editing… mostly to do with my now 4 year old laptop and cranky editing software. Import & Rendering times usually stretched to many hours and iMovie frequently crashed. It got to the point where I could not insert any titles or effects for fear of ruining the output, or just having hours of work vanish in a blink of an eye.

So… often I would just give up and go have a drink.

I’m back at home now and have a pile of work to do, most of it lots of finish work involving the deck and painting, plus some BioDiesel processing… but I promise I’ll set aside some time (and the bottle) and plow through the writing and photo editing backlog as fast as I can. Thanks for your patience!

–chuck

Deck Progress

Here is the reason I haven’t been posting stuff here, answering email, or available to any of my friends of late. The past few weekends have been spent measuring, sawing, pulling old rusty nails, demolition, and replacement. I have swapped EVERY beam and plank seen in this photo, with the exception on the ones along the railing and those that remain painted green at the bottom of the photo.

I had to replace the beams underneath first – one at a time. Christopher did a lot of the work by pre-painting the beams and planks. (The unpainted beams are some emergency replacements from our snow-storm breakage from a few years ago.) The planks were only done on three sides, leaving the tops raw wood. The paint chosen was an oil-based alkyd, so he put on a coat of primer then finished them with a coat or two of the color. The past two days I’ve been laying in planks on the top. Basically removing the old ones, and laying in new ones. Chris & I screwed them all down yesterday.

Oddly enough I am not a very mathematical person, and really more of a visual thinker. At the start of the project I counted up the beams but then when it came time for the planks I just looked at it and literally guessed how many I’d need. My spatial estimation powers were confirmed when I completed the project just one plank short. I think I would have been dead on but I ruined one plank with the saw in the process. Yesterday we came to a point where the drill batteries were dead and we still had half the planks to screw in… so we all loaded up the pickup with all the scrap. I had to saw up the longer planks to fit in the truck’s bed, and in the end it was stacked up to the height of the cab. Chris & I took all the scrap to the dump and spent the better part of 45 minutes unloading them one by one. 3.38 TONS of scrap according to the scale. We swung by the hardware store and I purchased that one last plank, and a cheap Hitachi corded drill to finish the job.

This morning I was up @ 5 am and used up the rest of our cache of crack filler to uh… fill in all the cracks and over-driven screw holes. Chris is sanding the surface now and I raised up the tarp in hopes of keeping it dry if the weather goes to hell. My hope is to finish before I have to leave for Montana and the GTTSR. I doubt I’ll make it all the way, but we’ll see. Next summer we’ll have to replace a few more beams and the railings of course. Sigh.. the joys of home ownership!

The Moron Mechanic Strikes Again!

I recently performed an oil change on my wife’s Jeep Liberty CRD, as I’m an almost total “do it yourself-er” when it comes to car maintenance (NOT that I have any real skill… I’m just too cheap to pay for this sort of thing!) Usually that is a good thing. Today, I wonder however. It seems that when I pulled off the oil filter the rubber gasket stayed behind, and I installed the new filter right over it. This created a poor seal which as you can imagine, leaked oil.

Thankfully this condition was caught before things went REALLY wrong, but boy… what a mess. Sort of tossed a huge monkey wrench into my day’s schedule too.

Of course being a cheapskate once I realized that there was no damage done I was ticked off that I’d just wasted a few quarts of brand new oil! 😉

No photos sorry. I didn’t have my camera with me but if you do a google image search for “Exxon Valdez” and mentally erase the water, you should get a pretty good idea of what the scene looked like. Thankfully I had just bought a 50lb bag of “Oil-sorb” for use out in the BioDiesel home brewery in the barn and it was still in the back of the pickup truck! I think I used up 1/3rd of it.

Something like this... just subtract water.
Above: Just subtract water!

At least I’ll not make THIS mistake again!

Goofy Online Petitions

I never participate in these things, but this one was just too goofy to pass up: “Jeremy Clarkson for Prime Minister”

Apparently the Prime Minister’s office in the UK has an website where the Queen’s subjects can request favors and allow others to vote for it. Somebody wanted Jezza as PM, and they actually ran it. Mind you just to prove how lame the system is it allowed me to vote – using nothing but my old address in Wiltshire as “proof of eligibility”… hell I was merely a resident alien and that was a decade ago!

Well, yesterday I received an email from the PM’s office stating:

From: “10 Downing Street”
To: “e-petition signatories”
Subject: Government response to petition ‘PMClarkson’
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:10:11 +0000

You signed a petition asking the Prime Minister to “Make Jeremy Clarkson
Prime Minister.”

The Prime Minister’s Office has responded to that petition and you can view
it here:

http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page16590

Prime Minister’s Office

The page they reference points to a YouTube Video:

Unlike our government, at least the brits have one with a sense of humor, or humour, as the case may be.

Entropy.

When I was a college kid I had a t-shirt that read “Fight Gravity.” I was a climber and it made for a good joke. Now as a middle-aged homeowner I should get one that says “Fight Entropy.”

My son Christopher’s summer project was going to be painting our deck. His reward was to be a laptop for use at college. The first step in the job was sanding and scraping. That took quite a bit of time, especially as the weather here stayed rainy until early July. A couple of weeks ago, when I started inspecting his job as it neared completion of this step, to my horror he had uncovered a LOT of rotten wood. Major portions of our deck have been held together by a layer of paint!

Above: This is the worst of it. We replaced those big main beams two winters ago when they broke under the weight of a big snowfall. Long-time readers of this website will recall that bad winter. After Chris sanded, I tapped the exposed wood with a claw hammer and it basically vanished. Lots of rot in both the intermediate beams, the deck top, and the facia under the railings. I suspect I’ll be completely dismantling this part of the deck soon.

What started as a paint job has transformed into a complete rebuild. Ugh.

Above: Chris painting the trim around the windows.

Above: The same spot, viewed from below. You will note the deck railing is off, and there is a pile of lumber in the driveway. Most of what Chris is standing on has to be replaced. He has a plank-painting factory going on in the garage. I prefer to pre-paint all the beams and planks.

Above: The deck on the south side of the house has two parts, the main part near the kitchen, and the other part near the back bedrooms. A thin walkway connects them. It is still in good shape, with only one support beam that requires replacement. This is a view of that part. Chris has already painted most of it. You can see some rotten planks out in the yard that I removed from the main part near the kitchen. The tarp is up because rain is in the forecast tonight and tomorrow.

Above: This is the main part of the deck. This is where we cook out, sit in the evenings, watch the stars, etc. You can see I’ve replaced three planks here, and done a lot of patching here and there. I bought some uber high-tech deck coating for this section, which requires 4 days to put on, and 7 days of curing. Hence the tarp to make sure it stays dry and out of direct sunlight. Hopefully it will last longer than the 2-3 years we’ve been getting from the paint.

Oh yeah… it has been REAL hot this weekend too. In the 90s, which is very rare here. 😛

Consolation Prizes

I was supposed to go on the Seattle Jaguar Club’s tour to Mt. Rainier today. Unfortunately a household emergency kept me here, and the car in the barn.

So instead I’ll show you some photos from another Consolation Prize trip. A few weeks ago I went up to the Vancouver area to participate in a JCNA slalom event. Unfortunately I never found it, despite driving around the Pitt Meadows and Coquitlam area for quite a while. Oh well. Instead I turned back south and since I had heard they’ve opened the road up to Artist’s Point between Mt. Baker and Mt. Shuksan I figured I’d drive up there. Gorgeous spot.

I crossed the border at Lynden and then pointed the car east towards the mountains. The road up to the Mt. Baker ski area was relatively clear of traffic and most folks pulled over to allow me to pass when they saw and heard the growling cat in their mirrors. What fun! The final bit is a hard, switch-backed hill climb up a very steep incline. I had the car really flying and having a ton of fun. It performed flawlessly, with no drama or even much tire squeal. It just held on and ran like it was on rails. Awesome.

At the top I opened the bonnet and let it cool down from the hard run. The Artist Point parking area was surrounded by a huge wall of snow, completely obliterating the views.

Above: Over there behind the snowbank is Mt. Baker… I think.

After the car cooled down I wandered down the road to about 750′ lower in altitude to soak in the views just a bit more as the snow was much less deep.

I dropped back down to the foothills, driving almost as hard down as I did up. That fun ended when I came up upon a slow moving Subaru, who just would not use a pull-out and allow me to pass… I resorted to pulling over myself and letting him get ahead, then roaring along until I came up to his lazy slow self again. Finally near the bottom of the hill where the road meets the river i was able to get around him. From there I wandered south on SR 9, home to a zillion motorcyclists every weekend for the run home. Nice day.

No such fun today though… I’m fixing a deck which is falling apart. =\