Paradise ponders, rectangular redwood edition... Well, now that I've finished snowplowing for the day, I managed to get some time in on the steps project. I made 3 more passes through the planer on each of the 8 4x4s that I started with. That's 24 passes today (half filling my dust collection barrel!), and now the redwood 4x4s are distinctly rectangular in cross-section – but the corner radius milling has been completely removed.
The first photo shows the 8 former 4x4s; the next two show the micrometer measurement of the thickness and width, respectively. So ... the 4x4s are now dimensional lumber, 2.8225" x 3.3530". :) The thicknesses are all the same to within my ability to measure, though that will change as the pieces dry out. The widths vary considerably, though: from 3.2733" to 3.4504". Note that all of them are under the 3.5" that they're supposed to be. I'm not sure if that's the mill cheating us a teensy bit, or (more likely, I think) shrinkage from the wood drying out.
One of the challenges of building out of solid wood is dealing with shrinkage. This project is much less critical than, say, a tabletop. I will be using dowels to keep the centerline of the pieces stable, and then good glue joints to attempt to keep edges from shifting. I'm using good quality glue that resists shear forces, but even so, if the differential shrinkage between two adjacent pieces is too high, they will slip and form a little ridge. The only way I know of to guarantee that that won't happen is to glue up all the pieces and then dry them in a kiln for at least a few days. The few days I've got, but the kiln I do not. :) I'll be letting them dry in my heated barn for 4 or 5 days before I sand them down. Hopefully the majority of any differential shrinkage will have occurred by then..
Paradise ponders ... Debbie and her cat edition... Yesterday afternoon I brought firewood in and laid a fire, thinking Debbie (who's still in the throes of some evil virus) would like it. I got it going nicely and then went into the bedroom where she was napping to roust her. The sight at right greeted me. That cat is Jahar, our Savannah cat – and he owns Debbie. He just barely tolerates me, and then only on special occasions. She went back to napping, and didn't come out to enjoy the fire for a couple of hours. :)
Yesterday evening we had terrific gusty winds and fairly heavy snowfall. The snow was of the wet, gloppy kind. With all the wind, the accumulation was variable: zero in some places, but over a foot in others. The photo at left is a metal-bending machine (for roofing panels) parked near our house. The tarp protecting it tore and blew off, and the machine (as you can see) is pretty well stuffed with snow and ice.
Around 8 pm, our power and cable Internet connections simultaneously died. Our backup generators kicked in within a few seconds – and ran constantly for the next five and a half hours. The outage that got us also took out the entire southern section of Cache Valley, 1,000 or so homes and businesses. That was just one of over 50 outages suffered along the Wasatch Mountains front at roughly the same time. The snowy and icy road conditions meant quite a few accidents, and some of those were collisions with poles. The wind meant quite a few downed trees, and some of those took out power, telephone, and cable lines. I'm not sure which failure mode we experienced, but the repair time was long because the power company's crews were stretched to the limit. Our general experience is that we're back up within an hour or two; this was much longer than that. After the power was off for an hour or so, I poked my head out our front door and back door, to look around at the valley. Other than at our house, there wasn't a light in sight – total darkness prevailed. Apparently we have the only backup generator within a couple of miles. After last night's experience, at least one of my neighbors is suddenly very interested. :) We were very grateful ourselves, as we didn't have to worry about getting cold, losing the food in our freezer, or even being slightly inconvenienced. Everything just worked. If my memory serves me right, this is the fifth outage we've had (and by far the longest one) since installing the generators. The decision to spend the money on them is feeling pretty good right about now...
Paradise ponders ... homecoming in the wind edition... We've got smiles on our faces around here, because our friend Tim D. is due home from the hospital any minute now. His recovery went faster than anticipated, always a good sign. He's up and walking around, but he does have rather severe limits on what he's allowed to lift: just 15 lbs. for the next year (though it's possible they'll relax that earlier if it's clear he's healed enough). For a retired guy whose hobby is farming alfalfa on five acres, that's going to be tough. So many things require lifting around a little farm like this, but most especially the irrigation pipes (which are in use roughly half the days from May through September, and which must be moved on each of those days) and hay for his two horses. The hay Tim's wife Jeannie can handle, except when one of the big 1,200 lb. bales needs to be moved; for that, my tractor will do the trick. The pipe moving we've started to organize some of the (many!) youths in Paradise, and me. So good to know he's home and the surgery was successful!
Debbie and I had breakfast at Angie's this morning. She had a “Santa Fe” skillet with chicken, I had eggs and ham. Good, solid, delicious food as always. It was fun to hear the locals talking about local things once again; the first time we've been immersed in that since our trip to Hawai'i ended. I overheard the conversation at a nearby table, a middle-aged couple visiting Logan because they're considering moving here from Ogden. They were raving about Angie's – they couldn't believe the quality of the food, not to mention the quantity, and the smiling, friendly service just blew them away. We're not far from Ogden, but the cultural difference really is quite large. Ogden is much more the “big city” atmosphere, and service such as provided by Angie's would, I'm sure, really stand out. But I think that only explains part of it – some of it is Angie's. I've met the owner, who's often around, talking with customers. He's just like his staff – open, friendly, welcoming, interested, eager to please. I'm sure that attitude and energy trickles down to all the staff, or at least all the staff who stay employed. It's not that we get unfriendly service elsewhere in Logan, because we do with but rare exception. What I'm really trying to say is that even here Angie's stands out.
Despite overly full belly ('cause there's no such thing as a small breakfast at Angie's so far as I can tell, and it's so good you're definitely going to want to eat it all!), I started working on the steps project that I bought lumber for yesterday. There will be just two steps, 44" wide. The upper step will be more like a landing, 36" deep, because the door from our house will open over it. The other step will be about 11" deep. Both of them will be roughly 3" thick, solid redwood. I'm making them by gluing multiple 4x4s together, using dowels to get accurate joints. The 4x4s come from the lumberyard with a roughly 3/16" radius to make rounded edges – a good thing for most purposes, but not for mine, as I want the top of the slab to be free of the grooves that would make. So I'm planing all the 4x4s down on two opposite sides, to eliminate the radius. That will reduce the thickness to roughly 3" instead of 3.5".
In the first photo below you can see the side I planed on the bottom, and the unplaned side (with the radius milling) on the top. The second photo shows all eight of the 4x4s I need with one planed side (on the top). These all measure 3.137" in thickness now, down from the roughly 3.4" (with lots of variance) as I received them. This little exercise was a nice test of my planer, to see how stable its depth of cut was. So far as I'm able to measure (0.001"), it's perfect – the first piece and the last piece both measure 3.137" thick no matter where I measure them. A few hours from now, as the wood starts drying differently on the different pieces, that will no longer be true. :)
To plane all those 4x4s took a total of 24 passes through my planer, three for each piece. Why? Because the planer can only remove 3mm (a shade under 1/8") on a single pass. So to chew off enough wood to remove the radius milling, it took three passes. I'll have 24 more passes to take off the opposite side of each 4x4.
When I finished that first side on all of them, I decided to take a break. I went to shut off my dust collection system and saw that the collection barrel was over-full (see first photo below). Oops! I've only emptied this barrel twice since installing it almost two years ago. Most of what I do doesn't make all that much sawdust. But the planer is an entirely different story: it removes a lot of wood, and fast – in fact, that's it's entire job. The second photo shows what I saw after I removed the lid and cleared the “extra” chips from the transparent feeder tube. Those are all redwood chips on the top from the planing I did this morning. I reached down into the chips to see where the redwood started – and discovered that 2/3s of the barrel are redwood chips from this morning. I'm going to have to pay closer attention to that system when planing! :)
The wind is howling outside. We have an average wind speed of 28 mph predicted for later this afternoon, and I think it's probably around 20 mph average right now (though some gusts are clearly much higher speed than that). The temperature is 53°F right now, about like yesterday, and between the wind and the heat our snow cover is melting very rapidly. Many fields are completely clear already. But ... our forecast is showing up to 6" of snow over the next couple of days, so I'm not removing my snowplow from my tractor just yet...
Paradise ponders... We've been visiting Tim D., our friend and neighbor, in the hospital every day. He had back surgery to fuse three vertebrae on Wednesday. The surgery went very well, and he's recovering faster than they'd predicted. We saw him a couple of hours ago, and he's smiling and ready to be up and at 'em. I warned him that I'd take a baseball bat to him if we caught him trying to lift anything (he's got a 15 lb. limit for a year!). It's really good to see him doing well – he's one of the good guys, and we've been worried about him.
Debbie's out having her nails done at the moment, and she drove her new truck by herself for only the second time. She's had it for two months now, but didn't want to walk by herself when we had snow and ice. So we've been going together, in the Tesla, while her new truck sat in the garage. It started right up after we figured out how to do it (there's no key, and it won't do a darned thing unless your foot is on the brake).
My brother Scott went with me to pick up some lumber today. I'm building a set of stairs to get from our bedroom to our new sun room; there's a 12" drop involved, so just two steps. I'm making them from redwood, which I'm going to bleach, artificially distress (basically, I'm going to bash the hell out of it with a variety of bashers), then finish with a two-color system to accent the dents, and finally a coat of matte polyurethane to keep the natural wood look but protect it well. It should be an interesting experiment. Just getting the wood was more trouble than I expected. First, redwood is rather expensive these days. Second, in both Home Depot and Lowe's the lumber had been handled roughly and left outdoors – so it was quite dinged up and in some cases soaking wet. Lowe's had more of it in stock, so we went there and picked through a pile of wood to get the 9 4x4's that I needed (I'm gluing up the 4x4s to make a thick slab for each step). One item I wanted didn't exist in the store: pipe clamps. You wouldn't think pipe clamps would be scarce in an area with so many woodworkers, but they only had one in stock. Lots of bar clamps, but just the one pipe clamp. I had to order them from Amazon...
An accidental discovery... While on our recent trip to Hawai'i, we stopped in at a coffee and tea shop to stock up for the mornings in our cottage. Naturally I'd forgotten to pack my favorite little tea infuser, so I asked at the shop for one. They didn't have any (which really surprised me!), but they did have something I'd never heard of: tea filters. I picked up a 20 pack of them for a few dollars, and used them during our trip.
How did they work out? Short answer: they're better than any infuser I've ever had, and I really liked the infusers I've had for the past few years. I ordered 200 filters last week and got them yesterday. The filters themselves are conical paper (much like coffee filter paper, but a little finer) with two little holes at the top. The filters come with a little plastic stick, cleverly shaped to go through the two holes, sit firmly on your cup's rim, while holding the filter cone open (so you can pour hot water over it). I've been rinsing my tea leaves in the infuser with cold water to get the tea dust off; that's not necessary with the filters. If you let the filters drain in your sink, in a few minutes they're dry enough to toss in the trash – very convenient.
Slow blogging for a few days, most likely... I'm catching up on the huge pile of paperwork and backlog of stuff put off while we were on vacation. In addition, a good friend (Tim D.) had some serious back surgery yesterday. We'll be spending some time with him in the hospital until he gets home. Also we're on standby to help out at his home with anything his wife might need...
Some advice for liberals ...on Carryn Owens' moment in the spotlight last night. The author is Mary Katharine Ham, also widowed (under very different circumstances). Her response to the loss of her husband is itself a moving story of strength under incredible pain. Rereading some of those events even today brings me to tears. But here the point is that she knows a bit about the topic she's tweeting about...
Home, we are, safe and sound... But not without a bit of drama! Just before we boarded our plane in Kona, we heard an announcement. Our plane was not going to San Francisco as scheduled, but was instead going to Honolulu! It seems our aircraft had a broken HF (high frequency) radio, and without the radio it couldn't make the long flight to the mainland. It could, however, fly the short distance to Honolulu, where they had the parts to fix our plane. So off we went, away from home.
In Honolulu they told us we couldn't be on the plane while they tested the repaired radio, so off we all trudged. A half hour later we were told that we were getting a whole new airplane – so they unloaded all our luggage from the broken plane, threw it all into our new plane, and then we all trudged aboard. Finally we took off, headed for San Francisco.
We'd be arriving in San Francisco about four hours later than originally scheduled, so naturally we missed our flight from San Francisco to Salt Lake City. While we were in the air, United rebooked us onto a later flight, but not with the upgraded seats (more legroom) we'd paid for. I had to be rather insistent before the customer service agent would set that right, but finally I did. United has a ways to go if they want to be known as the friendly skies!
A friend was driving down from Paradise to pick us up, and fortunately we were able to catch her before she drove down for our original arrival time. She picked us up without incident, and we had a nice drive back – got all the local news, heard about our naughty animals, and shared a nice meal at the Red Iguana.
The animal reunion was exactly as expected (especially the overjoyed canines!), except that Jahar (our Savanna cat) is still upset, and is yowling. I expect he'll settle down after we've gone to bed...
A really great last day... I'm writing this from the gate area of Kona Airport in Hawai'i, where Debbie and I are bored to tears waiting for our flight. My bandwidth here is very limited, so I'm writing this post now, but will put photos up after we get home and have enough bandwidth to make that process endurable.
Amazingly enough, today worked out pretty much as planned. We started by packing up and saying goodbye to Hale Ohia, our home-away-from-home in Hawai'i. Then we headed down to Hilo to have our last breakfast at Cafe 100. We both had locos – Portuguese sausage loco with a side of Portuguese sausage for Debbie (could you guess that she likes Portuguese sausage?), bacon loco with a side of ham for me.
By the time we finished our breakfast, it was about 8 am. Just after 9 am we were on the dirt road up Mauna Kea. We drove one of our favorite roads, looking at the beautiful scenery and looking for pueos. We saw no pueos. After about four hours we got to our destination: the Dr. David Douglas memorial, and a memory I cherish – taking my mom and dad here, and hiking the quarter mile or so to the monument with my dad. I got down to the monument this morning and leaned up against a koa tree, memories flooding in. Just a minute or so after I stood against that tree, a little elepaio landed on a branch less than two feet from my face. He perched there for 30 seconds or so, head tilting first one way and then the other, watching me and chirping as if to ask me how I was doing. Then he flitted off to investigate something else interesting in his little empire. I hiked back up to Debbie and our truck with a big smile on my face. Those elepaio are one of our favorite birds here, and also one of the most elusive. We'd only seen them three or four times on the rest of our trip, and never such a close view.
Then we headed back down toward Waimea, going about 15 miles on this dirt four-wheel road. We were still hoping to see pueos, but weren't too hopeful based on the complete failure on the way up in the morning. Boy were we wrong! We ended up seeing ten individual pueos, including two pairs courting (which involves some spectacular flying). One of the pueos we saw was perched, but the rest were flying – and they spent at least some of their time quite close to us. That meant that with our binoculars we had simply wonderful views of their swooping, hovering, low-altitude aerobatics – by far the best that we've had on any trip we've made to Hawai'i. We also saw an io landing in a tree and flying away, close enough for a very nice viewing by binoculars.
Despite all this, I think the highlight for Debbie was the chance she had to feed granola bars to a very eager horse. This fellow happened to be standing near a fence we could access, and then Debbie went to work on him. Within a couple of minutes he was (literally!) eating out of her hand. Many smiles were upon Debbie's face. :)
After all that, still glowing from our birding and horsing experiences, we visited The Gallery of Great Things again. We had a bit more shopping to do there. Then we went to The Fish and the Hog for dinner: ahi poke appetizer that we split, fish and chips for Debbie, and fish tacos for me. All were delicious, and a fitting “last meal in Hawai'i” for us. Then it was time for us to drive down to Kona, turn in the rental truck, and start the air journey home.
As I write, we've checked in, gotten our boarding passes, gone through security, and now we're just waiting. We still have another hour before boarding. :( Then it's a five hour flight to San Francisco, an hour layover, and a two hour flight to Salt Lake City. There a friend will pick us up and ferry we two sleepy, cranky folks back home for a reunion with our furry friends. That should be great! :)
A day around Pahala and Na'alehu... Today was partly a repeat of past favorite drives on this trip, and part exploring new territory. Our complete track for the day is here if you want to follow our precise path.
The first thing we did this morning, at 5 am, was to head for Jaggar Center to see the eruption in Halemaumau Crater one last time. Unfortunately the eruption was much less active this morning, so we just briefly watched a few little lava splashes. While we were watching, someone else there started playing a flute, badly. We have no idea why that person would choose to interrupt the silence that everyone else was enjoying, but he did. That prompted us to leave, and let flute-boy play without us in the involuntary audience.
The new piece for the day was in the area north-northeast of Pahala. There's a paved road that goes for miles back up the eastern slopes of Mauna Loa. Despite our many visits to the Big Island over the years, we'd never known that area was there. Most of the road traversed old sugar cane fields, much like on the Hamakua Coast. Partway along that road is the Ka'u Coffee Mill visitor center, where we were the first people there this morning, and enjoyed a nice cup of coffee. The drive in that area was both beautiful and full of birds, just as many (and of the same species) as we'd been seeing in the areas west of Pahala.
After that, we headed back to some drives we'd especially enjoyed in the areas west of Pahala and north of Na'alehu. One thing we did in particular, though accidentally, was to drive across the rugged ford mentioned in an earlier post – but for which I forgot to take photos. That issue is now rectified with the photos below and the short video at right, in which you can hear the crunch as I bottomed the truck on a protruding piece of lava. Oops! :)
We saw a few new things this time, even though it's only been a few days since we were last here. The “balloon plant” (my name) in the first photo was much in evidence this time, with those big (potato-sized) fruits that are basically a skin inflated with air, and a few small seeds in the middle. Weird, they are! The second photo is an orange wildflower that was common today. We don't know whether it's an escaped horticultural, an introduced weed, or a native. Whatever it is, it was darned pretty! The butterfly in the third photo is, we think, a monarch butterfly. These were somehow introduced to the Hawai'ian Islands, from which they can't possibly do their normal migration to Mexico. The fourth photo shows something that looks a lot like the Indian Paintbrush we know from the mainland, but the leaves are all wrong. No idea what it actually is. Finally, the last photo is something that looks sort of like an orchid (from the flower), but the leaves don't look right. We only saw one plant in all of our journeys this trip, so I suspect it's an escaped horticultural (though at that point on our drive we were several miles from the nearest house).
Last but certainly not least, in the afternoon we stopped at Hana Hou for the third time. Once again we had a really good meal. My starter – homemade corn and vegetable chowder – is in the first photo. It was great: not too salty (my normal complaint with soup), full of nice sized chunks of local vegetables plus some new potatoes, and a luscious, thick broth that didn't taste of corn starch. I believe they thickened it with a roux, and let the vegetable flavors shine. The second photo was Debbie's entree, mere seconds before she started shoving it into her face and making yummy noises. It's a crabcake sandwich, with local lettuce, tomato, and onion and homemade bread from their bakery. Debbie had that thing entirely eaten before I was even halfway done with my meal. :) The last photo is my entree: the “Hogzilla” (their name!). This is a big tortilla stuffed with their wonderful roast pork, with a little cheese and jasmine rice in addition. If you like roast pork, my recommendation is to order the Hogzilla – it's the same roast pork you'll find in their other pork entrees, but a larger (tending toward giant) portion. No matter how hungry you are, you'll have trouble getting this whole thing into your belly!
Finally, we went back to Ka Lae Coffee, another favorite place, and got ourselves some coffee. Even though it was late afternoon, after my giant meal at Hana Hou I felt the need for some caffeine to stay alert on our drive home.
It was a nice, easy, peaceful day for us. No traffic to fight, nearly our whole day in the boonies, and a fine meal. What more could we ask? Tomorrow is our last day here (sniff, sniff...), and for that day we're combining a bunch of favorite things: breakfast at Cafe 100, four-wheeling on the northern and eastern slopes of Mauna Kea, a short hike to the Douglas Memorial, a visit to The Gallery of Great Things (where we bought a small koa statue of a cat last week), and a meal at The Fish and the Hog in Waimea. After that we head to the airport at Kona for our redeye home – it leaves at 10:25 pm. We're going to be two tired and cranky puppies by the time we get home to Utah on Tuesday morning. Luckily for us, a good friend who is very forgiving is picking us up at the airport in Salt Lake City. :)
A botanical garden repeat... Today we repeated a day we had last week, at the Hawai'i Tropical Botanical Gardens. It wasn't completely a repeat, however, because many different things were in bloom this week. The day could hardly have been more perfect for a walk like this: in the 70s, overcast (which makes good lighting for both viewing and photography), and uncrowded (mainly because we were the first people there, right as they opened). Debbie was stoked because she did so much better on this walk than on the previous walk last week – she has gained a lot of strength during our vacation simply because she's been walking a lot more.
Before going to the gardens, we stopped at Cafe 100, as planned, for breakfast. I had a “breakfast plate” with grilled ham, rice, and two eggs over easy. Debbie had a “Portuguese sausage loco” – rice, brown gravy, Portuguese sausages, and an egg over easy. Both were excellent. After our trip to the gardens, we went to Suisan for poke, also as planned. We were a bit surprised upon entering the store, though, because most of the poke trays were completely empty! Fortunately we found some kinds that we liked still remaining, and we ended up having our last delicious poke meal in Richardson's park. We didn't see any whales breaching today, though I did see an enormous Samoan guy surfing – and when he fell at the end of his run, it was close enough to a whale breaching! After we finished our poke, we still had a couple hours of daylight left, so we drove around a bit on the Hamakua coast. This is a bit of an odd experience for us, because we still remember well the days when this was all sugar cane country, with beautiful rolling fields of sugar cane set against a background of blue ocean and sky. We were driving need Pepeekeo, a town that used to be centered around a sugar cane processing plant whose ruins are still there. We remembered a field here with a beautiful old banyan tree in it, and a road so that the locals could use it as a picnic spot. We took my mom and dad there to see that tree, some 25 years ago. We found a road named “Banyan Tree Road” in the right spot, but not a trace of that grand old tree or the sugar cane fields that surrounded it. On the other hand, the development of the area in the past 25 years is much less homogeneous than it used to be – we passed housing developments, pulp trees, sorghum (why?), papaya orchards, macadamia orchards, vegetable fields – all kinds of things, many quite beautiful in their own right. But our memories still fight for our affections. We also spotted a new bird for us: the nutmeg manikin.
The first photo below is from a plant right at the garden's entrance. It has the strangest-colored blossoms we have ever seen (and last week it wasn't in bloom at all!). The rest of the photos are from within the garden...
