Phutu...or is it?

10/26/2003 I haven't really felt much like writing lately which is the reason that there isn't anything new up here. If you want to hear about my little trip up to Boonville you can click here to go the the Bonsai Society of SF website where I posted a story about it. It's too bonsai related for most of you to probably care. I have been working away at the house, which, as usual, is taking a long time to progress. Since the back is all painted and I managed to put in the circuit for my tablesaw in the basement I have now been able to start doing the railing for the deck. I thought that It would be fairly quick but I hadn't figured in how long it takes to mill wood down from larger pieces. It took me a whole day to take rough 4x4 down with a planer and tablesaw to finished look and then bolt them onto the deck for the posts. Then I spent most of the day Friday working on making balusters (the vertical slats.) I have a lot of 2x6 left from the surface of the deck so I am cutting the best of it into 2x2's to use as balusters. I can get a lot of them out of one piece of clear wood, the problem is that I don't have almost any clear pieces. So I have been cutting them out of much larger pieces one at a time. It looks like I will need about 90 in all and I have completed about 30 of them. Putting all of the pieces together into the finished railing seems to take quite a while also. I managed to take about four hours to do two sections. The result is pretty nice, I think it will look even better once it is painted to match the house. I took Romi for a run this morning. Since it was the changover for daylight savings time I managed to get up at about 5:30 am. It was well before sunrise, so I had a little coffee and stood on my deck leaning against the newly completed section of railing (not too hard, mind you, since it will be much stronger when it is all done) while I watched the horizon over the Oakland hills slowly brighten. Before the sun actually peeked over I slapped on my running shoes and headed out the door; it's only about a five minute run to the top of the hill, but it's a tough one since it is all at least slightly up. Romi is always tugging at the leash as we start running so that makes it a little easier...it's later when he stops to sniff things that it gets hard; I end up pulling him up hills sometimes. I made it to the top with plenty of time to spare and stopped, gasping for a little air, to admire the unedited horizon and sky. There were almost no other people with dogs out at the time but there were a bunch of religious nuts who were standing in a group near the top all disharmoniously quoting scripture in spanish. As I jogged past it made me think of that group in LA a few years ago with their Nikes and sweatsuits all dead because they thought that they were going to be taken to another planet by aliens. It's been hot here, and this morning was the hottest morning since sometime in August. I'm hoping that my maple trees don't start thinking that it is spring again. Dory told me that some of you have been wanting to see more detailed photos of the kitchen and other parts of the house so I took a few. I'm sure that this page took quite a long time to load since I put them all up. Enjoy, and let me know if there is anything else that you would like to see.

10/13/2003
9/20/2003
9/14/2003
8/13/2003
7/29/2003
7/19/2003
7/8/2003
7/1/2003
6/3/2003
5/29/2003
4/22/2003
3/18/2003
2/27/2003
2/18/2003
2/15/2003
1/31/2003
1/21/2003
12/18/2002

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