Wild Rye

Where does one go for enlightenment? The Dude Abides Blog of course.

With the floor open and some critical wiring exposed it was natural to detour our plans and re-wire the ceiling fan in the room below.

When that sub-project was done it was time to button up the floor with a fresh sheet of 5/8″ plywood. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to leave some hidden treasure…in this case a 1/16 scale diecast VW beetle. We inscribed the date on the bottom of the car and placed it in the floor for some future inhabitants to find 100 years from now.

Looking at this photo of migrating Golden Rays published in the Telegraph, I can’t help but feel that there is more driving our planet than random happenstance.

Once you commit yourself to a certain level of perfection in a project you find yourself captive to forces beyond your control. This is what happened when I pulled up the carpet in Norah’s room.

There was a soft spot between two sheets of plywood. It looked as if someone had dropped an 18 lb. bowling ball off the top rung of a step ladder. We knew about the soft spot when we bought the condo. The building inspector said it could probably wait until we replaced the carpet. And now is then. 

In my mind an acceptable fix would have been to screw a thin plate of sheet steel over the spot. My buddy Kevin looked at it and said it was probably worth doing the job right. And this meant replacing the plywood. Bear in mind, this sheet of plywood ran under one of the walls. Which meant cutting the plywood along a joist line with my circular saw. Which I’ve used all of twice in my life.

I nailed a 2 x 4 long the line of cut as a kind of ad hoc jig. This left just enough blade exposed to cut through the 5/8″ plywood. I’m just glad my friend Bob wasn’t around. He would have  recommended that I take up ALL the plywood and replace it with 19/32″. 

I’ve got to say that having a laser sight on your circular saw is a wonderful thing. It made it simple to make a clean, perfectly straight cut down the joist line. This is a GCD saw, or whatever Lowe’s store brand is called and it’s really nice for the price. The carbide tipped blade zipped through nails like nothing…I was halfway expecting the blade to shatter, throw hot metal and put my eye out.

Turns out that there was no tongue in the adjoining sheet of plywood. These sheets fit together with tongue-and-groove to prevent sagging when a seam isn’t supported by a joist. This means I’m going to have to put sections of 2 x 4 between the joists to support the seam when I replace the plywood. 

Remember, this all started with wanting to clear out a corner of the house in order to have a nice quiet place to write.

The little dog is off her feed today. First time I’ve ever seen her less than eye-popping ecstatic to eat. Now she won’t eat a thing. She just curls up somewhere and shivers. However she will drink water and she’ll go for walks so we’re thinking this will all work out in the end. So to speak.

We managed to get all 700 square feet of carpet ripped up from the upstairs yesterday. Pulling up carpet is easy–if that’s all you have to do. But of course this means moving all the furniture and other accumulated clutter. Which in our case is substantial. And then you have to get said carpet into the dumpster that you’ve rented for $80 per week. 

The only way to get 700 square feet of carpet into a dumpster…well I suppose you could burn it or melt it…perhaps the simplest way to get this volume of carpet into a dumpster is to cut it into strips and roll it into tight, compact tubes.

And for that you need something better than a utility knife for cutting. I tried my Sabre saw and that cuts the carpet backing just fine. Doesn’t cut the carpet loop. The Secret Weapon in this case are the Harbor Freight Tools Carpet Scissors. The head is angled so you can cut the carpet while it is still on the floor. Your hand will get a workout but these things worked great. This nice thing is that we can use these for cutting the underlayment for the laminate as well.

I want to be at 24,000 words today with my shitty first draft

But of course I have to finish the flooring, molding, touch-up spackle and painting of the writer’s lair.

But since we have the dumpster only until Monday morning, what I really need to be doing is pulling up carpet in the entire upper floor of the house.

So that means I have to find a place for all the crap that’s accumulated in the nook in our bedroom where I formerly had my “office.” So I’m schlepping stuff here and there. Some of this stuff may have real world value, like a first edition Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance. But then there’s other stuff like nerf darts, a box of preformed penny wrappers, installation CDs for who knows what kind of hardware, and miles of unexplained cable.

But really. The first order of the day. The very first order. Is to clean up the dog barf. Because it seems that while we were putting stuff in the dumpster last night, which is in the garage because that’s where the Evil Homeowners Association will let us keep the thing, the cocker spaniel found her way into the garage and ATE AN ENTIRE BAG OF WILD BIRD SEED.

So this morning I woke up to find that the dog and gone into the bathroom and pooped out something that looks exactly like the raw material for a Clif Bar. A little later Maureen discovered what appeared to be a large number of pre-formed bird treats–or what must have been the dog’s stomach contents.

Thank you for sharing in my misery.

How is the novel coming? Thanks for asking.

IT SUCKS.

Of course the most important part of any good writing is the writer’s lair. Which means that I have to install laminate flooring. On the entire upper floor…because once you’ve done one room you really kind of have to do all the rest of the rooms. 

So here’s what the Great Indoors looks like:

Because there is not enough pain and suffering in my life, I’ve decided to write a novel. 

It’s turning into a big yak-shaving project. As one might expect.

More than anything what I need right now is a set of flat washers. So that I can shim the latch-strike on Norah’s door. I know, I shouldn’t complain. It’s all part of the writing process.

Thanks to a freak storm, the Habitat Works Memorial Day Weekend Tamarisk Extirpation Pack & Die trip has been canceled. And I bought an expensive new sweater from Patagonia for the occasion. 

Then Doug called and asked if I wanted to climb some real rock up near Wheeler Gorge. Sure! Why not? First time for everything. We got to lower Matillija when the drops started coming down, fat and heavy. Not a good time for climbing sandstone Doug tells me. Turns slippery.

So we went down to the gym and got a workout in before the birthday party crowd showed up. Which was good for my pride. I hate it when a six year old kid climbs higher, farther, faster than I ever could on a good day.

I’ve got a nice-enough pair of Salomon hiking shoes, better at least than the old Timberlands I used to sport. I like the idea of Timberlands, but it seems to me that their sole-rubber doesn’t grab the slippery edge of uncertain rock.

I digress. What I mean to say is what’s the deal with round shoelaces? Salomon and every other outfit I know puts round shoelaces on their hikers. And these laces just don’t stay tied. I recently splurged on a pair of Vasque Summit boots, damn fine shod I tell you. And these come with sensible flat laces.

You see, wide flat laces stay tied better. Round laces, and square leather laces (as on my Timberland boaters) don’t stay tied any better than Houdini.

If you want the 411 on shoelaces for hiking, bushwhacking or walk-abouting, visit Ian’s Shoelace Site and read all about it. Of special interest is his lacing for cyclists….note that his photo shows the tie on the inside of the shoe but for bicycle commuting you’d want to tie the laces on the outside of the shoe, thereby keeping them out of the hungry fangs of your chainring.

Alright kirby, you win this time. I completely wimped out on the DIY ultralight backpacking stove challenge. I sawed a clean hole in the bottom of a Diet Coke can and used my Dremel to drill 24 pinholes around the shoulder using the super-useful templates at Zen Stoves. 

But then something happened. While I was out getting some JB-Weld to cement the halves of the stove together I stopped at Sport Chalet…to get a bear canister. Now I don’t want any of you to get the wrong idea and think I have no stones at all, I don’t mind rassling a bear over my lunch. I just don’t want to pay the $150 fine for getting caught in the Sierras without a bear can. 

Anyhow, while in Sport Chalet I spied an MSR Pocket Rocket for just FORTY FREAKIN’ DOLLARS. Figuring I had more than an hour of delicate fussy Dremel work left on my can stove, not to mention the time I would lose by JB Welding my finger to my eyeball (again) and I just couldn’t pass up such a featherlight camp stove.

Damaged pride aside (real mountain men make their own gear), the MSR Pocket Rocket is 3 oz. of superfine cooking goodness. Easy to light, easy to handle, it boils water in 2-3 minutes. Beats all heck out of the gel fuel stove I used last year. One thing to watch–the flip-out pot holders get red hot during a burn. And the stability can be a little tenuous on a lumpy boulder or in soft sand. And you can’t use a windscreen with it (fuel cartridge might explode!) But those are little things if it means not having to use JB Weld.

So kirby, it looks like I’ll need another venue for proving my mountain manliness. I suppose I’ll just have to forge my own Bowie knife out of used railroad spikes or something like that.
 

Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber has a thread about this type of attack. He doesn’t have a solution but it sheds a little bit of light. He seems to believe it was a problem with Dreamhost. This makes me wonder if Bluehost has been hacked, or if the hack was a php exploit. (Not that I understand what that means.)

I have to say that this sort of thing, and the time that it’s going to take me to figure out, kind of makes me wonder if it wouldn’t be better to have the blog hosted on something like typepad or wordpress.com so that I could simply refer this to a support tech and have them fix it. Sigh.

I’ve been blogging sporadically so it took me a while to notice that the Google ads on this blog have been advertising a big breakfast of pharmaceuticals. My first thought was “hallelujah, I’m going to be rich!” Overnight my site became a billboard for SPAM, and any minute the cash should come rolling in. But I’m not getting any ad clicks at all…

…not that I’m trolling for clicks. Let’s keep things honest here folks. I’m mentioning this click drought as a symptom of the hack.

I’m a little too thick-skulled to figure out exactly what the hackers did to my site and I’m not finding much help on the forums at the minute. But it appears they loaded a ton of keywords into the site header in the following tag: <u style="display: none;">. The huge number of keywords forced the Google ads to display ads not entirely germane to my postings.

Or maybe the keywords were simply there as spider bait and there is still something amiss with the ad scripts. I’ll let you know when I know something.

What I’ve done so far:
1) Upgraded Word Press
2) Changed admin passwords
3) Under theme editor, changed Header to remove hidden keywords

I have hundreds of books, stored in boxes and lying all about. It would take three lifetimes to read them all, if I was dedicated. Which I’m not.

So now it’s trench warfare in the War on Crap, Spring cleaning my book collection one title at a time. But the battle is going well, thanks to Delicious Library (not to be confused with del.icoi.us)

Here’s what makes the work so easy: I simply hold a book, CD or DVD up to my Mac’s iSight camera, Delicious Library reads the bar code and does all the data entry. If the book is one I want to keep I drag the image to a representation of the bookcase where I’m keeping it. If the book is one that I want to sell I can imediately see Amazon’s going price for used editions. If the book is selling for less than a dollar I drag the image to my “disposed” shelf and I bag the book for the local library’s used book bin. If the book sells for over a dollar I can list it on Amazon with one click.

This has hugely simplified the task of processing my old books while at the same time satisfying my obsessive-compulsive desire to eek out some value from all this paper. For Windows users check Lifehacker’s write up on Libra.

Last weekend my mother needed a ride to Fish Camp and I needed some time in the Sierras.

My original idea was to take Jackson Road (Forest Road 6S07) to Fresno Dome and camp near there. Next morning I would head further up the road and pack up to Chain Lakes, spend the night, hike down and get Mom for the return trip on Sunday. I read a lot of trail brochures, downloaded maps, uploaded maps to my GPS receiver, bought a bear can, checked the Forest Service site for campsites, (the site said Big Sandy, for instance, was open-no services. Doesn’t say that now.)

When I stopped in Oakhurst to get a wilderness permit for Chain Lakes the ranger’s jaw dropped to the point where she had to pick it up off the floor. “There’s nine feet of snow up there. Jackson Road is gated. Didn’t you do any research?”

So this is how you learn that camping season doesn’t really start until after May in the Sierra Nevada. The ranger didn’t have much to offer as an alternative but one of the staff at the Jack L. Boyd Outdoor School, where Mom’s conference was staged, suggested Chilnualna.

Geek Hiker has a good write-up of the trail, and some good photos. However it is impossible to convey the size and intensity of these falls through pictures, particularly during early Spring snowmelt.

It took about three hours of focused humping up the trail to conquer the 2200 elevation gain with a 40 lb. pack. This includes some sight-seeing along the way. The trail was constructed to provide good views of each of the falls’ five galleries.

There was one young couple camped at the C-Falls camp sites, otherwise I had the place to myself. This is one of Yosemite’s lesser-known treasures. That said, the proximity to Wawona provides easy access to the trailhead, so there are plenty of day hikers even in the off-season. Once the hikers cleared out it was remarkably isolated and awe-filled, with the thunder of the falls nonstop.