The Farm
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Rats, so, I blew it already. I was supposed to blog every day and I missed yesterday. No great honking surprise, I guess. Anyway, here's something for today. It's cold here, brrr. It's been dropping down into the 20's at night. Maybe not hugely cold for some of you, but that's about as cold as it gets here. It really makes me feel bad for Susan when she goes out to feed the horses in the morning. Worse, when she gets up, she lets in a draft of cold air under the covers.
Cold or not, one of the projects I'm working on now is a deck for the side of the house. It's a little more complicated than I can handle, so I've got the help of Phil, one of our neighbors, and a buddy of his, Mark. To place its location, let's first step briefly into the Wayback Machine.
In the beginning, there was this (no, not Kenya, nor even a little bit of snow, look into the background). This was the location of, as Vernon (Mr. Altman, to you, Sonny) so aptly named it, the "White Trash Pool", more formerly known as a Doughboy. We moved the pool to a neighbor with kids for the hard-driving bargain price of $0. This is on the east side of the house. In case it's not obvious from the photo, the grassy part where Kenya is sniffing drops off about five feet to a flat spot where lied the pool.
So, the plan was to build the World's Biggest and Most Expensive Deck Imaginable. Well, to be fair, that wasn't precisely the original plan in so many words, it's just kind of turned out that way. I'm not quite sure when we broke ground, but this picture was taken on 9/19. The viewpoint from this photo is almost the same as the one with Kenya above, so it should give you some idea of the positioning of the Monstrosity.
There are two things that make this deck:
- cool
- harder than I can do by myself
The first thing is an area designed to hold a hottub. Hottubs are not heavy, particularly. You'd get the same load on the deck as you would inviting over four of me (though why you'd want to, I can't imagine. You'd never get a word in edgewise). But hottubs on their own aren't really much fun: not, at least, until you put water in them. Then they get really heavy, like having 40 of me standing in the same place on the deck. Here's where we would stand.
The second bit that makes this deck too complicated for my little head and clumsy fingers is a walkway that runs around the perimeter. We did this to avoid an unsightly railing, which is necessary if the deck surface is more than three feet above grade. Well, just don't walk off this end in a drunken stupor. If you did, and then turned back around to look at the house, or, more likely, to curse at me and ask for a phone to call your lawyer, this is what you'd see.
Hopefully, we'll be able to finish it soon. A hottub would be just to thing to fight this non-California sub-freezing weather.
Rats, so, I blew it already. I was supposed to blog every day and I missed yesterday. No great honking surprise, I guess. Anyway, here's something for today. It's cold here, brrr. It's been dropping down into the 20's at night. Maybe not hugely cold for some of you, but that's about as cold as it gets here. It really makes me feel bad for Susan when she goes out to feed the horses in the morning. Worse, when she gets up, she lets in a draft of cold air under the covers.
Cold or not, one of the projects I'm working on now is a deck for the side of the house. It's a little more complicated than I can handle, so I've got the help of Phil, one of our neighbors, and a buddy of his, Mark. To place its location, let's first step briefly into the Wayback Machine.
In the beginning, there was this (no, not Kenya, nor even a little bit of snow, look into the background). This was the location of, as Vernon (Mr. Altman, to you, Sonny) so aptly named it, the "White Trash Pool", more formerly known as a Doughboy. We moved the pool to a neighbor with kids for the hard-driving bargain price of $0. This is on the east side of the house. In case it's not obvious from the photo, the grassy part where Kenya is sniffing drops off about five feet to a flat spot where lied the pool.
So, the plan was to build the World's Biggest and Most Expensive Deck Imaginable. Well, to be fair, that wasn't precisely the original plan in so many words, it's just kind of turned out that way. I'm not quite sure when we broke ground, but this picture was taken on 9/19. The viewpoint from this photo is almost the same as the one with Kenya above, so it should give you some idea of the positioning of the Monstrosity.
There are two things that make this deck:
- cool
- harder than I can do by myself
The first thing is an area designed to hold a hottub. Hottubs are not heavy, particularly. You'd get the same load on the deck as you would inviting over four of me (though why you'd want to, I can't imagine. You'd never get a word in edgewise). But hottubs on their own aren't really much fun: not, at least, until you put water in them. Then they get really heavy, like having 40 of me standing in the same place on the deck. Here's where we would stand.
The second bit that makes this deck too complicated for my little head and clumsy fingers is a walkway that runs around the perimeter. We did this to avoid an unsightly railing, which is necessary if the deck surface is more than three feet above grade. Well, just don't walk off this end in a drunken stupor. If you did, and then turned back around to look at the house, or, more likely, to curse at me and ask for a phone to call your lawyer, this is what you'd see.
Hopefully, we'll be able to finish it soon. A hottub would be just to thing to fight this non-California sub-freezing weather.
Rats, so, I blew it already. I was supposed to blog every day and I missed yesterday. No great honking surprise, I guess. Anyway, here's something for today. It's cold here, brrr. It's been dropping down into the 20's at night. Maybe not hugely cold for some of you, but that's about as cold as it gets here. It really makes me feel bad for Susan when she goes out to feed the horses in the morning. Worse, when she gets up, she lets in a draft of cold air under the covers.
Cold or not, one of the projects I'm working on now is a deck for the side of the house. It's a little more complicated than I can handle, so I've got the help of Phil, one of our neighbors, and a buddy of his, Mark. To place its location, let's first step briefly into the Wayback Machine.
In the beginning, there was this (no, not Kenya, nor even a little bit of snow, look into the background). This was the location of, as Vernon (Mr. Altman, to you, Sonny) so aptly named it, the "White Trash Pool", more formerly known as a Doughboy. We moved the pool to a neighbor with kids for the hard-driving bargain price of $0. This is on the east side of the house. In case it's not obvious from the photo, the grassy part where Kenya is sniffing drops off about five feet to a flat spot where lied the pool.
So, the plan was to build the World's Biggest and Most Expensive Deck Imaginable. Well, to be fair, that wasn't precisely the original plan in so many words, it's just kind of turned out that way. I'm not quite sure when we broke ground, but this picture was taken on 9/19. The viewpoint from this photo is almost the same as the one with Kenya above, so it should give you some idea of the positioning of the Monstrosity.
There are two things that make this deck:
- cool
- harder than I can do by myself
The first thing is an area designed to hold a hottub. Hottubs are not heavy, particularly. You'd get the same load on the deck as you would inviting over four of me (though why you'd want to, I can't imagine. You'd never get a word in edgewise). But hottubs on their own aren't really much fun: not, at least, until you put water in them. Then they get really heavy, like having 40 of me standing in the same place on the deck. Here's where we would stand.
The second bit that makes this deck too complicated for my little head and clumsy fingers is a walkway that runs around the perimeter. We did this to avoid an unsightly railing, which is necessary if the deck surface is more than three feet above grade. Well, just don't walk off this end in a drunken stupor. If you did, and then turned back around to look at the house, or, more likely, to curse at me and ask for a phone to call your lawyer, this is what you'd see.
Hopefully, we'll be able to finish it soon. A hottub would be just to thing to fight this non-California sub-freezing weather.
Monday, November 27, 2006
OK, so I'm going to post every day now until we're caught up. There it is, written in pixels, unbreakable.
Last Sunday (well, a week ago yesterday, so two Sunday's ago), we went to the Infineon Raceway (Sears Point, by the old way of naming things) for a half-day driving school. They outfitted us with slick-o driving suits, helmets, and a little driving physics. Then, zoom zoom, off we go.
Our first track session involved getting in a line and following the pace car. The pace car, a white mustang, just visible here, drove around the track, picking the correct line through each turn and straight-away. Our job was to follow the pace car *exactly*. Since it was a little drizzly and misty that morning, we had to stay on the pace car's line or suffer the consequences. The consequences, as some of our classmates found out (just couldn't follow directions, could they?) were a "little thingy", so defined as a spin where you don't make contact with anything.
So the pace car chose the "line" and we followed like little zippy fast ducks. Since, as I mentioned, the track was wet, we started out on the "wet line", which is a little higher through the turns. The "dry line" right down low (here and here), which we got to follow later as the track dried up, is very slippery when wet due to deposited rubber and oil.
After our first track session, we piled into an SUV driven by one of the instructors. He took us around the track again showing us where to accelerate and where to brake and why to stay off the dry line when the track is wet. To show us that, he had us get out in one of the turns and just shuffle our feet along the track in the dry line. It was literally as slippery as ice.
After one more follow the pace car and one more short lecture, we were back in the cars for solo sessions (no pace car). We weren't allowed to pass each other, but, since they spaced us out at intervals of several hundred yars, the situation didn't present itself anyway. This was our fastest and funnest session yet.
The cars we drove were open-wheel formula cars. They had about 125 HP, which might not sound like much, but the car itself weighs about the same as a heavy motorcycle, so that works out to be plenty fast enough. We got going to about 100 MPH on the fastest part of the track, which seemed like plenty fast enough. It was kinda like sitting in a very very fast bathtub. It was a whole lot of fun and we learned a lot about driving bathtubs. I found it interesting how cerebral racecar driving really is. There's a lot of physics you have to keep in mind to avoid "thingies" and "demolition" (a thingy with an unhappy ending). I wonder if it'd be more interesting to watch racing on tv now?
