Readin', Racin', Raisin' Fish, Rockin',Tunes, & Hoops

Racin': One Lap of America Day 6, Barber Motorsports Park

2011-05-10T18:40:00.000-07:00

Barber Motorsports Park in Leeds, Alabama (birthplace and boyhood home of Charles Barkley, so there's a Hoops connection, too) is one of the prettiest, most meticulously maintained racetracks in the country. They have a reputation for being terrifically anal about their facility and that reputation is somewhat deserved. If you put a jackstand down on the pavement, you have to have a piece of wood under it. If you spill fluids (oil, gas, coolant, whatever) on the paddock or racetrack, they will send you a bill for it. If you have an off and hit any of their precious Armco barrier, they will send you a bill for it (after writing up an incident report and having you sign it).

A story told to me was that when he was building the track, someone told Mr. Barber that "in that swamp the bugs will eat you alive." Throughout the facility there are metal sculptures, most of them of bugs of one sort or another. On the infield between a couple of straightaways there is a large spider (spyder?). If you look closely, you can see several little baby spiders around her legs (I'm assuming it's a mama spider).

On the wall of the timing/scoring building along the main straight, there is a very large metal wasp.

The funniest detail about that is that some birds have built a nest inside the sculpture. I didn't have my camera with me when I noticed that, otherwise there would be a picture of that as well. You can see a tiny bit of nesting material hanging out near it's left shoulder.

In addition to the track they have a museum which houses Mr. Barber's car and motorcycle collection which is truly astounding. I have visited the museum before (one weekend in 2006 while living in Hattiesburg) and spent several hours there looking at the vast array of cars and bikes. I have been told that 75% of his collection is in storage and only about 25% is displayed at any one time. That is amazing as well.

The track is a pretty place to turn money into noise. Because neither of us had ever run a lap at Barber and I had done both time trials at No Problem the day before, Francis was elected to take both sessions today. The day itself was gorgeous; warm, breezy, bright blue sky with some high clouds.

Really a great day to spend at the track. Even the bluebirds came out to watch us race.

Francis and I talked a bit and reasoned that even though either of us would be slow, he would be the much faster slow, so he went out. Here he is hanging out before the morning session talking with Brock Yates, Jr. and Jason Saini.

Francis' morning run was pretty good. He placed 49th with a time of 5:55.859, undoubtedly way better than I would have done.

At lunch time, they let the non-competing drivers out to do some laps around the track. I must say, I was intimidated by the track when I looked at the layout, but when I drove it I really liked it. There are some really cool corner combinations, a lot of elevations changes, and some decent straights. It also looks like a track that rewards practice. There's no way you could get this track down in 4 laps or even 8 laps. With a couple of days practice, it would begin to reveal its secrets. Anyway, I had a great time.

In the afternoon session, Francis ended up getting much more excitement than he had bargained for. In the picture here (taken during the morning session) he is coming up a hill and running parallel to the main straight.

The entrance is blind and uphill to the right. You're approaching the top rpm in 3rd in the Roadster, so are doing about 90 mph. During his first hot lap of the afternoon session, he got to the top of 3rd and shifted to second instead of fourth. When he let out the clutch, the wheels locked up and he went into a spin. He put the clutch back in, spun a full 360 degrees and managed to keep it in the middle of the track the whole time. He gathered himself back up and continued on, but he was shaken. The results could have been much worse (a blown motor or a significant crash) but weren't due to his quick reactions. Oddly enough, he didn't drop that far in the standings, placing 51st with a time of 5:58.602, only 3 seconds slower than the morning. Good job, Fran Diesel!

We packed up the car and hooked up the trailer and headed out of BMP, pointing north toward Joliet, Illinois. This was going to be the longest transit of the week, over 700 miles. We left at about 3:00 or 3:15 and were making good time going up I-65 in Tennesse when the axle on the trailer shifted (again) and the right side tire began rubbing against the frame and sending up a cloud of blue smoke. We pulled over on the side of the road to fix it. Right behind us a local fellow pulled over in his pickup and offered to help. About 15 minutes later one of our fellow One Lap teams (Tim and Robert in the red Miata) pulled over to help. It took about an hour to get it all set to rights, so we lost a bit of time. However, the fix is really good and is holding up well, so I am confident it will make it all the way back to Seattle.

Alabama experienced some devastating wind storms a little while ago. The evidence was clear all up and down I-65; light poles snapped in half or bent at crazy angles, swathes of trees chewed up and knocked down, road signs completely twisted or blown over.

I slept through a good portion of Kentucky and Indiana because Francis drove two tanks of gas in a row (we usually trade drivers at fill ups). I drove the last tank in to Joliet and the Super 8 motel at 2:35 a.m. on May 6. I didn't even bother to bring my laptop out of the car. I knew I wouldn't do anything with it.

Mileage today: 723
Mileage to date: 5,930
States covered: Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois
Wildlife seen: many snowy egrets and bluebirds (at Barber MP)

Racin': One Lap of America Day 5, No Problem

2011-05-09T19:35:00.000-07:00

If you look at the 2011 One Lap of America itinerary, the track listed for Day 5 is Circuit Grand Bayou or some such nonsense. I have been to this track three times now (once for a BMW driving school and twice before with One Lap) and it has always been known as No Problem Raceway. Most of the stuff at the track, buildings, golf carts, paper ID bracelets, trucks, are all still labeled No Problem. It seems that someone new bought the track and wants to turn it into one of those country club type tracks like Monticello or Autobahn, so they had to give it a new upscale name.

Whatever. I'm going to continue to call it No Problem, the same way I call it Sears Point instead of Infineon.

So, we got to our hotel in Donaldsonville at 3:45. We stayed in bed until 7:30 and then headed out for the track about 15 miles further south into the bayou. No Problem is extremely flat and surrounded by woods and sugar cane fields. The track itself is relatively simple and I like it. Because I have done the track so much more than Francis, I did both the morning and afternoon sessions.

It was an absolutely gorgeous day. It was the coldest day on record for that day since they started keeping track back in the 1950s. Maybe the locals were shivering, but most of the One Lap competitors thought the weather was awesome. It was a bit like a summer day in the Pacific Northwest; in the high 60s with a good breeze and clear blue skies.

Before the morning session I was hanging out in line with two of the guys in my run group, Chris and Joe. Practically no-one brings a stock car to One Lap. Chris is running that black VW. It's an R32 with a turbocharged V6 motor in it. His co-driver, Josh, was also the builder of the car. His work was absolutely gorgeous. Joe's car is that green Miata, the one with the supercharged motor in it. So my supercharged BMW is kinda normal in that group!

When you look at a racetrack the first thing you look at is the longest straightaway and then figure out how to get the fastest speed out of the corner before that as that will give you the biggest bang for your buck. The front straight at No Problem is mid-length, about 1,900' and is part of the run-off for the drag strip. You enter it through a long, sweeping right had corner that runs onto the straight between two lines of concrete barriers which are only one line when they are drag racing. You can really get the car leaned over pretty far.

Once you hit the apex of the corner, you begin stepping on the gas and unwinding the wheel so that you enter the straight in a smooth and undisturbed fashion.

In the morning session I felt pretty good about my run. Come to find out I placed 55th with a time of 4:49.611. I find that kind of depressing. It's expected, but depressing. Neither Francis nor I spend much time at the track because we have so many other things to do in our lives. In fact this track time at One Lap is the first real track time we've had in two years. So, with no practice and not much talent, 55th is to be expected. I just want to be better than that. Unfortunately, the only way to get better is with seat time and I just have too many other things I'm interested in/responsible for to put that kind of time and effort into this.

My afternoon session was somewhat better. I placed 49th with a time of 4:42.350. So, that proves I can get better, it just takes some time. I managed to shave 7 seconds off my morning time and moved up 6 places. I guess I'll have to be satisfied with small improvements because there aren't going to be any great big miracles here.

While I was banging around on the track, Francis was talking with Adam Hennesey, a mechanic who is a part of one of the other teams. He described the repair we could implement and gave us a list of what we would need to accomplish it. Now all we had to do was stop an another auto parts store.

After our second run, we packed up and headed for Leeds, Alabama, just outside of Birmingham. The route we were taking runs right through Hattiesburg where I lived for 14 months from December 2005 to January 2007. I knew right where the auto parts stores were and I knew that my second most favorite barbecue place was just up the street from there. We drove to Hattiesburg, did our shopping and then had dinner at Leatha's. It was as good as I remember.

We stopped for a sit down dinner partly because we had a relatively short transit, only about 450 miles. After dinner, filling our gas tank, and stopping for a venti Americano at the local Starbucks we hit the road with me driving. I drove until the next gas stop just outside of Birmingham. We got gas and, because it was only about 35-40 more miles, I kept driving.

When we got to the hotel we had proof positive that God protects fools. As I got out to go check in, I looked around for my wallet and didn't find it in the place where it usually is, or the other back up spot. At that point, Francis said, "Oh, my God." or something like that. He pointed to my wallet which was sitting outside the car, resting against the top just behind the passenger seat and right near the gas tank filler. It had sat there for 35-40 miles of 70-75 mph freeway driving! What a nightmare it would have been if it had dropped off. First, it is highly unlikely that we would have ever found it. Second, it has everything we need for the trip; my driver's license, credit cards, debit cards, cash. Everything. The reason it was there was because that's where I set it down after using the credit card at the pump while I was pumping gas. I forgot to put it into my pocket. When you get a bit sleep deprived, you can begin to mess up simple things just by not following through all the way to the end of a process. That one could have been a disaster.

We checked in relatively early, 11:00 p.m. Instead of going to bed, I began to work on the post on CMP. I had actually intended to bring it all the way up to date, but I didn't get CMP done until about 12:30 and then just wanted to go to bed, so I did.

Mileage today: 463
Mileage to date: 5,207
States driven through:(I've been thinking of adding this feature and will play catch up here) Washington, Idaho, Montana (70%)- Day 1; Montana (30%), North Dakota, Minnesota (95%) - Day 2; Minnesota (5%), Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana (30%) - Day 3; Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia - Day 4 (OneLap Day 1); Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina - Day 5 (OL Day 2); South Carolina, Georgia, Florida - Day 6 (OL Day 3); Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana - Day 7 (OL Day 4); Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama - Day 8 (OL Day 5) 20 states so far
Wildlife seen: lots of snowy egrets around No Problem

Racin': One Lap of America Day 4, Daytona (continued)

2011-05-09T16:16:00.001-07:00

A couple of things I meant to add about Daytona.

One is a big miss on my part. When we went out to do the parade laps at lunchtime, I had my Flip video camera in my pocket and totally forgot that it was there. How cool would that have been to have in car video around the banks of Daytona? I know there are probably hundreds of YouTube videos of laps at Daytona, but none of them are shot from inside my car with Francis and I there.

In addition, before the first session, we did our first oil and filter change of One Lap.

Also, I have been remiss in recounting mileage.

Mileage today: 741 (includes all laps at Daytona and 1/4 at Gainesville)
Mileage to date: 4,744 ( includes the 673 from CMP to Daytona as well as Daytona to Gainesville to Donaldsonville)

Racin': One Lap of America Day 4, Daytona

2011-05-09T14:25:00.000-07:00

Well, it has been several days since I last posted. I have many good reasons for that (mostly lack of time and very late nights) which will become apparent as I chronicle the rest of our One Lap 2011 adventure. As of now, One Lap has been over for two days, but I am going to proceed with our story.

We arrived in Daytona Beach, Florida at about 1:45 a.m. and crashed into our beds. We got up around 6:00, got breakfast and then headed across the street to the track. Daytona is an immense complex (more written about its immensity in my posts about the Rolex 24 from late January/early February) and Francis and I were incredibly excited that we would both get to run on the track. Francis took the morning session. Here he is waiting for his run group to start. Doesn't he look handsome and race-driverish in this picture?

Here he is coming across the official start/finish line. The One Lap start/finish line was actually on the infield between Turns 4 and 5 for safety and accessibility reasons, but this is a pretty cool picture and a testament to good (lucky) timing and good living.

Once you come across start/finish on the tri-oval, you have to get the car slowed down from about 135-140 to about 60 or 70 in order to make the first turn into the infield. It's a comfort to have good reliable brakes. You go through the infield course and then go back up onto the high banks not all that far from where you left. From there you go through NASCAR Turns 1 and 2 and then onto the back straight. Two-thirds of the way down the back straight, you enter what they call The Bus Stop, a chicane that slows cars down to about 60-80 from a relatively high speed, probably 125-130 in our car. After the Bus Stop, you go back up onto the banks for NASCAR Turns 3 and 4 and then onto the tri-oval and the start/finish line. Total length of a lap; about 3.5 miles.

Francis had a really good run, placing 39th with a time of 7:18.230 for the three laps. So, he covered 10.5 miles in 7:18, that's an average speed of 87.74 miles per hour. Doesn't sound like much, but he was hustling.

At lunch time, between the morning and afternoon sessions, they let us out on the track to do several parade laps around the NASCAR oval. Speeds were limited to about 100 mph, which was just fine. It's hard to imagine that the stock cars run at speeds of 195+ on the same track. It gives you a whole new appreciation for their skill level.

The first time you enter the banking the whole world tilts. It is positively mind-blowing. Many people say they feel it is like driving in a tunnel because all you can see is asphalt in front of you, asphalt out the driver's window, asphalt out the passenger's window, and asphalt in your rear view mirror. We didn't have that problem as we ran with the top down. We could see everything.

I ran the afternoon session and proved once again that Francis is much faster than me. I placed 50th with a time of 7:34.518, so Francis was a little over 5 seconds a lap faster. Yikes!

Here I am coming out of the East Horseshoe and heading for the One Lap start/finish line. If you look very closely, you can tell it's me. It's hard because we wear the same driver's suit and helmet, but I have clear glasses and Francis always wears sunglasses. I'm kidding of course, it's practically impossible to tell who is driving. You're just going to have to take our word for it.

Once we finished the session we packed up and headed out. The route book called for us to head right to Gainesville Raceway for some drag racing; a Low ET competition and then bracket racing. Francis and I had another stop to make first at a NAPA Autoparts store just down the street.

At CMP in South Carolina we discovered that we were losing fluid out of the differential (the part of the car that takes the rotation of the driveshaft and turns it 90 degrees to power the wheels (all cars have them, some in the front, some in the rear, some at both ends)). We were both concerned because if you lose all the fluid, the gears in the differential get really hot and essentially weld themselves together. When that happens, the drive wheels lock up solid and you lose control of the car. We were not interested in that happening, so we had been monitoring the situation.

The problem is relatively common; a mechanic in the group told us that it was probably the O-ring on the output flange and that we could just top up the fluid for now and then fix it later. First, though, we had to get the drain/fill plug off the differential cover. BMW and other German automakers use a 17mm hex key to take the plug off. This is a distinctly uncommon part and size, American manufacturers use a much different system. No one on One Lap had one that we could borrow, so we went to the store to see if we could get one along with some heavier weight gear oil.

They didn't have one, but Francis McGyvered a solution for us. Did you know that if you take a Torx T-60 socket, punch the shaft out of the socket and turn it around, that you now have something pretty close to a 17mm hex key socket? I didn't either, but I do now! We put more fluid in (not much actually, the diff holds about 2 quarts and we put in about a 1 - 1 1/2 cups), got everything packed up (we were doing the work in the NAPA parking lot) and then headed for Gainesville.

I was pretty pessimistic about our chances of even running at Gainesville. We had lost a lot of time putting the fluid in and it was getting to be late afternoon/early evening as we headed across the Florida peninsula. Sure enough, the Low ET competition was over and they had begun the first round of bracket racing. We talked to the organizers and they allowed us to make a Low ET run, but not to be in the bracket racing. We lost points because of that, but were not all that concerned as we really never had a chance at a good finish in our class anyway. Francis ran a 14.334, good for 39th place. He has actually run a 14.00 before. Had he done so, we would have been in 36th.

So now it was getting to be about 7:30 pm. Gainesville is about 110 miles from Daytona and about 600+ miles from our next stop, Donaldsonville, Louisiana. 7:30 p.m. is not the best time to begin a 600 mile transit because you end up getting in extremely late. In our case, extremely late turned out to be 3:45 a.m. on May 4. Now you know why I didn't post that day!

Racin': One Lap of America Day 3, South Carolina

2011-05-04T21:33:00.000-07:00

I have not been able to write the past two nights as we got in at 1:45 and 3:45 after the last two transits. It's only 11:30, so I'm feeling significantly better.

So much has happened in so short a period of time. We have a ton of pictures and have had some very cool experiences. I'll try to share a flavor of it with you.

When last I wrote, we had arrived in Lancaster, South Carolina. Monday morning arrived with a warm and sunny welcome. We made our to Carolina Motorsports Park, about 15-20 minutes away. Usually when we do One Lap, Francis and I split the tracks. CMP was his as he has done it before and the learning curve for him will be less steep than for me. I've done it once in the past too, but his experience is more recent. Anyway Francis got himself ready, donning the track suit we share and heading down toward where he had the car parked.

Francis did a great job driving; he usually does. Here he is hard at work between Turns 2 and 3 at CMP.

He placed pretty well (44th with a time of 6:02.474 for three laps) and brought us up in the standings. We're not all that concerned for a number of reasons. One, our car, though considered powerful by most people we know in our regular existence, is considered somewhat mediocre here. At One Lap 500, 600 and 700 horsepower cars are common (and the thing most common about the highest horsepower ones is how often they break). Two, neither Francis or I works hard at being an excellent track driver. I would say it is more within his grasp than mine, but neither of us is putting in the effort to get there. To do so would be to diminish something else in our lives and is a choice we have consciously made. Three, we do not get the opportunity to practice on these circuits on a regular basis. Practice is good; more practice is better. So, when we do well, we're happy, but we also know that we are probably going to place in the 40s or 50s overall. We're here to have a good time.

In his second session, Francis put in another great drive; this time placing 28th with a time of 5:46.867. It's not possible to compare the times straight across because they changed the track configuration, but it was still a great effort. Here he is charging down the front straight at over 100 mph.

I mentioned earlier that the higher horsepower cars break more often. We have had an extraordinary amount of attrition over these past few days. At CMP, no fewer than 4 cars broke. This Porsche Turbo overheated and spread coolant over about 1/3rd of the course. Bad Porsche! Bad!

The theory here is that on oil feed line to the turbo came loose on this Mitsubishi Evo. Spraying hot engine oil onto a turbo that is glowing red is generally a great recipe for fire. That's what happened here.

Another Mistubishi Evo cracked its turbo housing. The hot gasses escaping from it fried the shifter mechanism (the turbo was blowing extremely hot air directly on the shifter cables and melted them).

There have been other casualties. Those are the ones I have pictures of at the moment. Fortunately for everyone, the only casualties here have been mechanical; none of the broken cars have caused injury of any type to any of the drivers.

We left CMP in the mid afternoon (3:00 ish) and drove 140 miles northwest across South Carolina to the BMW Performance Center for an autocross on their driver training course. We received an excellent visit from Kevin York, a racer and driving instructor I've known for several years and a man I consider a good friend. Francis placed 47th. Here he is taking off.

Once we were through at the BMW Center, we packed up and headed for Daytona Beach, Florida. We arrived there at 1:45 a.m. on May 3. It was late, so I didn't do any update on the days activities, even though they had been quite exciting.

It is now early morning (12:44 a.m.) on Thursday, May 5th. I am quite tired and even though I still have two days of adventures to share stories about, I am going to bed. Tomorrow will be another jam packed day and then we have a 700 mile transit to start at the end of it. If I don't get some sleep, I will not be very useful on the drive. Francis is driving Barber Motorsports Park tomorrow. It is a new circuit to both of us, so it should be another adventure. Good night, all.

Racin': One Lap of America Days 1 and 2

2011-05-01T19:14:00.000-07:00

We started the official part our One Lap adventure yesterday in the morning rising early and getting ourselves over to Tire Rack for the wet skidpad event at about 8:00 a.m.. The drill for each of the events is similar. Show up at the prescribed venue. Empty all of your stuff out of the car, both to make it lighter and less dangerous (you don't want to have a bunch of distracting stuff flying around when you are making speed). Compete in the event. Repack the car and trailer. Move on to the next event wherever it may be. For this first event, it was only 8 miles away from our hotel, an easy transit.

A skidpad is a circle of concrete or asphalt usually 200' or 300' feet in diameter. Car manufacturers, tire manufacturers, tire resellers (like Tire Rack) and car enthusiasts use them to get a systematic idea of the handling properties of either a tire or a suspension component or set of suspension components. The idea is to drive around the circle as fast as one can in one direction for a few laps and then reverse and drive in the other direction. If you carefully time how long it takes to get around the circle you can use that time and a little bit of math to figure out the average speed around the circle. It is possible (don't ask me how, because at the moment I don't know) to convert that speed into an g rating. This is the most common way that all of the above folks refer to the performance of a tire; i.e., "it is capable of generating .95g on dry pavement."

So the first One Lap event is a skidpad event. In addition, because wet tire performance degrades more quickly than dry performance, the first skidpad event is always done in the wet. Sometimes Mother Nature cooperates and rains all over you; other days you have to make your own. Tire Rack's skidpad is fully plumbed with sprinklers to keep the entire surface completely soaked.

Francis and I have, over the last 6 runnings of One Lap, developed a system for sharing the events. He usually lets me have my pick of them. I am smart enough to know that he should get some that he will enjoy. Anyway, with some of them we just pick and over the years, I have been the one elected to do the skidpad events. We put a new tire on the car this year, a set of Michelin Pilot Super Sports. This is Michelin's newest tire in the Pilot series, which is their highest performance series of tire. For the past couple of years (after Bridgestone stopped making the Pole Position SO-3) we have been using the Michelin Pilot Sport PS 2 tire. They are discontinuing that tire and replacing it with the Super Sport. They claim that is has dry performance as good as the PS 2, wet performance that is better than the PS 2 and almost 2 x the durability. I will have the opportunity to test all of those claims during this 18 day period. So far, their claim that the wet performance is better is absolutely true in my book. My wet skidpad result was .778 g, good for 22nd place overall. We are off to a good start.

The next event took place at Grissom Air Force base in Peru, Indiana, 82 miles south of Tire Rack in South Bend. The local SCCA (Sports Car Club of America, not Seattle Cancer Care Alliance) chapter put on an extremely well organized autocross for us. Autocrossing is an automotive competition usually held in a large parking lot, or in this case an the apron of a military landing field. A course is laid out on the surface using cones to indicate the direction you are to drive in. You are timed from the start line to the finish line. Low time is the winner. Your time is measured to the thousandth of a second. For this event each One Lap team would get three runs; the best of three would count.

For the inexperienced, and that would include Francis and I, at first it just looks like a giant sea of orange traffic cones. Once you get a chance to walk around it a bit, it becomes more understandable. Francis ran the autocross for us, so he did the walkaround. For his first run, the first time he had ever done an autocross and the first time Francis had driven the Roadster at competitive speeds in almost two years, he ran a 61.xxx (don't remember the decimal portion). Not great, considering that the fast time of the day was 50.4xx, but not horrible either as there were many competitors at 67 or more seconds. On his second run, having familiarized himself with the course and the Roadster, he cut 4 seconds off and ran a 57.xxx.

By the time he got ready for his third run, Francis was relaxed and ready to go for it. The weather was sunny and windy, but it was a perfect day for a short-sleeved, top-down autocross drive.

After sitting in the staging lanes, he rolled up to the starting line and, on the starter's signal, took off!

He flew through the course and posted his best time of the day, 56.775, on his last attempt. He was flying low moving through the cones.

We repacked the car and trailer and headed for the next event, a time trial on the Summit Point road race course. Summit Point is in West Virginia, up near the pointy part of the top of Virginia. We actually stayed at a Shoney's Inn in Winchester, Virginia for the night. Summit Point is 550 miles from Peru, Indiana, so we had several hours of driving to do. We arrived at Shoney's at 1:45 am today, so I did not spend any time writing a post (which is why you are getting two days in one right now).

The Shoney's was nothing fancy anyway and I would have been surprised if they even had wireless access. We slept there for about 4.5 hours, got up and headed for the track. That may not seem like very much sleep, but it was horizontal, quiet, and vibration-less. All three of those are not achievable in any car, so even a shortish sleep in a hotel is preferable to none at all. Summit Point was about 15 miles from our hotel, so we got there around 8 or so, signed in at the gate (at every venue you have to sign a waiver that says something to the effect of "If I maim or kill myself or anyone else, I will not hold the organizers responsible." You don't have to sign, but if you don't, they don't let you come on the property either) and proceeded to the paddock where we parked and got the trailer unhooked and the car unloaded.

We decided that I would run both time trials today and Francis would do both of tomorrow's at Carolina Motorsports Park. I'm in pretty much the same boat as Francis; I hadn't driven the Roadster at competitive speeds in almost two years. To say I am rusty is a disservice to oxidizing metal. I have never run this track before, so that added to the difficulty factor.

Because Summit Point is relatively close to Washington, D.C., many of the BMW club members in the Capitol Region regard this as their home track. An old One Lap competitor/friend of ours, Neil Simon, who lives in D.C., was there. He's not competing this year, but came out to say hello to old friends. He took me into the track's classroom and explained the racing line on a big map of the track. The racing line is the theoretical fastest way around the course. That explanation is all well and good, but doesn't really give you any of the visual landmarks you need when negotiating the track at speed.

I was really nervous about my first run. The combination of a long lay off and a brand new unfamiliar track was part of it. The other part of it was my competitive nature bashing up against an honest evaluation of my skill level. To put it charitably, I'm not that fast. After my first time trial, I found our just how not-fast I was.

For any of the road race time trials, the procedure is the same. You are directed out onto the track and given the opportunity to run one reconnaissance lap. You cannot learn a new track in one lap, but it is better than nothing. At least all of the corners won't be a total surprise. After your reconnaissance lap, you line up at the start/finish line with the others in your run group. You are waved off one at a time, with enough space between you that there generally won't be any possibility of passing or getting passed. You run three laps and then come in off the track.

In our run group I was slotted ahead of Pete Zekauskas. Pete and his brother Matt have been running One Lap at least as long as Francis and I. They are really good guys and are fun to hang around with. Unfortunately for me, Pete had done a driving school at Summit Point a month or so ago, so he knew the track. With him behind me, I wondered if he would pass me. The Roadster is much faster in a straight line than their car, but skill in the corners and knowing how to set up for them, is a large advantage.

My first lap was ok. I was getting a feel for the track. Here's as picture of me coming through Turn 10 and onto the front straight which is pretty long.

The car is just coming down to the apex of the corner and is leaned over pretty well as I am already on the gas and accelerating through the corner.

On lap 2 Pete had caught up with me by Turn 10. Here he is chasing after me on the main straight.

I'm actually pulling away from him here because I have way more horsepower and torque, but he would catch me later in lap 3. As I came out of turn 1 and 2, I noticed that I had not turned the automatic stability control off. This is a good thing to do on the track, but a bad thing to do on the street. On the track, you know it is off and are aware of the trade offs; you get better performance but need to be careful as you could spin out if you put too much power down in the wrong place (like in a wet corner). I had forgotten to do this; it would bite me. Because the ASC was on, when I hit the gas in a slow corner, the wheels would want to spin. The car, sensing this, would cut back on power and make things slow down for was seemed like an eternity. Not what you want to have happen when you know someone is chasing you.

Pete caught me in the back section of the track and I let him by. If someone comes up behind you, whether it on the track or the highway, they are going faster than you. The polite and courteous thing to do it to pull over and let them by. I was polite and let Pete by. Unfortunately that slowed us both down. I ended up in 66th spot, running a 5:10.844 for three laps. That meant that I would start in the very last run group in the afternoon session.

As we waited what seemed an interminable amount of time, it began to get dark and sprinkle rain. I remembered to turn the ASC off this time and felt much better about my run. Here I am running through Turn 8/9 and working hard. Francis found a great place to take pictures from on the back side of the course, a photographers' platform at the top of a grandstand.

You can see just how dark it had gotten. Here's a shot of my halfway through Turn 9 and accelerating toward the track out point.

Unfortunately for me, the time clock does not lie. I actually had a slower time in the second event, posting a 5:20.985. This was good for 65th place and will definitely drop us in the standings.

We packed up the car and hooked up the trailer. We were the very last competitors to leave the lot. We pointed ourselves toward Kershaw, South Carolina and Carolina Motorsports Park, 400 miles away. Because we were leaving at 3:30, we got into our hotel by 9:30 p.m.. I've spent the time since then downloading photos from the camera to the computer, uploading photos to Photobucket and writing this post.

I have more to write about why I come on One Lap and some of the conflicting emotions it brings up in me, but it is now after midnight and I am going to sign off for the night. I will write of this another time. 6:30 a.m. wake up calls come early.

Mileage today: 445 (including Summit Point track miles)
Mileage to date: 3,330
Wildlife seen: Francis saw two deer and we think we saw a coyote in North Carolina.

Racin': A day without Driving

2011-04-29T15:35:00.000-07:00

Francis and I spent the day in South Bend, most of it at the Tire Rack facility. After waking up and getting breakfast, we drove over there and began our preparations. We washed the car and then applied all of the stickers to it. Once that was complete, we did our technical inspection.

The tech inspection is pretty minimal; they expect you to have gone through the car mechanically. All they are doing is checking your racing suit and helmet and that you have all of the approved stickers on in the correct places.

One of the coolest things about One Lap is that is like summer camp in a way. You see the same folks year after year; there are always some new ones and some who do not return, but you just pick up where you left off a year (or three in our case) ago. The camraderie of sharing this crazy automotive adventure is infectious.

We spent quite a while wandering around talking with all of the competitors we knew and meeting a new bunch of folks as well. It's really interesting to see what cars people bring, what they have done to cars the have run before, and generally what's going on in their lives.

In early afternoon, we changed the brakes from our street pads to our race pads. We'll run those for the next week now, changing them once we get back to South Bend on Saturday, May 7. We had a drivers' meeting at about 4, then packed up and came back to the hotel.

Francis is out driving around in the Roadster. It is a beautiful sunny day, windy and somewhat warm; a welcome change after three days of rain and snow. He's going to see if he can find an aerosol cleaner for our MAF (mass air flow sensor). It has been suggested that if it is dirty, it may be contributing to the misfire codes we keep getting. We'll see.

Miles driven: incidental
Wildlife seen: none.

Racin': Driving to South Bend: Day 3, Esko to South Bend

2011-04-28T19:44:00.000-07:00

As I stood in the bathroom at Mary and Phil's house this morning brushing my teeth, I looked out the window and saw snow falling to the ground. There was a light dusting on the Roadster from overnight, as well. After having breakfast, re-packing the car and saying my goodbyes, I started out at 8:00 a.m.. The time and temperature sign at Esko High School read 8:03 a.m., 34 degrees.

I drove into Duluth encountering the second worst traffic of the trip, it took about 30 minutes to go 5 or 6 miles. I crossed the river into Superior, Wisconsin and then headed south on Route 53. Just out of Superior it started snowing and continued snowing for the next 100 or so miles, until about 50 miles north of Eau Claire. The rest of the trip was relatively uneventful, just a lot of miles on Interstate 94 heading east through Wisconsin and then into Illinois.

The trailer is behaving itself, but that one headlight we worked on Monday night is out again. I don't think it's the bulb, but we're going to have to do some investigating to make sure.

Chicago was its usual traffic fest (yes, it was the worst traffic of the trip). To top that off, the tolls are outrageous when you are towing a trailer. I probably dropped about $20-25 in the area right around Chicago.

I just got back from the South Bend Regional Airport where I picked up Francis, my son and co-driver. We'll be joined at the hip for the next 8 days of automotive fun and mayhem.

Mileage today: 570
Mileage to date: 2,202
Wildlife seen: 1 osprey (also, I forgot to add that yesterday I saw a wild turkey and Tuesday I saw 6 pronghorn antelope and a crane (I think it was a sandhill crane but am not sure).

Racin':Driving to South Bend: Day 2, Billings to Esko

2011-04-27T19:30:00.000-07:00

Not much excitement today, just a lot of time in the car.

I got up at 5 and was on the road with breakfast in a Mickey D's bag by 5:50. Before I got going I checked the fault codes in the computer. I had misfires on 4 different cylinders; 1, 2, 3, and 4. I also had an oxygen sensor (pre catalytic converter) limit on cylinders 1-3 and 4-6 (which makes sense with all the misfires). Nothing much to do about it at this point, just keep an eye on it I guess. I did put that one bottle of fuel injector cleaner in the gas tank yesterday. I'll do another one tomorrow, or maybe wait a couple days and do it.

I drove 829 miles in about 12.5 hours and am now in Esko, Minnesota at my sister and brother-in-law's house. Normally when I'm driving to One Lap, the weather is good enough for me to roll with the top down. So far, the top has been up almost the whole time. Yesterday, it was raining off and on all day. Today was the same. When I got to Moorehead (first city in Minnesota across the Red River from Fargo, North Dakota) I put the top down as I finished getting gas. That lasted for about 50 miles. Up ahead as I drove east on Highway 10 I could see dark grey clouds. I figured that I would be getting rained on soon, so I pulled over and put the top back up.

10 minutes later I was driving through a snowstorm. Then I remembered, "Oh, yeah. I'm in Minnesota. It snows on Mother's Day sometimes." Still, it made me nervous. Even though the road stayed bare and wet, you never really know what the traction is like until you lose it. Not cool, especially when towing a fairly heavy trailer. The snow kept up through most of central Minnesota and turned to rain as I approached the Duluth area. My sister, Mary, and I went out for a bit and as we returned to her house, it started snowing here. As long as it doesn't stick, I'll be ok.

Mileage total: 1,632
Wildlife seen today: 3 bald eagles, 5 pronghorn antelope, many hawks hunting by the highway, wild Canada geese (not like those fat, tame ones around Greenlake in Seattle)

Racin': Driving to South Bend: Day 1, Seattle to Billings

2011-04-26T19:18:00.000-07:00

Got to bed last night at 11:30 after packing the trailer and working on the headlights with Francis (one was burnt out, the other had to be aimed better). I got up at 3:00 a.m. so that I could get out of the house by 4:00. I wanted to get to Missoula, Montana in time for lunch with our other son, Walter, who goes to school at U of M there. I got there, but it took some doing!

Everything seemed fine as I headed east on I-90 out of the Puget Sound lowlands and into the Cascades. It started to snow just before Snoqualmie Pass which made me a bit nervous because I have high-performance summer tires on the car and they are as wide as steamrollers, not the best for driving in snow. In addition the rubber compound in the tires is meant to work in the Spring, Summer and Fall. In the cold it gets quite hard. Luckily the air temperatures were not that cold. I hit snow several more times during the day, but the roads stayed bare and wet, so it was quite safe.

On the way up to Snoqualmie Pass, the car started running really rough and immediately threw a Check Engine light. The car felt like it did the time I blew a head gasket, with two cylinders not firing properly. If I blew a head gasket, my One Lap adventure would be over practically before it had gotten started. I was seriously worried. This time, it felt like only one cylinder had dropped out. I started to come down the other side of the Pass and pulled off the highway at Cle Elum to take a look. I shut the car off and restarted it and it ran on all 6 cylinders. Yay! I still have to pull out my code reader and take a look at what faults are stored in the computer, but will probably do that tomorrow morning before I take off.

The next bit of excitement occured at the first gas stop. I decided to push all the way to Ritzville, forsaking all the open gas stations at Moses Lake. I have this thing about getting the most out of every tank of gas. I want to keep driving as long as possible and stop as infrequently as possible. Pushing gas stops helps me do that, but it can make things nerve wracking on occasion, like this morning. When the Reserve light comes on, I know that I have about 30 miles before the tank runs dry. When the light came on, I was passing a mileage sign; Ritzville 31 miles. I knew that if I got there, I would be running on fumes. I wasn't actually all that worried because Francis and I had put a 6 gallon container of gas in the trailer, but it is a bit of a pain to do it on the side of the road if you don't have to.

Anyway, as I was pulling in to the Shell station in Ritzville, the engine coughed. I had just made it. The Roadster drank 13.298 gallons of premium. The specifications in the owner's manual say that the tank capacity is 13.2 gallons including the reserve. I guess the extra .098 gallons went into the filler neck. That is cutting it much to close and I have modified my behavior somewhat. The worst part of this is that the car got 17.19 mpg on that first tank. The trailer is extra heavy this year will all sorts of tools and stuff. Probably too heavy, but there's not much to do about that except to consume the consumables as quickly as possible. We have a cooler strapped to the tongue of the trailer with 36 Diet Pepsi s and 30 16 oz Talking Rains. That's about 57 pounds of liquids, not counting the ice! Guess I'd better start drinking.

Across the street from the Shell station is a Starbucks. I had finished my morning coffee brewed at home and was ready for another, so I drove across the street and into the parking lot. As I did, the wheels on the trailer locked up. They shouldn't as they are just spinning freely on the axles, so I got out to look. The passenger side trailer tire was wedged against the back frame and the driver's side tire was wedged against the front frame. The curbing on that street in Ritzville is very steep. I must have hit it at an angle and twisted the axle on the leaf springs. I dragged the trailer forward into the parking lot and got to work.

I could see that all I had to do was jack up the trailer, loosen the bolts holding the axle to the leaf spring via two big U shaped bolts and then move one wheel forward and the other wheel back. It took about an hour to get that done, but I did get it done. Those bolts are really tight now. I rewarded myself with the Americano that I had been wanting since earlier.

I was pretty nervous getting back on the highway and up to speed, but everything seems to be holding together well. I've put almost 600 miles on since the repair. Of course I am obsessively checking it each time I stop for gas or food or whatever, but it is holding up so far.

I called Francis to let him know about the Check Engine light and the trailer snafu. He was impressed with the way I McGyvered the axle. Later in the morning, he called me and suggested that I run some fuel injector cleaner through the motor. I've never done that before and now that this supercharged S52 motor has 203,000+ miles on it, maybe it's about time. I picked up some at an auto parts store in Missoula after lunch with Walter at 5 Guys Burgers and Fries and put it in at my next gas stop in Butte. Gas mileage had been in the 17s all day; very depressing. The tank with the injector cleaner came in at 19.25 mpg! God, I hope that continues.

I'm in a Motel 6 in West Missoula and am going to bed soon. I've traveled 803 miles today and have another 800 mile day in front of me tomorrow if I am going to get to my sister and brother-in-law's house in Esko, Minnesota as planned. Going to get started at about 5:00, so I'd better get to bed soon.

Racin': Preparing to Leave for One Lap of America 2011

2011-04-25T10:41:00.000-07:00

The past week has been full of preparations for One Lap of America 2011.

The Roadster spent last week at Car Tender getting its needs attended to; new tie rods, new front hubs and bearings, new front brake rotors, rebuilt front brake calipers, a new pulley/tensioner assembly for the supercharger belt and a new blower belt as well, new front wheels and four brand new Michelin Pilot Super Sport tires. It was not a cheap week to be the owner of the Roadster.

The trailer is getting refurbished as well. Francis has been doing all of the work on that. He made sure that all of the lights work, paying particular attention to the grounds for them and buying a just-in-case replacement set (guaranteeing that we would not need them). New Bearing Buddies on the wheels will ensure that there is always grease in the bearings (no more road side repairs at 8 pm on a Sunday night in Oklahoma, thank you very much.). In addition, he raised the spring perches in the back so that we would have more tire clearance when the trailer is heavily loaded.

I'm going to leave work early today and do a final bit of shopping for stuff for the road and then go home to pack the trailer and my bag for 18 days on the road. I expect that by the time May 13th rolls around and I am back in Seattle, I will have covered about 10,000 miles. I'll be writing posts from the road.

I leave tomorrow morning at 4:00 a.m. heading east. I'm going to stop in Missoula, Montana for lunch with Walter and then end the day in Billings.

Readin': G-Dog and the Homeboys

2011-02-20T20:56:00.000-08:00

After reading Tattoos on the Heart by Father Greg Boyle, S.J., I wanted to read that book's predecessor, G-Dog and the Homeboys: Father Greg Boyle and the Gangs of East Los Angeles by Celeste Fremon. The first edition was published in 1995. The new edition that I read had been updated with an Introduction and Epilogue by Celeste written in 2008, along with a forward by Tom Brokaw.

Ms. Fremon originally intended to write a simple Sunday magazine article on Greg Boyle. She became so interested in what he was doing, and eventually, so involved in it, that she came to write G-Dog. It is an extraordinary work as it portrays East L. A. Mexican-American gang members, not as the monsters they are characterized as in the news, but as the human beings they are in all their flaws and glory.

It is obvious to me that she gained these people's trust because the interviews in the book are extraordinary. The general structure of the book is a chronology of the work Father Boyle did over 6 years in East L. A.. At the end of many of the chapters there is a break and then a first-person narrative by one of the young men or women she had come to know. These are probably the most heartbreaking parts of the book. They speak with such honesty and in so many cases with so little hope. I found myself wanting to reach out to them to give them the boost up and out that they needed. I also knew that most of what was written happened 15 or more years in the past, so that lots of life had happened to them since then.

In her Epilogue, Ms. Fremon is eloquent and factual about what will work to fix the gang problem. It is not the standard societal response of more prisons and tougher sentencing; all that does is perpetuate the problem. The fix is harder, but so much more worthwhile; it involves making a commitment to work with these people and put in place the structures that will help them to build resilience in their lives. I don't intend to rewrite the book here, it is all very well done and said much more eloquently than I could manage. I found her arguments to be sane, evidence based and profoundly sensible.

I know that a long-term commitment to people is what is needed to help them break cycles of poverty, intergenerational abuse, and long term traumatic stress. I can only hope that more people with the ability to offer help will actually do so. G-Dog and the Homeboys is proof that this approach works, as long as there are structures in place to make it work.

Readin': Two Books by Tarquin Hall

2011-02-20T20:36:00.000-08:00

I've recently finished two books by Tarquin Hall, The Case of the Missing Servant, and The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing.The books are mysteries and they share a protagonist, Mr. Vish Puri, founder and managing director of Most Private Investigators Ltd. The stories are set in India. Mr. Puri lives in Delhi, actually what was once a rural suburb that has been swallowed up by the city as it expanded.

Vish Puri, as a private investigator spends most of his time on marriage cases. In India with all its arranged marriages, there is a need, as the society expands, for someone to be able to vet a possible marriage partner. In the past when village life was slower and everyone known, it was easier for families to do it on their own. Now that things have expanded and mixed to a great degree, that is no longer possible. Vish Puri serves that need.

Each of the books sets up a devilishly deceptive case well beyond the standard matrimonial investigation. In each Mr. Puri makes use of the many operatives that he has working for him. They all have interesting nicknames that he has given them; Tubelight, Facecream, Flush, Handbrake, and Door Stop (the lazy office boy).

The country of India and its inhabitants are as much a character in the stories as anything else and it all rings very true. Mr. Puri is of Punjab descent and I am beginning, now that I have finished the second book, to be able to read without constant reference to the glossary for the names of foods, rituals, and small common expressions. In fact, I now know a couple of swear words in Punjab!

In each book, Vish Puri is able to untangle what seems to be an impossibly difficult puzzle with persistence, a remarkable ability to disguise himself, his many operatives, and an extraordinary understanding of human nature. Each book is quite satisfying and stands on its own; no need to have read the first in order to enjoy the second.

The books are relatively recent. I hope that Tarquin Hall is hard at work on a third Vish Puri mystery, as I await it with eager anticipation. Let's hope that Vish has a long run as a character; I quite enjoy him.

Racin': Videos of The Rolex 24 at Daytona

2011-02-02T18:47:00.000-08:00

Last weekend, Francis and I journeyed to Daytona Beach, Florida and Daytona Speedway for the 49th running of the annual, season-beginning sports car race. We left Seattle late Thursday night and arrived in Orlando around 7 a.m. on Friday, picked up our rental car and drove about an hour north to Daytona Beach. We spent much time walking around the Speedway which is truly immense. Once you see the videos you'll have an idea of just how huge it is.

On Friday afternoon they held the Continental Tire Sports Car Challenge, a race for two different classes of cars; Street Touring and Grand Sport (the hotter of the two). The race was either 2.5 or 3 hours long, I can't remember which. I also had not yet remembered that my Flip Mino HD was in the pocket of my vest, so there are no videos of that race.

We checked in at our hotel on the beach in Daytona Beach Shores after the race. It was fantastic. Right on the beach with nothing between us and the sand except for a patio with a hot tub and swimming pool built into it.

Saturday morning the weather was absolutely gorgeous; mid- to high-60s, no clouds and bright blue sky. There was a whole bunch of racing related stuff going on at the track, so we got there around 10 am. Little did Francis know that we wouldn't be leaving for another 13 hours! This was my third time at the Rolex 24, so I knew what a cool phenomenon a 24 hour race is; he had yet to learn.

For a good portion of the day we sat very high in the main grandstands, almost on the Start/Finish line and just 5 or 6 rows under the suites. All of the videos are taken from that vantage point. You can get a sense of just how big the place is when you see the videos. The main NASCAR oval is 2.5 miles around. The Rolex 24 uses all but about 100 yards of the track, but adds a long infield section for a 3.56 mile total lap length.

The first video was shot on Saturday afternoon after a full-course yellow (caution). The field gets all bunched up behind the pace car and as they come off NASCAR Turn 4 and onto the front straight, the pace car dives into pit lane and the field goes roaring by. Turn your sound way up and you'll get a sense of just how loud those suckers are!

The next video is also of a restart, this one taking place on Saturday night after another full course caution. I stayed with the lead car for a long portion of the complete lap so you could get an idea of how fast they are going and how big the track really is (and also how excellent our seats were).

The last video is the most unusual one of the trio. Every year during the running of the Rolex 24 at about 10 or 10:30 p.m. they have a fireworks show. It's not all that long (and I didn't capture the very beginning of it), but it's a pretty high quality show and it's all going on while the racers are screaming by at 160+ miles an hour on the back straight. The shoot the fireworks off from the middle of Lake Lloyd. I don't know if you noticed in the two earlier videos, but there is a lake, a 24 acre lake, along one side of the Daytona infield. When they originally built the track, they dug all the dirt to support the 31 degree banking in turns 1 -4 from the middle of the track. Once they saw the size of the hole, they decided to fill it with water. The lake is actually large enough for them to hold water skiing shows on (and they do). Anyway, the fireworks are cool and just a bit bizarre.

About a half hour later, after 13 hours at the track, Francis and I went back to our hotel and grabbed about 6 hours sleep. Sunday's weather was even better, being a bit warmer and with a bit less breeze. We returned to the track around 8 am after checking out of our hotel and still had 7.5 hours of racing left to watch. We only got to see 6.5 hours of it because we knew that we had to leave enough time to drive to and navigate the Orlando Airport for our 6 pm flight. The Rolex 24 is a cool event. I think Francis may be addicted; I know I am.

The really cool thing is that we get to run on that track in that configuration during One Lap of America 2011 in early May. I'll write more about One Lap in future posts.

Readin': Tatoos on the Heart

2011-01-25T13:58:00.000-08:00

Fr. Greg Boyle has written an incredible book. It has been a while since a reading a book has affected me so often. I found myself tearing up over and over again reading the stories of his experiences in the Los Angeles projects.

Boyle has been a Jesuit priest for 25 years and has spent most of his time in and around the same parish in L A situated between two housing projects, home to many of the gangs. He started an organization called Homeboy Industries whose motto is, "Nothing stops a bullet like a job." The organization gives jobs to as many gang related individuals as they can and helps them up and out.

The book, subtitled The Power of Boundless Compassion, is astonishing. In it, Fr. Boyle explains his ministry, and by extension, our call to ministry in eloquent, poetic terms. The book is truly inspiring and one whose impact will be with me for a long time. His theology is sound, compassionate and grounded. He illustrates his points with stories of his homies and the experiences he has had with them. I read it for the stories to begin with, but realized shortly after beginning that this was an intensely spiritual work. It should give anyone who is struggling with work in what may appear to be a hopeless situation the fortitude to persevere. I know it has inspired me to look at my life and what I do with it in a new way.

A life-changing book, if you let it.

Hoops: Dawg Bites Wildcat; UW 85 - U of Arizona 68

2011-01-21T13:36:00.000-08:00

Last night's game at the newly renamed Alaska Airlines Arena at Hec Edmundsen Pavilion proved to be as good a game as many people predicted. With UW at #1 and UA at #2 in the Pac-10, it promised to be a good one.

It was.

The game was tight for much of the time with the Huskies generally keeping a 5-8 point lead, but letting it dwindle down a couple of times and even having Arizona get ahead a few times. With about 5 minutes left in the game, UW started pulling away, eventually winning by 17.

Isaiah Thomas (22), Justin Holiday (22), and Matthew Bryan-Amaning (18) proved their worth once again as they combined for 62 of UW's points. IT and MBA seem almost hard-wired together they are playing so well. Several of Zeke's assists were aimed right at MBA and he delivered each time. Two assists come to mind; both alley-oop passes. The first, to MBA floated high to the right of the hoop as MBA grabbed it in his right hand and thundered it down. The second went to Venoy Overton, which was, in itself, quite a surprise. With V coming in from the left baseline, IT hung the ball up to the left of the rim. V grabbed it with both hands and flushed it down. Both moves brought the raucous crowd to their feet.

Arizona is a good team. One tactic they used well that I thought should have been called more closely though, is their screening. I have nothing against a team that sets a good hard pick on an opposing player. That's an essential part of the game and one that every good team must learn to cope with. What I have a problem with is when the screening player moves with the defender after the pick to continue keeping them out of the play. This gives an unfair advantage to the offense because the defense is now playing4 on 5 with one player completely screened out. From my vantage point, that's what Arizona was doing very effectively. Maybe I'm becoming a UW homer, but I don't think we do the same thing when we're on offense. Our picks are clean and we use them well, both on the ball and away from the ball to get shooters free.

Anyway, it was a great game. Well played by both teams.

Readin': The First Rule

2011-01-16T14:20:00.000-08:00

I have a weakness for what I consider to be literary popcorn; the modern detective novel. I tend to go through them relatively quickly, usually just 1 or 2 sittings. As a result, I almost never buy them in hardback, only paper.

My latest read has been The First Rule by Robert Crais. Mr Crais has a series of books out whose main character is a wise guy private eye (my favorite kind, along the lines of Robert Parker's Spencer and Marcus Didius Falco in Lindsay Davis' series) by the name of Elvis Cole. Elvis has a partner in his Los Angeles-based detective agency named Joe Pike. Joe is the sidekick Elvis needs when the going gets rough, sort of like Hawk is to Spencer.

Mr. Crais has started writing books that feature Joe Pike as the main character with Elvis serving as sidekick when there's some detecting to be done (Joe is more of a doer than a detector). The First Rule is the second Joe Pike novel. The third, The Sentry is already out in hardback, but I'll either have to wait a year for the paperback or get it from the library. I just can't justify $25+ for such a short read.

Joe is a man of action; a former Marine, former mercenary, former L.A. cop. He has been described by another reviewer as " a Zen warrior-priest" and that seems a pretty accurate assessment. He's entirely self sufficient, deadly with weapons or without, and a truly decent guy. One thing I really like about Crais' writing is that his characters are real and believable. I end up caring a lot about Joe and Elvis because I have witnessed them do so many good things whether those things get rewarded or not.

The First Rule tells the story of what happens after one of "Joe's guys", a former mercenary that Joe hadn't seen in 10 years, is executed (along with his whole family) in a home invasion. Joe gets involved and gets to the bottom of it, but not before running into the Serbian gangs, the ATF, and a plot to get 3,000 AK-47s into the country.

I love Joe's sense of loyalty and his willingness to put everything on the line in order to find out what went wrong in Frank's life and make sure that justice is served. The ending is quite surprising, but also very satisfying. The bad guys get it, in the end and the good guys come out ahead. We get to see a surprisingly tender side of Joe in his relations with a 10 month-old that is a part of the story.

A very satisfying and recommended read. If you haven't every read anything by Robert Crais, I probably wouldn't start with this one, but you could as it stands on its own well.

When I read an author, especially if they have a series of books, I like to start at the beginning and then move through the books in chronological order of publication because then you can see how the author develops all of the individual characters over time. Also, so of the little references made to previous adventures become much richer if you have already read those.

Raisin' Fish: The cycle starts again

2011-01-14T13:11:00.000-08:00

This morning at 8:30 I picked up 70,000 coho salmon eggs from the Skykomish river strain at the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife's Issaquah Hatchery. I brought them back to Lake Forest Park and McAleer Creek and Francis and I loaded them all into the incubator. For a video overview of the process, scroll down a couple of posts for the 4 videos I put up a couple of weeks ago. The middle two will give you a good idea of what we did today.

Now the daily vigilance of checking the outlet pipe of the incubator begins. As long as there is water flowing out there, then there is water flowing through the system. The eggs should hatch in the next couple of weeks. From there it'll be another 3.5 months (more or less) until they are ready to release. The whole process is driven by the temperature of the water that the eggs/alevin/fry are in. The warmer the water, the faster they grow. Of course, the colder the water is, the more oxygen it carries, so there is a balance to be achieved there (not that I can really do anything about the temperature of McAleer Creek beyond making sure that we have lots of overhanging vegetation to shade it so it won't heat up unnecessarily).

I love working in the water with the little fishes.

Readin': Unbroken

2011-01-12T13:58:00.000-08:00

Laura Hillenbrand is a great writer. She writes non-fiction that reads as well as any novel. Her first book was Seabiscuit in 2000. That book was quite popular and very good. It eventually got made into a movie and rightly so. Because she can tell a story clearly and well, because she is able to bring the characters in her stories to life in a way that makes us care about them, because she is able to convey the inherent drama in the story she is telling; her books already read like a movie script.

Her latest book, Unbroken, A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption is no different. The main focus of the book is Louis Zemperrini. Louie was a boyhood hooligan and an Olympic runner who came close to breaking (and perhaps would have had things been different) the 4:00 minute mile barrier. He ran in the 1936 Olympics in the 5,000 meter race as a 19-year-old against 26-30 year olds and placed fourth. It was only the fourth time he had run a race at that distance.

World War II intervened. Louie became a bombardier in the Army Air Force, the precursor to the USAF. He was aboard a B-24 that crashed in the Pacific while looking for another plane that had gone down. He and the other two survivors spent 47 days on an inflatable raft, longer than any humans had. At the end of that, they were, unfortunately, picked up by a Japanese boat. Louie spent the next 2 1/2 years in various Japanese POW camps.

Unbroken is a brutal, hopeful, magnificent book. After reading it, I have so much admiration for what people are able to overcome. Louie had a hard time for several years after returning to the US, but in the end made it. He's still alive, at least he was at the time the book was written.

Reading either of Laura's books is a sure bet. They are both awesome.

Hoops: Dawg Bites Duck, UW87 - UofOregon 69

2011-01-07T13:20:00.000-08:00

Last night's game at Hec Edmundon Arena was bittersweet. Bitter because Abdul Gaddy will not be playing the rest of the season; sweet because Terrence Ross absolutely torched the Ducks he was so hot.

It was easy to see that the team misses Abdul. He was sitting on the bench in street clothes where he'll be for the rest of the season after tearing his left ACL in practice on Wednesday. He provides such a calming influence when he's running the point. You could see the Dawgs were in need of some calming during the first half. We shot pretty poorly (17-38, 48%) which allowed Oregon to stay close, ending the half up 39 - 33. Our poor shooting had little to do with Oregon's defense; it seemed like we were rushing things. Abdul would have calmed that down.

The second half was a different story, though it didn't look that way at the beginning. The Oregon Ducks came out with a lot of intensity and actually led the game at one point; 42-21 with about 2 minutes elapsed in the half. The lead traded back and forth for about 5 minutes with the Ducks staying in it well during that period. However, they could not sustain that intensity. At the 13:31 mark we pulled ahead on a 3-pointer by Scott Suggs and then motored steadily away, finished up with a cushion of 18 points.

Isaiah Thomas (20) and Terrence Ross (25) combined for 45 points, most of them in the second half. At one point Zeke was bringing the ball up court, drifting just left of center. From the far right corner TR flashed his hand up and took off for the hoop, slashing quickly across the court. Isaiah let a pass fly high, Terrence gathered it in and thundered home an awesome alley-oop dunk. Beautiful stuff to watch. Terrence had his best game yet. He sure doesn't play like a freshman, even though he is. I'd imagine he's going to be getting alot of those minutes that used to go to Abdul.

MBA had another solid game; 13 points, two blocks, and 8 rebounds. Scott Suggs chipped in 13 on 5-8 shooting; 3 of 5 from 3 point range. Justin Holiday had 7 and Darnell Gant had 4. Venoy Overton started the game in Abdul Gaddy's place, but he seemed oddly ineffective as a starter. He's been at his best coming off the bench and getting into the head of the man he's defending. I'm guessing it's going to take him some time to adjust to this new role. I hope he gets the time to make the adjustment.

Although I am a U of Oregon graduate (Masters in Computer Science-Education in 1986) I found that at no time during the game did I find myself rooting for the Ducks. From the beginning I pulled for the Huskies. Odd how loyalty to a team works.

Raisin' Fish: About those promised videos . . .

2010-12-31T10:21:00.000-08:00

Eight or nine months ago, I said that I had documented the whole salmon raising process on video and that I would post them soon. Well, soon turned into not-so-soon pretty easily. Life got in the way as it has a habit of doing and now I find myself at the end of the year with a bit of time off from work. Earlier this week, I put together a couple of video clips into a series of short movies.

The first one is an introduction to the incubator and clarifier set up.

The second video shows the loading of eggs into the incubator.

One thing I didn't explain very clearly in the video is why we are giving the eggs a 10 minute bath in an iodine/creek water solution. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife guys over at Issaquah Salmon Hatchery want to make sure that no diseases or invasive critters are transferred between creek systems, so they ask us to use the iodine bath to limit the spread of any unwanted pests.

The third video shows what we do to finish up once all the eggs are loaded.

The last video in the series of four shows what all the work is about; the release of small coho salmon into McAleer Creek.

It was fun to do the videos. If anything is not clear or you have questions, drop me a comment and I'll do my best to address it.

Hoops: A Fine Holiday Welcome for the Big - 12

2010-12-07T09:17:00.000-08:00

UW Huskies 108 - Texas Tech Red Raiders 79

Saturday afternoon, December 4, at 1 pm the Huskies played Texas Tech at Hec Edmunsen Pavilion. Justin Holiday set the tone for the game by scoring 13 of the Huskies first 14 points. He was hot and the team was smart enough to keep feeding him the ball. He finished the game with 20 points in all and contributed some massive defense.

Isaiah Thomas seems to be struggling. He plays like the whole game depends on him scoring all the time. What ends up happening, it seems to me, is that he drives in to the lane and either gets stripped or blocked or ends up with nobody to pass to. Frustrating to watch. He's so talented and quick and is capable of making the most amazing shots. It still never ceases to amaze me that defenses seem to forget that he is a lefty. When he goes up with the ball in his right, switches over and finishes from the left, it looks like they weren't even guarding him. He scored 16 and was perfect from the foul line (6 for 6).

Matthew Bryan-Amaning had another solid game; 18 points, many rebounds and some tough interior defense. Aziz N'Diaye has been getting the starting spot with MBA coming off the bench. When he does, not only do we not lose anything, we actually gain solidity and competence at the center. I'm sure in time that Aziz will be a great asset; right now, he's a work in progress. He scored 4.

The Huskies thumped Texas Tech by 29. They were ahead by 19 at the half (61-42) and extended that lead during the second half. Venoy Overton put the cap on the first half by disrupting a play (I forgot whether he stole the ball or just forced a turnover) and then taking the ball at the other end and scoring a very pretty layup during the last minute of the half. After that the scoreboard posted a message saying, "Feeling Venoyed?" I would imagine that TT was felling pretty Venoyed as he was in their shirts all day. I intend to appreciate all of the time VO is on the court. He's a senior this year and I, for one, will certainly miss him when he is gone. He never scores too many points (he had 9) but he is sooo responsible for the other team not scoring so many points either.

Got to see Terrence Ross play for the first time. He's pretty exciting. I hope he's not a "one and done" player (I don't see how he can be, he's not getting that much playing time. If he were a true 'one and done' he'd be in the lineup and making much more of a contribution) because what I saw on Saturday was pretty awesome. He scored 6 and had a spectacular dunk in the second half.

Scott Suggs and Darnell Gant played well, both scoring 8. Abdul Gaddy is turning into a really competent point guard. Not very flashy, but really competent. He's also got a pretty shot. He made his 6 points on 2 three pointers. Brendan "The Human Victory Cigar" Sherrer got to play and filled up the box score for himself. He played the final 3:42 minutes and scored a bucket, got a rebound and a block, and fouled someone. Good job Brendan. The student section went nuts when he got put in so early and even more nuts when he scored.

Good game.

Raisin' Fish: I will post those promised videos

2010-12-01T10:17:00.001-08:00

It has been almost 9 months since I posted anything about raising coho salmon on McAleer Creek. Two things come to mind immediately.

One, I shot videos of the whole process last year and have not yet posted any of them. I will do that in the next month.

Two, we are building a much larger clarifier to allow more of the sand and silt normally in the water to drop out before it enters the incubator. That project deserves some documenting and I will begin to do that, just not today.

Stay tuned, there's definitely more coming.

Hoops: Nice Shootin' Tex!

2010-12-01T09:28:00.000-08:00

Well!

It has been almost forever since I have posted to this blog, but I am back and interested in continuing.

UW Huskies 102 - Long Beach State 75

Last night's game at Hec Edmunson Arena between UW and Long Beach State was a revelation on a number of levels. Though this was the fourth game of the season, it was the first that I have been able to see. I had conflicts with each of the three previous games. We are in new seats this year. They are four rows closer to the floor and in the 'chair back' seats rather than the bleachers. I didn't think that four rows would make that big a difference, but it does. A very enjoyable place to watch a hoops game from. I congratulate my wife and daughter on doing an awesome job of picking this year's seats.

The Huskies have been totally transformed! They are still capable of and willing to play carnivorous defense, but they are now also a shooting machine. C. J. Wilcox, who red-shirted last year as a freshman, is a classic 2-guard (shooting guard). He took nine shots last night, which doesn't sound like a lot, but he made 7 of them; 6 threes and a deuce. So, 20 points on nine shots. I'd say that's pretty efficient production. I didn't hear it myself, but apparently Lorenzo Romar said after the game that he had passed up too many open opportunities. Yikes!

Along with C. J. there were 6 other Huskies scoring in double figures; Gaddy with 17 Overton with 10, IT with 19, MBA with 14, Holiday with 11 and Darnell Gant with 10. The amazing thing is that there were 14 3-pointers in that mix. In a couple of seasons passed, there were times when we couldn't seem to get more than 2 or 3. Now they're shooting rainbows from everywhere.

The other good news is our inside play. Gant, Matthew Bryan-Amaning and the new guy, Aziz N'Diaye bring a really solid game up front. Aziz is a 7 footer from Senegal by way of the College of Southern Idaho. He is very much a work in progress on the offensive end, but his rebounding and defense are pretty darn good and he runs the floor well. MBA has stepped up his game yet again. I hope that he can consistently stay at the level he showed last night. He was 7 for 7 from the field (not all that hard when you are shooting inside of 5 feet) and cleaned the boards and blocked or altered a number of shots. Good stuff.

This is an exciting team to watch. I am definitely looking forward to the rest of the season and can't wait for PAC-10 play to begin.

Raisin' Fish: A Disaster, then Release

2010-03-13T09:37:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was an emotional roller coaster.

I woke in the morning with the sweet anticipation of releasing 68,000+ coho salmon fry into McAleer Creek in the late afternoon with Francis, Stephen and Vivian. As I arrived at my desk at work, I received a call from Francis. He sounded depressed and had good reason to be. When he got to the house that day, he noticed that there was the smallest dribble of water coming out of the incubator's outlet pipe. That is definitely not good. He roused Stephen and they went right to work restoring the water flow and bleeding excess air out of the system.

We had had a great deal of rain over the previous two days and the increased water flow pushed lots of sand and gravel around. Unfortunately, that gravel movement included covering over our intake pipe. When that happens, the clock starts ticking on the fish living in the barrel. At the point when water stops flowing through the system, they begin to breathe the oxygen out of the water the same way we would breathe the oxygen out of the air if we had a plastic bag sealed over our heads. Once the oxygen runs out, you die. That's what happened to lots of small coho salmon fry yesterday morning.

When Francis opened the top of the incubator, all he saw was dead fish and "maybe 50" live ones. As he told me this story on the phone my depression grew. Since my mother's death in December I've been working through the grieving process. This was one more poignant reminder that life ends, sometimes quite abruptly. I was quite depressed all day.

I had intended to work all day Friday and leave early at 2:30. I did that with decidedly less spring in my step than I would normally have had. I was not looking forward to cleaning up a "99% die-off" (Francis' estimate).

When we got down to the incubator, there were lots of dead fish in there, but I noticed many more than 50, and as we flushed out all those poor dead ones, I began to notice many more fish rising up out of the bottom of the barrel. It turns out that Francis' estimate was way off, thank God. While the mortality was still a significant percentage, I'd estimate it at 50 or 60% rather than 99% Getting 20-35,000 fish out, while not up to our usual standards, is still quite a bit better than none at all.

I had not intended to take any video of that sad event. In the end, I did take a couple of minutes of video. I downloaded some editting software yesterday and will try to put stuff together and get it posted here very soon (Hey, I might even do all those videos that I have from loading the incubator!)

All in all, a good, then awful, then much better day. Life goes on and we go on with it.

I'm sure there were a bunch of happy crawdads downstream yesterday in the afternoon given the bonanza of food we released to them!

Hoops: The Boys Help QPon Go Out In Style!

2010-02-21T13:21:00.000-08:00

UW 97 - UCLA 68
Yesterday was Senior Day at Hec Edmundson Pavilion. One team manager and Quincy Pondexter were the only seniors celebrated.

Quincy has been having a great season and I've written a bunch about him in past posts. He has led the team as well as he has been able, doing it by example, playing defense, scoring, rebounding, the whole package. When the rest of the team shows up to support him, there aren't any teams in the Pac-10 that can hang with us. As evidence, you only have to look at yesterday evening's game.

The team came out on fire! They played excellent defense from the very beginning and their shooting was on. UCLA shot 36% in the first half. I have to give credit for that to the Huskies defense. They are one of the best teams I have seen at closing off passing lanes. Lorenzo Romar recruits highly athletic guys in the 5'8" to 6'8" height range. All of them possess an above-average wingspan, though. Lorenzo teaches them to disrupt passing lanes really well. This means that whoever has the ball usually has an extraordinarily hard time getting the ball to the man he originally intended it for. When the Dawgs defense is hot, their offense gets hot at the same time.

We had great shooting from all over. Q had 14 points in the first half including 2 3s (he finished with 20 again). IT had 13 points in the first half and finished with 17. We got great scoring from the second tier of players as well. MBA has continued to step up his game; he scored 12 last night, all of them in the second half. Suggs had 9, Holiday had 11, Elston Turner had 9, Breshers had 6, and Venoy put up 7 (all in the first half).

UCLA was shell-shocked. No matter how many timeouts they took trying to regroup, when they came back on to the floor we continued to crush them. By the end of the 1st half we were up 49 - 26. The second half was more of the same; crushing defense and efficient offense. The game ended with the Huskies up 97 - 68. We'd have gone over 100 if we hadn't held the ball for the final possession without even attempting to score.

Quincy Pondexter, you were great to watch this season. I especially liked how you really manned up and led the team. I'm disappointed that some of them were not capable of following your lead (yes, I am talking directly to you, Zeke) and others just have some more growing to do. Lord knows I have been frustrated with you in past seasons. I'm so glad I got to witness this one, as this is the way I'll remember you. I wish you a successful NBA career. I certainly think you have what it takes to make it.

Hoops: You Can't Win If You Nap Too Long

2010-02-21T13:05:00.000-08:00

Washington Huskies 64 - USC Trojans 67

The Dawgs came out of the gate for this game on fire. After the first couple of minutes they were up 12-4. Then a combination of things happened. The officiating crew produced some of the most lopsided calls I have ever seen. Unfortunately, they ran against UW most of the way. Once that happened, the Dawgs fell apart. They shot 38% from the field, had 9 turnovers in the first half (3 on bad passes by Justin Holiday), and shot 28% from behind the 3 point line (2/7). Good defense by USC? Maybe some. Implosion of a team that lacks some mental toughness? I think so. At the half they were down 32 - 24.

USC, to their credit, ran a really good offense. They used most of the shot clock on every possession. They seemed to be playing with the UW defense in a lot of ways, letting it look as though the Dawgs were doing a great job, then scoring in the last 3-4 seconds of the possession. They were able to do that on almost every possession, keeping the score 8-12 points out of reach for the first part of the second half.

The Huskies just seemed to be going through the motions until the 10 minute mark of the second half. At that point they woke up, started playing intense, full-court press defense and scoring at will. Unfortunately, they had dug themselves a very deep hole. Mike Gerrity, the USC point guard showed incredible toughness down the stretch. Without him, USC might have lost that game. As it was, they hung on to win 67-64. This was UW's second home defeat of the season. Coupled with our 1 win road record, that means we're below .500 in the Pac-10. Bummer.

I'd be very surprised if we got an NCAA tournament bid at this point. It'll depend how we finish the last 4 games of the regular season (UCLA at home and then WSU, Oregon, and Oregon State on the road) and the Pac-10 tournament. Who knows? Maybe they'll wake up for good.

Tunes: Tierney Totals Tuesday (Fatly)!

2010-02-17T09:11:00.000-08:00

Last night was Mardi Gras, aka Fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. Bernardo took the train up from Portland and we had dinner with Joe & Sharon at their house. Afterwards, as part of the celebration, we went to Dimitriou's Jazz Alley to listen to the Tierney Sutton Band.

The TS band has been together for 17 years and it certainly shows. Piano, bass, drums and vocals all blended seamlessly together into one lush whole. Tierney is certainly the star here. She is a fabulous vocal talent and has a style that is absolutely her own; a high, clear, breathy mixture of scat singing, unique phrasing and absolute technical brilliance. She has such a reverence for the work of songwriters and lyricists that comes through in her between-song comments. She knows the details of their lives and how that influenced their art as it also informs and influences hers.

She is one of the top-tier female jazz vocalists, not just currently, but all-time. Yet, she is smart enough to let her band mates shine in solo spots that are as long as they want. Her drummer, Ray Brinker, is fascinating to watch. He is the quietest, most intense drummer I have seen in a long time. Much of his work is done with brushes; his touch is unerring and the beats he lays down combine with the bass to lay a solid foundation for Tierney to soar over the top. In many jazz groups the players look at one another for the subtle cues about where the song is going next, who's soloing next, etc. These guys have been together so long that the eyes are no longer necessary; they just listen. Ray kept his head turned away from his band mates for most of the night, not because he was ignoring them, too-cool-for-school style, but because he was pointing his ear at them so he could hear better.

Trey Henry, the bass player (Tierney said of him last night, "He's funkier than you are." - no brag, just fact), had the most animated face. It was really cool to watch him as he laid down the beat. He and Ray combined to lead off a version of Fever that was absolutely smoking. I do not think I have heard a hotter version than that anywhere, anytime.

Christian Jacob, the pianist, is an accompanist of amazing skill, but also a soloist of great virtuousity. It was cool to watch he and Tierney trade licks back and forth. In fact, it was a great pleasue to watch her interact with all of them, together and separately throughout the night. You might be thinking, "The drummer? Really?" The answer is yes. Tierney does a version of Surrey with the Fringe on the Top that is fired off by, led, and accompanied only by Ray Brinker, the drummer. He sets a blazing pace and she manages to keep up. She recorded it on the band's 2005 I'm With The Band and, at the time, I thought, " Well, yeah that's stunning, but I wonder how many takes it took." The answer, boys and girls, is, probably one. She was certainly able to repeat the performance live last night. Truly amazing.

I'm so glad Bernardo suggested going to Jazz Alley for our Fat Tuesday celebration. It was a great treat.

Hoops: Getting Better

2010-02-08T14:09:00.000-08:00

Washington 79 - Arizona State 56

Yes, the team that beat us by 17 (though that score makes the game seem closer than it really was) got beaten by 24. The Huskies beat ASU like a big bass drum, pounding them all night. The Husky defense was stifling. ASU could not get the ball to the spots on the floor where they wanted it shooting just 37.5% in the first half and we took advantage of turnovers for quick fast break buckets. By the 10 minute mark in the first half we were ahead 21-6, ahead by 15. The Sun Devils never got closer than that. We led at the half by 17, 42-25 and kept stretching the lead from there. The most we led by was 27 with a couple minutes to go (77 - 50).

Quincy Pondexter played his usual solid game, scoring 17. The biggest difference though was the support he got from Isaiah and MBA. Zeke ended the game with 17. He played much more efficiently on Saturday than he did on Thursday, but his play is still not totally within the team's game as he seems to think "Me first, then you (maybe)" is the way it should be. In the first half, he was running a 2 on 1 fast break from the middle. Q was on the right wing with his hand out calling for the ball. Zeke ignored him and took the ball straight at the defender. When your big guys make the effort to get out on the break like that, you reward them. It will come back to you later because they'll be much more inclined to have your back when you need them. Lucky for him, he put the shot down, but it was an indication to me that he still hasn't learned all the lessons that Lorenzo Romar has to teach him.

Matthew Bryan-Amaning played the best game I have witnessed this season. He was solid on defense, active on the offensive and defensive boards (9 in all) , and a more effective scorer finishing with 12. Thank you, sir, for showing up. That is the performance we need from you every night. It is a sight I could get used to seeing.

Venoy added 9, Scott Suggs got 8, Justin Holiday had 7, Elston Turner had 5, Tyreese Breshears had 3 and Clarence Trent got 1 to round out the scoring.

We shot much better from the free throw line and from the field overall.

Before the game we were the only Pac-10 team in second place with four teams tied for first. At the end of the weekend because of losses by 3 of those 4 teams (Arizona, ASU and UCLA) there's only 1 team in first (Cal) and 4 tied for second (including us). We play Cal on their court on Thursday. We beat them by 15 here last month, we are certainly capable of doing that again. After all, we just beat 2 of the 4 teams tied for first.

Unfortunately, we have yet to play a road game the way we play our home games. In the comfy confines of Hec Ed with the band playing, the student section rocking, and most of the crowd roaring approval, they play well. Out on the road in unfriendly territory, not so much. If UW is to play well in the post season (or play at all, for that matter) then they will have to figure out how to win on the road. I'd say that this week is a good time to do that, with Cal on Thursday and Stanford on Saturday. We've beaten them both before; do it again, Dawgs!

Good luck to you, men.

Raisin' Fish: Mid-Season Maintenance

2010-02-08T10:26:00.000-08:00

Saturday was a gorgeous day along McAleer Creek. Relatively clear skies, temps in the high 40s, bright sunshine; a great day to play in the water alongside the creek.

I knew that by now all of the coho that were going to hatch had already done so. The guys at Issaquah Salmon Hatchery had told me that the eggs were 2-4 weeks from hatching when I got them on January 6. Now that a month has passed, only the ones that had died should be left on the trays, along with a few of the lazier alevin that hadn't made it down through the screens yet.

My nephew, Stephen, and I made our way down to the incubator and clarifier intending to pull the trays out of the incubator, clean the dead eggs off the screens and then replace one screen on top of the net bag (to keep it from rising up to the top of the barrel, which it will if left unimpeded). We found that we have had an excellent hatch this year.

You can tell how successful your hatch has been by counting the dead eggs left in the trays at the end of hatch time. Just subtract that number from the total of eggs that got put in at the beginning and you have a reasonable estimate of the number that hatched. We didn't really count the individual dead eggs, rather we estimated. I was really surprised when I pulled the first tray up as it had fewer dead eggs on it than I had seen in any previous year. I estimated that there were no more than 100 - 150 eggs there. When you consider that there had been about 23,300+ eggs on there to begin with, then you get an idea of how good the hatch rate was this year.

The next two trays held more dead eggs than the first, but even the last tray, which had the most of the three, didn't have more than 150-200 eggs on it. In all we figure that at most 500 eggs didn't hatch, which means 69,500 did. That's a 99.3% hatch rate! (99.2857% if you're looking for the significant digits). That is quite a tribute to the consistency and constancy of the water flow we've been able to acheive.

Speaking of water flow, this morning when Francis came to work we noticed that there was no water spilling out of the clarifier, which is the norm for the system. That means that there is as much water flowing through the incubator as possible and the excess is going out of the top of the clarifier barrel. While I was working on the incubator, I shut off the water flow valve at the entrance to the clarifier so that I could lower the water level in the incubator. When I opened it back up, I noticed that the flow never returned to its previous strength. My theory, supported by subsequent discoveries today, is that when you shut the valve at the lowest end of 500' of pipe with water flowing through it, that column of flowing water has a certain amount of inertia and continues to move with gravity down the pipe. This will force any small air pockets in the pipe to 'migrate' up stream and collect in the high spots. If there's enough air in the high spots, the flow of water is restricted at that point unless you bleed the system.

This morning, Francis and Stephen bled the system and found several 'angry' air pockets, ones that hissed very loudly when a stainless steel screw holding the pipes together was removed. This confirmed my moving air pocket theory pretty well. We always bleed the system from the upper end to the lower, getting rid of air pockets all the way down and not encouraging them to migrate further up.

When they got to the bottom of the system, they found that two 10' sections of pipe close to the clarifier had 6' long cracks in them and were leaking significant amounts of water. They did not appear to be leaking on Saturday. I think I would have noticed that quantity of water. We had a really hard freeze in December. I'm guessing that the ice in the lines expanded enough to start the cracks and then increased pressure of shutting the valve/bleeding the system was enough to open them up. They replaced both sections and the water flow has returned to its previous level, flowing over the edge of the clarifier barrel.

When I was cleaning out the trays on Saturday, I noticed a couple of alevin that were pretty far along in their growth. Their bodies were beginning to develop and they had almost entirely absorbed their yolk sac. Other alevin were much closer to the beginning of their process, looking as though they had just recently hatched. I think that through a bit of luck and some experience with the process we chose the best weekend to clean the trays.

So, 69,000+ coho salmon alevin reside in the incubator barrel along McAleer Creek. They will probably be there until some time in April when we let them go.

I haven't done anything with the videos Gwynedd shot of loading up the incubator. I'll try to get them posted. If anyone is anxiously awaiting them, I'd appreciate you posting a comment letting me know. That will provide me with some extra motivation.

Hoops: Gutting out another close one with Jekyl & Hyde

2010-02-05T10:11:00.000-08:00

Washington 81 - Arizona 75
Well, last night's game was an emotional roller coaster. The Huskies came out on fire, went to sleep, woke back up for a little while to keep it close, shot horribly from the foul line in the first half (8-19, 42%), shot very well from the foul line in the second half (21-24, 87.5%), went into the locker room at half time down by 6, came out on fire in the second half, slacked off enough to allow a young and talented Wildcats team to stay close and then finally finished it off up by 6 for a 12 point swing in the second half.

Quincy Pondexter has proved himself to be the heart and soul of this team. It's obvious that he worked his ass off during the off season to develop a reliable 12-18' jumper. When he goes up with that shot, it is going down. Although he was one of the most Jekyl&Hydey players for his first three years (alternately brilliant and disappointing(when he didn't show up for the game mentally)), he has manned up and become the most consistent thing about the team. You can depend on him to drop 20 points a night, work the boards hard, stop his man on defense and in general be everything you could want for a team leader. Good job, Q. Last night he dropped 30; 20 from the field and 10 from the free throw line. He struggled at the line in the first half, shooting just 50%, but brought his average up in the second half finishing 10-16, 62.5% (well below his normal shooting average).

Isaiah Thomas seems to be in a sophomore slump. He could be the second half of a reliable 1-2 punch and he was that last year with Johnnie B. This year, not so much. He spent most of the second half on the bench after displaying amazing stupidity in his drives to the basket in the first half (drive in against 4 defenders, get up in the air, try to force up a shot or (rarely) look for someone to pass to). He did play excellent defense on Kevin Parrom, helping to hold him to 5 points while giving away 10 inches (5'8" vs 6'6"). He ended the game with 7 points. Zeke, you are wasting Q's senior year! He's not going to get another chance and he deserves better, smarter, more complete play than this. Get it together and be the man Q needs.

Justin Holiday and Tyrese Breshears showed some awesome two-man game action in the first half. Very entertaining stuff, but they were not on the floor together long enough to do it more than twice. If Tyrese B can learn to keep himself out of foul trouble (how about staying on your feet and not jumping for every shot that goes up?), he is the John Brockman replacement. He is very tough inside, works the boards hard and doesn't get moved around by many guys. He had two great blocks in the first half on Nic Wise on two consecutive possessions. Both of them on the same side of the court, both of them sent into the stands. If he can learn the Bill Russell, tip-it-to-a-teammate trick, that will be great. As it was, I wouldn't have wanted to face him again if I was Nic.

Scott Suggs posted 13 points; 3 3s and 4-4 from the free throw line. Good stuff, and the sort of contribution we need from the younger guys.

At the beginning of the season lots of ink got spilled on Isaiah Thomas and Abdul Gaddy. Venoy Overton got overlooked by everyone (except for Sports Illustrated) but has proved to be another reliable presence for us. He makes life hell for opposing guards and usually drops 10 points. Last night he ended up with 12, one 3-pointer and 9-10 from the foul line. He was the man who kept the game out of reach for the Wildcats at the end. Every time they fouled him (and then seemed to foul him most at the end of the game (well, he did have the ball most of the time as IT and Gaddy were on the bench)), he stepped up and sank his shots. He missed one in the first half, but that was the only one he missed all night. Good Job, V.

MBA, where are you? We need you to have a monster season and support Q. It's not happening, but it could. Get it together. 3 points and four fouls isn't cutting it.

In the second half after a particularly egregious call by one of the officials, some misguided soul up high in Section 12 (kitty corner from my seats in 6) launched a water bottle at the court. It landed at the end of the Huskies bench about 6-8' in on the court and had enough force to skid way past half court. Play stopped, the miscreant was identified and hustled out of the arena in short order. There is just no room in an arena the size of Hec Ed for the start of hooliganism. I'm glad they dealt with that guy as quickly as they did. Dude, yes, the call was particularly bad in a game littered with bad calls at both ends. Yes, it was quite frustrating to see guys get paid to do such a lousy job (Pac-10 officiating supervisors, do you look at the tapes? Do you do anything to help these guys develop their skills? It appears not), but remember, this is just a game. There is no point in getting tossed out for something stupid like that (and besides, if you had hit someone with that half full water bottle from that high up, it would definitely have done some damage). When they suggest anger management classes, take them. It can only help.

The Wildcats are a talented, young team. They had pretty balanced scoring, getting double figure performances out of 5 of the 10 guys that scored. Derrick Williams got alot of press before the game, but he did horribly last night and played like a petulant child. You are probably good, Derrick, but last night will never make your highlight reel and you handled it with no class at all. Nic Wise, the only senior on the Arizona team, played well, providing some needed leadership to all those talented youngster. If Sean Miller can keep this group together, they are going to be trouble for everyone in the Pac-10 for the next few years. Good luck to him.

Well, let's see what we do with Arizona State on Saturday night. Should be interesting.

Hoops: What is that Foul Smell?

2010-01-27T09:55:00.000-08:00

U of Washington Huskies 123 - Seattle University Redbirds 76
No matter who you were rooting for at last night's game at Hec Edmundson Pavilion, you were bound to come away with a bad taste in your mouth.

I know that I complain about basketball officiating a great deal. I also know just how hard it is to call a decent game. Earl Strom, the great NBA ref, once wrote in an article published long ago in Sports Illustrated (and I'm paraphrasing a bit here), " Reffing a good game is like having a good marriage. It's a day-to-day proposition. Some days are good; some days are not." So, even the best (and Earl was, if not the best, certainly on any reasonable person's short list) can have a lousy game.

Last night all three officials had a lousy game. Couple that with a Husky team that was hungry to prove itself after losing a last second heartbreaker at UCLA and then getting thumped at USC and you have a buzz saw all ready and waiting for Seattle U to step into. And step into it they did.

I don't think I have been at a game where more fouls were called or more players were fouled out. In all, 8 players had to sit down; 6 from SU(Gweth, Broussard, Harris, Gilmore, Boxley, and Jones), 2 from UW (Overton and Bryan-Amaning). This created a real problem for Cameron Dollar, the SU coach, at the end of the game as he had only brought 10 players. The game ended with Seattle, already beleagured by 37 minutes of punishing defense, having to put only 4 guys on the floor, playing 4 on 5.

UW games usually last 2 hours. They called so many fouls that the game went 30 minutes over that. I can't say I understand why they called so many fouls. It looked to me like they lost control of the game early and then tried to get it back by penalizing people at the line. UW certainly benefited as we shot 60 free throw attempts by my count (which could be off by 1 or 2). By my count Seattle U also shot 43 attempts. 103 free throws in a game! Are those guys crazy? incompetent? blind? some combination of the three?

The Huskies played great defense, cutting off passing lanes, keeping in front of their player, generally harassing them. Seattle U responded in the first half by falling apart. Charles Garcia, an extremely talented 6'10" junior transfer from Los Angeles (who couldn't get into UW for some reason) tried to take the whole team onto his shoulders and force the game inside. He banged in there with a great deal of ferocity, but little effect. He is obviously quite talented. Last night will not make it onto his personal highlight reel. He may have felt he had something to prove to the Huskies. It certainly looked as though they had something to prove to him. Until later in the second half, the only points he made were from the free throw line. He scored 18 in all, 12 from the stripe.

The Huskies got good contributions out of the players you would expect; 27 from Pondexter, 19 from Overton, 10 from Gaddy. But there were some unexpected ones as well: 12 from Suggs, 16 from Holiday, 20 (!!) from Elston Turner. Isaiah Thomas had stomach flu and didn't suit up or play. Last night, they didn't really miss him.

At the end of the game, I felt bad for Cameron Dollar, his Seattle U team and their fans. They got thumped really hard in a ugly, ugly game. They are probably a much better team than they showed last night. It's unfortunate that they ran into UW when they were smarting after two tough losses.

Hoops: Two Games in a Row!

2010-01-17T12:26:00.000-08:00

UW Huskies 84 - U of California Golden Bears 69

Well, they did it again. The Huskies won this game in much the same fashion as Thursday's; excellent defense relentlessly pressuring the passing lanes and good shooting (though not as good as Thursday from the 3 point line).

Quincy Pondexter has raised his game up a notch this year, perhaps several notches. He has a consistent 15-18' jumper, he attacks the rim relentlessly and he has been awesome from the foul line (11-11 in this game). As the only senior on the team and the captain, he has stepped up in a major way, leading by example, which is always best.

Lorenzo Romar's teams have always played an athletic, active style of man-to-man defense. They help each other out alot, but are generally capable of standing on their own and guarding their man. What they are fantastic at is playing ball-denial defense. They make it extremely hard for other teams to move the ball around into the spots they like. This constant frustration really wears on them. It causes shots to be taken from unfamiliar spots and moves the other team way out of its comfort zone. You can see it in the low shooting percentages and low scores of the opponents these past two games. Cal was behind by 19 at the half (50-31) and ended up losing by 15. The score would have been much more lopsided than it was had Romar left his starters in. As it was, many of the guys deep at the end of the bench got playing time. That's when Cal began to make up some ground.

Another standout had been UW free throw shooting. Isaiah Thomas (20 points) was 8-10 from the line. Pondexter was 11-11. Suggs was 1-1, Bryan-Amaning was 0-2. As a team we were 20-24:83%. That's a marked improvement from years passed.

Scoring was again fairly balanced; Quincy got 25, IT got 20, MBA had 10, Holiday had 6, Gaddy and Overton both had 4, though Venoy contributed a massive amount at the defensive end. Suggs had 6, Turner 3, Breshears 2 and Gant 4.

The Huskies are now 3-3 in Pac-10 play. They needed to get these two wins. Next week they go on the road to SoCal, visiting UCLA on Thursday and USC on Saturday. They need to prove that they can win on the road if we are going to be a better-than-.500 club. Given the way they played this week, I think they can do it.

Hoops: Better Late Than Never

2010-01-15T09:12:00.000-08:00

U of Washington 94 - Stanford 61

It has been a long while since I posted anything about hoops, partly because my attendance has been spotty, partly because my mind has been occupied by other things (thinks?).

The Huskies seemed to be in Pac-10 free fall. They had lost their last three games to Oregon (at home), Arizona and Arizona State (both on the road). The guards were not shooting well, our interior presence was absent. Teams could play a solid 2-3 zone against us, pack the middle, let us shoot from outside and then collect the rebounds.

Seemed to be working, and would continue to work, as long as we weren't hitting our shots. Well, last night showed just what kind of trouble the rest of the Pac-10 will be in if we continue to make our shots. Last night the Huskies came onto the floor at Hec Edmundson Pavilion in a mean mood. They played aggressive, hounding defense, made shots from the outside (which opened up the middle) and then slashed to the basket for buckets. Abdul Gaddy scored 10 points, all in the first half; most of them were drives to the hoop finished with a teasing little floater that would consistently clear the outstretched fingers of the defense. It was good to see him scoring. That's the most I've seen him score so far this season (admittedly poor sample, I've missed 6 home games and don't watch any games on TV (so the Huskies are not being boycotted any more than anyone else)).

We scored 6 3-pointers during the night. The shooting was ON. Quincy Pondexter had 6 points in the first half and then exploded in the 2nd, scoring 21 (27 in all). He lit up Stanford at the start of the 2nd half; during the first 6.5 minutes of the half he scored 10 points on 2 3s, a turnaround jumper along the baseline and a monster jam in traffic (which caused Johnny Dawkins to call time out, AGAIN). We got solid contributions from Overton (9), Thomas (15), Bryan-Ammaning(6), Suggs (11, including 3 3s), and Holiday (6).

Lorenzo started a combination I had not seen before; Thomas, Gaddy, Pondexter (all consistent starters), Breshears, and Holiday. It was a pretty effective unit until Breshears got in foul trouble (early), then MBA came in and the subbing began. Our defense was stifling; the only guy who scored anything from the field for quite a while was Landry Fields and he only had 6. We led them at the half 41-22 to lead by 19 and then pounded them even further in the second half to stretch that lead to 33. Isaiah Thomas should get some credit for stopping their leading scorer, Jeremy Green who only scored 7 all night. That a 5'8" (really? he doesn't look that tall) guy could effectively guard a 6'4" guy and hold his numbers that low, speaks very highly for the defensive pressure applied. He worked at denying him the ball and worked at it really hard. It certainly paid off.

It was good to see the Huskies get a quality win in coference play. I'm looking forward to Saturday to see what they do with Cal.

Raisin' Fish: A new season starts

2010-01-06T14:21:00.000-08:00

This morning I left the house and drove to Issaquah Salmon Hatchery to pick up this year's allotment of 70,000 coho salmon eggs. I don't see any point in re-hashing the process as I did a fairly complete job last year. If you'd like to read it, go to the archive at the bottom and start reading the Raisin' Fish headings from the bottom up.

This year's new wrinkle is video. I have a Flip Mino HD that I picked up recently. It's a pretty cool little device. It's about the size of an iPod and relatively light, yet it will hold 2 hours of high definition video and it is powered by a lithium-ion battery that can be recharged through a USB port (which is also how you download the video) that 'flips' out of the top of the device. Gwynedd was my camera person this morning.

I still have to load the videos to my home computer and then stitch it all together. That may not happen until this weekend. Stay tuned though, as it should be pretty cool.

Hoops: First Game in the new Husky Season

2009-11-05T09:06:00.000-08:00

University of Washington 77 - Central Washington University 48

This was an ugly, sloppy, exciting game. It's always exciting to start a new season; you get to see a new crop of freshman, look at the adjustments the coach has made because of departing seniors (Jon Brockman!), and see what kind of improvements individuals have made to their games. A few observations are in order.

Venoy Overton seems to have spent his off-season watching old Detroit Piston tapes from the Bad Boys (Bill Lambeer & Rick Mahorn) era. He seems to concentrate on getting into the heads of opposing players with his very physical style. An example as the Huskies ran onto the floor for warmup before the first half started: normally, the opposing team is already out going through its warmup drills. The Huskies skirt the side of that and run to their end of the floor.Venoy ran right through their drill, disrupted a pass meant for one of their players and banged that same player in the chest on his way past. Welcome to Venoy's world. He made life miserable for CWU guards the whole time he was on the floor. He has amazingly quick hands and knocks the ball loose alot.

Abdul Gaddy is going to be an exciting player to watch for however long he is at UW. Because he is so young (won't turn 18 until after the 2009-2010 season ends), he's guaranteed to be here at least 2 years. I hope he'll stay for all 4; I think it would do him (and UW) a world of good. After an extremely lackluster first half, he made a couple of passes in the second half that were pure magic. Fast, in traffic, directly into a player's hands close to the basket; both for easy buckets. He didn't score much (1 point on a free throw), but once he gets going, he's going to shatter UW assist records.

Tyreese Breshers is our Jon Brockman replacement as soon as he gets in game condition. He is a down-low banger in the JB tradition, working for rebounds and playing tough defense. He tires quickly in Lorenzo's fast-paced style, but he'll get better (and get more minutes) as his wind improves. One play stood out in the second half. A CWU guard came down the left side of the lane for a layup but met Tyreese there. T stood his ground with his arms straight up and his feet planted. As the guard bounced off him (Tyreese didn't move), T plucked the ball out of his hands and threw it downcourt to a sprinting guard. Awesome!

The freshmen C. J. Wilcox and Clarence Trent are going to be making solid contributions all year long. In the second half on a 2 on 2 break with Wilcox handling the ball to the left of the lane and Trent filling a slot on the right, Wilcox launched a pass that looked destined to go over the backboard. Trent jumped way up, snagged the pass with his right hand and flushed it through in a monster dunk. This all happened at a dead sprint. I don't think Lorenzo was too happy with the play (much too circus-style), but the Dawg Pack loved it and it is likely to show up on the season's highlight reel.

UW shot miserably in the first half, hoisting up 3s at every opportunity. They seemed to have forgotten that it is ok to get in closer to the basket and that getting 2 is better than missing a 3 with the resultant long rebound. At the end of the first half UW was ahead 43 to 18, but it would have been 60 - 18 if we had been shooting a reasonable percentage. CWU just could not cope with UW's defense, it is that good, even early in the season. Their weakside rotation to the ball is a half-step slow at this point, but it is significantly better than where the team was at this time last year.

Our free throw shooting continues to suck. We could manage no better than 50% on 18-36 shooting. Men, that is not going to win games for us! We need to bump that percentage up 20 or 30 points if we are going to win consistently in the Pac-10.

Of the 12 players on the roster, 11 played (Justin Holiday is banged up and didn't play at all) and everyone scored. Isaiah Thomas had 18, Quincy Pondexter, after a lackluster first half had 17, Venoy had 11, Tyreese Breshers and Darnell Gant (who started, but may not once TB gets his wind and legs in order) both had 6. Matthew Bryan-Amaning had 2. He was great on D, but needs to contribute more at the offensive end. Now that he's a junior, there are no more "He's young, yet." excuses left. Time to man up, MBA. The freshmen, C.J. Wilcox and Clarence Trent both had 6; a solid contribution, and they played well in the defense. Elston Turner made 1 free throw; he's supposed to be a shooter. I know I'd like to see him prove it at this point.

Overall, a good game. Very sloppy first half, but that's pretty easy to chalk up to first game jitters. Coach Romar got them settled down and running the offense better in the second half and, even though they didn't have as wide a scoring margin in the second half (34-30), they played a much better half and we came away with the win, 77-48.

Go Huskies!

Raisin' Fish: Early Maintenance

2009-11-05T08:29:00.000-08:00

Last Wednesday, Francis and I spent a good portion of the day in McAleer Creek. We were doing early system maintenance on the piping going from the inlet to the clarifier/incubator setup.

The most important factor in raising healthy fish is to assure a steady supply of clean, cold water to the incubator, preferably at a flow in the range of 10 gallons per minute. As long as the water is flowing, the eggs and fish are going to get all the oxygen and nutrients they need directly from the water. Before the eggs hatch, all they need is the water flow and oxygen. After hatch, they don't need any food until late in the process when their digestive systems have started to develop. So, mostly they just need the oxygen in the clean, cold water.

I've probably explained before that we have about 500' of 2" plastic pipe running upstream of the incubator. At the head end we have a 6" pipe with lots of 1/4" holes drilled in it sunk in a large pool of water. Because that pipe is at a level higher than the outlet pipe of the incubator, gravity drives water through the system pretty efficiently as long as there are no blockages or major air bubbles in the system.

We've got the inlet pretty well sheltered to keep debris from entering the pipe, so blockages are not much of a problem (haven't been during the previous 10 years anyway), but air bubbles are another matter. Cold water carries a lot of oxygen in solution (the colder it is, the more it carries - think of a glass of water you let warm up - bubbles develop on the sides of the glass as the oxygen comes out of solution when the water warms up). Turbulent creek water also carries air bubbles. As the water flows through the pipe, those bubbles collect in high spots in the piping. If the bubbles get too big, they restrict water flow.

We do two things to combat this. First, we try to keep the piping at as even a slope as possible, so that there aren't as many places for the bubbles to collect and they eventually find their way all the way up to the inlet end. Second, we bleed air out of the pipes at the junction where two pipes come together. We use standard plumbing piping that we get from Home Depot (2" black ABS plastic) that comes in 10' lengths. We join lengths together using white 2" heavy duty collars (they're much deeper than the black ones with more surface area to hold both pipes) and stainless steel sheet metal screws. Those screws double as our bleed mechanism. We make sure that when we screw the pipes and collars together, the screw heads are pointing straight up at the top of the pipe. Bleeding the system then involves nothing more complex than backing one screw out of the hole and letting the air escape.

Bleeding the system is kinda contemplative; I just put on my waders, grab a portable drill with a Phillips head driver and start walking upcreek from the incubator. At a junction of two pipes, I back out one screw. If water comes out, then there's no air to bleed so I put the screw back in and continue upstream. If I hear the hissing of air, then I wait until water does come out, then put the screw back in. It's a nice quiet walk up the creek and I get to check out what's going on in the creek at a fairly close and slow rate.

When we first put all that piping in, it was all in the creek and just followed the curves of the creek downstream. This led to lower reliability for a couple of reasons. When the water gets high after a rain, the creek flushes alot of branches, rocks, sticks, leaves etc down the creek. Some of that stuff can lodge under the piping, lifting it out of the water and destroying its ability to flow water. Very bad for the fish. The other problem is more insidious. The constant motion of the creek pushes the pipe against the stones over and over. Eventually, this wears a hole in the pipe and you lose water pressure to the system right there. If the pipe is in the creek, you don't see the leak. You have to run your hands over the entire 500' of pipe, checking for leaks with your hands.

A couple of years ago, Francis and Joel (a family friend who works around our place occasionally) took all of the piping out of the creek and put it up on the bank. This makes it easier to bleed and much less likely to spring a leak. We did have one problem area that had been nagging at us for the last couple of years and it wasn't until last week that we fixed it.

At one point in its downstream travels McAleer Creek makes a big curve around a small hill. We took the pipe right over the hill, digging a trench for the pipe so it stayed more or less level. Over the years, the trench filled in with dirt, leaves etc and became somewhat hard to find, and, even harder, to bleed. We spent part of Wednesday digging the pipe out of the dirt and repositioning a bunch of it to make it easier to bleed and maintain.

The incubator is now flowing clean, cold water at a rate of 10+ gallons per minute. We won't need it for a couple of months (the eggs need 750 thermal units from fertilization to hatch, so I'll probably get them in about 60-65 days or so - late December/early January), but we are ready. It feels good to be prepared.

Raisin' Fish: Another Part of the Cycle & A New Experience

2009-10-30T15:16:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty well acquainted with the coho salmon life cycle. I'm very familiar with their growth and development from the 'eyed' egg stage through their release into MacAleer Creek. I know a bit about what happens to them once they leave the incubator and head out to sea.

Previously, I'd encapsulate my next experience in a few sentences. Something like, "The fish return to Issaquah Hatchery in mid-October through November. The eggs are harvested and fertilized and then put into the hatchery to grow to the 'eyed' egg stage."

Well, thanks to my cousin, Ken, a docent/volunteer at the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery, I am much more familiar with the "egg harvesting" phase of the process.

Issaquah Creek was running fast and dirty on Tuesday because of all the rain we've been having lately.

A great blue heron sat beside the spillway eying all those fish, but I guess it already knew they were much too big to take on.

The inlet gates for the hatchery were closed (there were enough fish in the holding pens already), but that didn't keep lots of fish from lining up, wanting to get in.

On Tuesdays during the spawning season, volunteers gather at the hatchery at 8:00 a.m. to begin the process. I left home around 7, but, because I haven't been going to work for almost 3 months, I had forgotten just how grinding the morning commute can be. I had the opportunity to experience the I-405 southbound commute in all its glory on Tuesday. I made it to the hatchery on time, but just barely.

First thing to do at the hatchery is gather and eat donuts and coffee. After that everyone suited up. I had brought my own waders, but borrowed a rain slicker and gloves (the same kind of gloves vets use when working inside a large animal, heavily rubberized hands with a clear sleeve that goes up past your elbow and has an elastic closure there). In addition, you wear cotten gloves over those gloves because the coho salmon are quite slippery and you need something to get a grip on them.

First step is to get all of the fish gathered together in a smaller area within the holding pond. They do this using what they so eloquently call a "crowder". It's a motorized walkway on tracks with a big steel partition that reaches most of the way to the bottom of the holding pen. They fire up the little gas engine on the walkway and start moving it toward the business end of the pen.

At that end there are a couple of interesting, purpose-built machines. One is called the Wallaby Whacker. It's a pneumatically-driven machine that, when you feed a fish through the opening, bangs the fish between the eyes, killing it quickly.

After the fish are killed, the females are slit open and their eggs harvested into a bucket (sorry, no pictures of that, I was busy in the holding pen while that was happening). The males are milked for their sperm (milt, they call it, though I'm sure Uncle Miltie would be appalled). After harvesting, the fish are fed through a machine that is a large RFID tag sensor. Tagged salmon have a small RFID tag in their nose. You feed the fish through the machine and it directs tagged salmon into one tote and untagged ones into another. That way they can get the tags from only the fish that have them and get data on the fish (how long they were in the water, when the returned etc).

Those machines are made right here in Washington, on Shaw Island in the San Juans.

Ok, so there we all were, suited up and standing beside the holding pen. The coho were all crowded up against one end of the pen.

Once things got started, several of us waded into the pen with a big net and started scooping up salmon. When they harvest chinook, they don't have to use nets. The chinooks' tail is very stiff and easy to grab onto, so they don't need the net. Coho have much more flexible tails; when you grab them they just fold up and the fish slips away.

Fish are separated; hens (females) and bucks (males), wild and hatchery-raised. You can tell the difference between wild and hatchery raised because the wild ones have an adipose fin. Thats a little fin just in front of the tail on the top of the fish. Hatchery fish have that fin clipped off; it doesn't upset their ability to navigate in the water too much and makes it very easy to tell them from the wild ones. Wild hens and bucks are especially prized because they are likely to contribute greater genetic diversity than the hatchery raised fish.

If a male is big enough, or is wild, they are killed and then their sperm is milked out of them.Reproductively, males are always ready (do I hear some of you saying (with a knowing sigh) "Typical."?), but females have to be checked to be sure that their eggs are ripe.

To check a female for ripeness, you hold it by the tail, head down. If they are ripe, all of the eggs in their body cavity will be loose and they will sag toward her head, creating some dimpling toward her tail by the egg slit. Those eggs are ready for her to eject them once she has built a nest, or in this case, to go into a bucket to be fertilized. If she isn't, then her body will be hard and no dimpling will show. She gets thrown back into the pond, to be checked again in a week. Eventually, she will be ready.

That's cousin Ken holding the fish and consulting with one of the hatchery workers.

During this whole process, I netted fish and delivered them to be sorted. The nets get pretty heavy and they have a holding platform that hangs on the wall that you can rest the net on. Once all the fish are sorted, you put the net back in the water and get another batch. I found that if you move the net along the bottom very quietly, the fish don't even realize they are in trouble (you are scooping them up) until it is much too late. That doesn't prevent them from thrashing around; they do that quite a bit. I guess that's why we were all wearing rain coats, to keep from getting covered in splashed water and fish slime.

I stayed until noon, helping to net fish, and then drove home to lunch. Thanks, Ken, for inviting me to experience yet another part of the salmon cycle.

Rockin': Building the New Wall: Phase 2

2009-10-21T08:41:00.000-07:00

I spent the first three weeks of September in Israel/Palestine sharing the life that Diane, my wife, and Gwynedd, my youngest daughter, had been leading for the past year. We visited many of their favorite places and went to work daily at the Holy Child Program in Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem. On September 25th I returned to the U.S., flying from Tel Aviv to Newark, then Newark to Seattle. About 36 hours after leaving Jerusalem, I was home in Lake Forest Park.

I called Jane to find out what had been happening with the wall. Nothing. While in Israel, I had gotten a call from my mother and found that her cancer had metastasized. I decided that I would return to Rhode Island, finish the wall and visit my mom as many times as possible during my stay. I made arrangements for a frequent-flyer-miles-fueled flight on Alaska Airlines and a cheap rental car.

I flew out of Seattle on Monday, October 12th, in the mid-afternoon, arriving in Boston around 11 p.m.. Unfortunately, my bag with all my tools and work clothes, did not arrive with me. It would be another two days before it eventually showed up at EFI at 11:45 p.m.. In the meantime, Jane picked me up at Logan and drove me to Providence airport to pick up the car ($140/week there versus $280/week in Boston!). By the time I got to Escobar Farmhouse Inn, it was 2 a.m.

Because I didn't have my work clothes or tools, I drove to Meriden on Tuesday, October 13th to visit my mom. We went to lunch at Napoli's Pizza and had delicious calzones (mmm, pepperoni and anchovies), then drove to Hubbard Park and Castle Craig. The view from there is outstanding. I took her back to her convent (for those who don't know yet, my mother became a nun in February 1981 after my father died in November 1979), we talked for a bit and then she laid down for a rest and I drove back to Portsmouth.

Wednesday morning, I was sitting on the porch with my coffee and was struck by the subtlety of the differences in coloration on the wall, the greenish cast of the stones on the old wall versus the new and rawer grayness of the new stone. At least all of the dirt that gave the stones a brownish look has been washed off in the ensuing weeks. I like the way it looks.

That night, the baggage delivery guy called me saying he was at 127 Middle Road in Portsmouth and couldn't find 133 (the delivery address I had given the baggage folks in Boston).
"What kind of car are you driving?"
"A maroon van."
"I'm standing where I can see 133 Middle Road. I don't see any maroon van. Are you at 127 Middle Road, Portsmouth, Rhode Island?"
(much laughter) "Well, that explains it. I'm in Portsmouth, New Hampshire."

It would be another full day before my bag arrived.

So, finally, the wall building commenced on Thursday. Louis had a great load of stone waiting for me when I arrived on Tuesday. I began building and was surprised to see how much progress I had made by lunch time. With only 10' to build, it was not going to take long to get this project done. Unfortunately, the weather was not cooperating. It began to rain while I was having lunch, so work was done for the day. The rain continued the next morning, letting up around 1 in the afternoon. I worked Friday afternoon for a couple of hours. I was getting to the point where I would need to have a set of hand-picked stones to finish out the wall.

Up to this point, I had done none of the picking. All of the rock for the new wall had been coming from an old wall on the farm that was no longer useful and was being reclaimed by nettles and other weeds. Louis, Jason, or Maurice would arrive in the backhoe or skid steer with a load of rock that they had pulled off the old wall. At dinner on Friday evening, I arranged with Louis to pick stones on Saturday morning for the finish of the wall.

Saturday morning dawned grey, cold, and windy, but not rainy, though it did look like it might rain any minute. After breakfast I walked over to the farm and met Louis and he showed me where all of the stone had come from. I saw some really good stones there and loaded them into the bucket of the skid steer. On the way past the barn, I saw a great thick, rectangular rock that would make an awesome base at the end of the wall. As Louis drove up, I said, "I have got to have this rock!" Louis maneuvered it into the bucket of the skid steer. It turned out to be much thicker than I had thought and probably weighed upwards of 500 pounds. When we got over to the Inn, I had Louis drop it right into the space where I had planned for it to go. All I had to do was rotate it 90 degrees and push it around a bit to get it into its ultimate position. I was, once again, glad for the mechanical advantages provided by Louis' farm machinery. There's no way I could have moved that rock by myself! It does, however, make an awesome anchor point for the end of the wall.

Because I had picked some really great rocks, I had the wall essentially finished before lunchtime with only a couple of rocks left to place. One was a behemoth that I would need help lifting onto its final position as the last capstone. I was able to move it into position near the wall, but knew that it would kill my back if I tried to lift it myself.

Help was coming. Earlier in the week when I went to visit my mom, she told me that she and Margaret, my middle sister, would be coming out on Saturday. When Steve heard they were coming on Friday, he decided to come as well. I had also invited my older brother, Mike, to come, but he explained that there were projects he had to get done at home and would not be able to come. What I did not know until later was that he was working to rearrange his schedule and show up as a surprise.

Margaret, Jane, Mom and I went to lunch together and then returned to the Inn. Steve showed up after lunch and, while I was showing him the progress I had made, Mike called. He had driven down, but gotten lost in the maze of Providence highway construction (apparently an easy thing to do). He eventually showed up and the three of us were able to put that final capstone on the wall.

Here is a gratuitous family portrait: Left to right; Mom, Stephen, Michael and me, all happy to have gotten that big rock on the wall with no injuries. Thanks for taking the picture, Margaret. We were having a mini-reunion again; Mom and her 5 oldest children all together. Only Mary, in Esko, and Tom, in Seattle, were missing.

Because of all the people there and conversation swirling around, it was tough to concentrate on finishing off the wall. It continues to amaze me what a solitary, intense, and concentrated process building with stone is. When placing a stone on the wall, you must fit it in to the space that is there, but even more importantly, you are creating the bed for the next stone to occupy. In that, it's a bit like chess; the move you are making is what it is, but more than that, it is preparation for the move you will be making 4, 5, 6 moves hence. Because I wasn't able to concentrate on it, I decided to call it a day. I did take the opportunity to show Mike the work I had been doing since August.

Because we've both been busy with our families on opposite ends of the country, Mike and I have not communicated all that often. Things are getting better now and I'm glad he made the effort to come down and see the work and the rest of the family. There's some light there and we're making our way toward it.

We adjourned inside, gave Mike a tour of the Inn and began dinner preparations. Jane and Margaret made steak, swordfish with ginger cream sauce, and assorted vegetables. It was an awesome meal and we had a great time together.

Sunday, as usual, I did not work; spending the time going to church, hanging out with Margaret and Mike who had stay the night and reading. As I sat on the porch and looked out at the wall, I knew that I would be finished tomorrow.

Monday morning was a glorious Fall morning in Rhode Island. Clear, bright, sunny, and a bit on the cool side. As I sat on the porch finishing my coffee, my eyes kept being drawn to a couple of stones; it's kind of amazing how my mind works on these 3-d puzzles even while I'm doing something else. In about an hour and a half, I had solved all of the placement puzzles and Phase 2 of my wall building was complete. Here's a familiar view; I love the way that bottom rock anchors the whole wall. There's no way that thing is moving; short of an earthquake (or a large motor vehicle crashing into it at speed.

Here's a view of all 67.5' of new wall, from the cherry tree to the sign post. It has been worth the effort.

This view is my favorite. You can see the wall in its total context; all of the new construction, Escobar Farmhouse Inn, and the blue, clear sky of New England autumn. I love the way the line of the wall leads your eye right on to the neighbor's wall to the north.

I think the wall looks pretty much how I envisioned it would when Diane and I discussed the possibility of doing this project back in July during family reunion 2009. I think it makes a fine addition to the Inn and in many ways looks like it has always been there. In another few years as the stone weathers and takes on some of the moss, algae, and lichen of the surrounding wall, it will look even better.

Rockin': Building the New Wall: Phase 1, part 2

2009-10-20T11:12:00.000-07:00

I ended my last post with the finish of work on Saturday, August 15. As usual, I did not work on Sunday, using it as a day to go to church and visit with family. I grew up in Meriden, Connecticut about a two-hour car ride from Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Most of my family still lives in the CT/RI area, so it doesn't take too long to go see any of them.

I was about to begin my last week of work on the wall. In early September I would be accompanying my wife and daughter to Israel and the West Bank (where they've been working for the past year) for three weeks. I had to drive back to Seattle and knew that it would take me longer than coming out had, as I planned to stop and see several people along the way. The end of the space where I would be putting the wall (which still needed to be dug and filled) was still 40' away and I had only gotten 12' of wall completed (though it was 20' at the bottom) in four days. I was somewhat depressed because it looked like I wouldn't complete the project and that had been the picture in my mind the whole time since volunteering. All I could do was work as hard as possible and see what I could get accomplished.

One thing that had happened over the past week, though, was that Louis had begun to take my work seriously and was about to begin stepping up his support of it through more timely delivery of materials. When I first volunteered to do the wall, Louis was skeptical. Everything he knew about me to that point did nothing to suggest that I would be successful with the project. He didn't know about my previous stone projects and didn't know whether I was just a dilettante or what. Two things convinced him that I had the ability; first, when he saw the repair work on the old wall during an interim phase he was seriously impressed with the quality of the work, and second, when I took the big hump out of the wall so that I could run it to the level of the neighbor's wall without talking to him about it. At that point, he saw that I had an eye for quality and the ability and drive to back it up.

I know I mentioned it in passing earlier that there was a hump in the wall quite close to the small cherry tree. My theory is that whoever built the wall to begin with was maintaining a constant height. When the ground rose or fell, so did the level of the wall. It bothered me to see that big hump in it, so I took it out. All I had to do was to pick up about 5 capstones and then strategically shift some of the stones around so the height was reduced.

One of my goals with the wall was to have it harmonize with those of the neighbors. The property directly north of EFI has a beautiful, straight, even dry stone wall. It sits at a constant height and really adds a finished look to the property. I figured if I brought my wall to that level over its full length, then it would look like a continuation of the one to the north, adding value to both properties. To that end I pounded a stake in near the sign post, took my roll of mason's twine and established a height line that started far back on the old wall and went all the way to the sign, ending at the same height as the neighboring wall. The picture below was taken at the end of the day, Friday, August 14th and shows the level line and the old wall sans hump

I don't know what happened to my Facebook posts. The ones from before August 18 have disappeared, so I don't have any record of Monday, August 17. In the picture below you can see that I am, once again, at a standstill. I am at the end of the 26' long gravel trench and there is not much stone lying around. I'd put the length of the wall at about 22' at the top and 25.5' at the bottom. At dinner that night I told Louis that I needed to have him finish digging the trench, fill it with gravel, and deliver a load of stone as early as possible on Tuesday so that I could keep working.

Louis took me seriously. Before I had even finished my breakfast, he and his grandson, Jason, were out in front of the Inn with the backhoe, digging the rest of the trench.

Though he would say otherwise, Louis is a skilled backhoe operator. Look at how close he gets to the surrounding obstacles and still is able to do the careful, straight dig he needs to deliver.

He started at the open end of the trench and dug as far as he could, then turned the backhoe around and finished the job. When you realize that he had to straddle an open trench to do that, you can begin to appreciate the skill that let him position that multi-ton Ford beast and get the accurate results that he did. I'm amazed at how closely he dug to the line without breaking it even once.

So now I had a trench stretching the full length of the job site. Next step, fill it with gravel.

By the end of the day, it had been filled in and another load of stones had been delivered.

had a good day of wall building. The bottom is at 28', the top is at 24', and the entire foundation trench has been dug out and filled with gravel.
August 18 at 5:24pm (Tuesday)

At the beginning of building I often had to wait for materials deliveries from Louis, this slowed down my progress somewhat. At this point he began delivering stone to me twice a day, once in the morning and a second time in the early afternoon. This allowed me to keep up quite a pace as you can see by how much wall I was putting in according to my Facebook posts.

had a good day of wall building. Bottom is at 35' and the top is at 27'. Hot day, but the relatively constant breeze made it manageable.
August 19 at 6:08pm (Wednesday)

I only had three more work days left, but the bottom of the wall was now over half way and I had built 15' of wall in three days. That was encouraging, but I also knew there was no way I was going to finish the whole thing.

My FB post the next morning reflects that realization:

is entering his last few days of the project. I have to leave on Sunday or Monday to drive back to Seattle, so Saturday will be my last work day. It is frustrating and somewhat disheartening to know that I will not complete this project, but it has been good work thus far. Hot and humid at 9 a.m., tough to get working.
August 20 at 9:36am (Thursday)

Later that day, I had a somewhat different take on things, though, and, as you can see from the picture had made some good progress.

despite my misgivings earlier today, I had an awesome day of wall building. 40' at the bottom, 35' at the top -- mostly because Louis brought me two incredible loads of stone. I have enough left to make good progress tomorrow as well.
August 20 at 5:19pm

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My youngest sister, Mary, had arrived that day for a visit with Jane. The next day, she helped me all day; cleaning and sorting rocks, doing whatever I asked her to do. Together we made great progress.

A spectacular day! Mary, my sister from Minnesota, arrived last night; today she helped me by cleaning and sorting stone. Louis delivered some truly excellent stones. Bottom of the wall, 49.5'; top of the wall, 44'.
August 21 at 5:55pm (Friday)

I had one day left; though it was hard to believe, I (with the help of many) had been able to build almost 30' of wall in 5 days. The last day of Phase 1 was, in many ways, the best one. While Mary and I were sitting on the porch eating breakfast, we both noticed a space toward the bottom of the wall that you could see daylight through. It bothered her as much as it did me (a good sign) and when we got out to work, she worked at fixing that.

Up to this point, I had been the only photographer of my work. That Saturday my middle sister, Margaret, also came out for a visit. That's why I ended up in a few of the pictures. This next one seems to be typical of the way I spent lots of time working on the wall. I'm just standing there looking at the wall, looking at the stones, looking at the wall, looking at the stones. Eventually, I see a stone that will fit in a place, then pick it up and place it.

My next visitor was Steve, my younger brother. He arrived in the late morning to look at the progress we had made. It was almost a mini family reunion with 5 of the 7 Rzegocki children there. This was not the last time that that occurred, though the next one was even more surprising. I'll write about that in Phase 2.

By the end of the day Saturday, I placed my last stones and cleaned up the remaining ones, putting them in a compact group near the base of the wall. The wall wasn't finished, but it had progressed significantly farther than I had thought possible. I was definitely pleased with the results.

In this picture you can see just how close I came to finishing.

My part of the stone wall at the front of Escobar Farmhouse Inn is done. My sisters Margaret and Mary helped today; we got an amazing amount done. Final measurements: 57' at the bottom, 55' at the top. What a good work to have done.
August 22 at 5:31pm (Saturday)

I thought that I was finished. Little did I know that I would be back in Rhode Island in just six weeks.

Rockin': Building the New Wall: Phase 1, part 1

2009-10-19T11:24:00.000-07:00

It has been a long time (almost 2 and 1/2 months) since I started building the new section of stone wall. I chronicled my efforts in real time using Facebook status messages from my iPhone to keep my friends and family up to date on my progress. Rather than relying on my sometimes faulty memory, I am going to copy and paste FB entries into this blog to chronicle the progress. Each of the initial sentences lacks a subject; Facebook puts in the name of the poster, so you can just assume that.

As I previously mentioned, while I was repairing the old wall, I had also staked out the trench for the new wall. I found some stakes around the farm, making two in the machine shed, and then stretched out some of the 800' of mason's line that I had brought with me from Lake Forest Park. The last picture in my previous post shows that work.

So begins the chronology:

spent my first full day at the B & B. There is nothing about the job I regularly do that would prepare me for a full day of manual labor; I am bound to be very creaky tomorrow. Spent the day cleaning up the older section of rock wall; made a lot of progress.
August 5 at 7:07 pm (Wednesday)

finished up cleaning the old section of wall yesterday. Have to wait until Tuesday to dig the new wall's foundation (so we know exactly where any gas, electrical or cable lines are buried). Spent today setting up the B&B's computer syst...em; once Cox Cable arrives I'll set up the wireless network. Also changed the oil in the Roadster; it'll be ready for another one by the time I get back home.
August 7 at 9:56pm (Friday)

going to start repairing the old section of stone wall. Can't dig the foundation for the new wall until late Tuesday (at least!), so I might as well get something useful done.
August 8 at 11:21am (Saturday)

is now firmly into Day Two of old wall repair. Defined the lines for the trench that will hold the foundation gravel for the new wall; while I'm waiting for Louis to arrive with the backhoe, I'll keep going on the repair.
August 10 at 10:34am (Monday)

The folks from DigIt had come out to inspect the trench site and mark where any utilities were. We knew there were only gas and water lines coming in to the house; both electricity and cable (when it arrived) would come in overhead. Even though we were probably supposed to wait for Tuesday (four days after we called them), Louis came over with the backhoe in the morning on Monday, August 10 and dug the first 26' of the trench.

One thing to notice about the photo above is the large rock lying to the left of the trench. It was a monster that had been lying just below the surface that Louis brought up when he was digging. It would become the first rock I laid for the new wall. There's no sense in wasting such a great piece of stone. While most of the stone I used could be picked up by one person, that rock was not one of those. The best you can do is roll and flip it into position, letting gravity do as much of the work as possible (though gravity is no help when it comes to getting it ready to flip!).

After that, Maurice, one of the workers at the farm brought over a load of gravel and dumped it in the trench. I learned a couple of things from that: 1) Maurice is not the sharpest tool in the shed. If you want him to do something, tell him exactly what to do. Do not expect him to do any thinking; 2) shoveling gravel is hard work. My next Facebook post echoed that statement:

It's hot (79 degrees) and humid (81%) with a promised high of 83 today. Shovelling that gravel yesterday was tougher on me than I thought. Tough to get going this morning.
August 11 at 8:47am (Tuesday)

If I had been dumping the gravel, I would have put the whole pile of it at the end of the trench nearest to the old wall. Obviously (well, at least it was obvious to me, though evidently not to Maurice), that is where the first section of wall is going to be. Instead, Maurice dumped the whole pile of gravel about 6' from the end of the trench. I took my trusty shovel and moved a portion of the pile over to the end of the trench and smoothed the rest of it out.

So now I had 26' of what would become a 67.5' trench and the first 15' of it was lined with gravel. Shortly after that, Louis arrived with the backhoe. The front bucket on it was loaded with my first delivery of stone.

I went back to the old wall and finished repairing the section I had been working on, then spent the afternoon spreading that pile of stone out so that I could see all of the 'puzzle' pieces.

just finished the repair of the first section of the old wall. Set 11 capstones today; pictures to follow when the light is softer. In another couple of hours I will have been here one week; I'm going to spend the rest of the afternoon sorting stones for the new wall.
August 11 at 2:49pm

The next day I began working on the new section.

had a good day; it was cloudy and relatively cool. Got 8' of new wall started and blended it in with the end of the old wall.
August 12 at 6:49pm (Wednesday)

I took a picture of the first stone placed. It seemed like a historic occasion at the time; sort of like the laying of the cornerstone of a new building.

By the end of the day, I had gotten 8' (measured at the bottom) done.

A couple of things to note about the photo above; that big round rock at the 'working' end of the wall was another that I had found close by. It sat, partially buried and resting against a post on the back side of the existing wall. Again, I didn't want to waste such a beautiful stone. Also, I've written before saying that building a dry stone wall is really building two parallel walls and filling the space between with scrap. That's mostly true, but in this picture you can clearly see at least two stones that I am using to tie the two walls together. While prowling through a rock pile, I would always be on the lookout for relatively thin, relatively long rocks that I could place perpendicular to the long axis of the wall. You can see one right at the front on the bottom and just ahead of the big rounded rock mentioned earlier. The second is visible (if you know where to look) almost directly above the end of the first rock I placed. I know there are others in the wall, but all you can see of them is one end protruding a bit. They look like little filler stones when viewed from either side of the wall, but they have alot to do with the strength and integrity of the wall.

The next day I experienced my only work day of rain during the three weeks I was in Rhode Island.

It's raining in Portsmouth; no wall work until it lets up a bit.
August 13 at 8:30am (Thursday)

But it did let up later in the morning, so I made a little progress.

the rain stopped so I worked for a couple of hours this morning, but it started again after lunch and doesn't look like it'll stop any time soon.
August 13 at 2:22pm

I did take a few pictures, though, and really liked what I saw. In each of the following pictures, the rain brings out the colors of the stone really well and points up the contrast between the new sections and the old.

The next day was clear and sunny and I was up and ready to work early:

A gorgeous morning in Rhode Island; I'm ready to rock.
August 14 at 7:36am (Friday)

By the end of the day, I had extended the bottom of the wall 15.5'. As I only had 16' of gravel, that meant that I had nowhere else to build now. In addition, I was running out of rock to use. Louis would have to bring me more gravel and rock. In an example of fantastic, just-in-time production on this old-school project, he brought me gravel at 7 pm that Friday.

And the next morning, he brought me my second load of stone:

Now I had room to build and materials to do it with. I got quite a bit done that day and celebrated with Jane and Louis by cooking the meal that evening.

had another productive day on the wall: the bottom is 20' out and 12' of the top has been capped off. Making Champagne Chicken, Balsamic Beets, and Parmesan Potato Wedges for dinner to celebrate a good week.
August 15 at 4:42pm

I had started working 10 days ago. In that time I had cleared the old wall completely, repaired an old section, and built 20' of new wall. I'll continue the story in my next post.

Rockin': Repairing a section of the existing wall

2009-10-15T13:17:00.000-07:00

It took me two or three days to get the repair done on the first section of existing wall. Most of the time, I did not bring the camera out to the job site until the end of the day (sensitive electronics/optics don't mix that well with dirt, roots, and heavy stones), so the pictures I'm posting here were usually taken in the late afternoon/early evening after I had taken my shower.

Here's what things looked like on the second day:

I spent a part of the day fixing the capstones that weren't level on the existing wall. I hope you agree that it looks much nicer now. I think it does. I was feeling pretty good about how the repair work was proceeding. I estimated that I would finish this section the next day. Here's what it looked like from the west (corn field) side of the wall:

Most dry stone walls just have a bunch of rubble thrown in between the two parallel walls. I like to fit the stones as tightly as possible. Here's a closer look; you can see how I have Tetrised the inside of the wall. I figure it will last longer that way:

Just as I thought, I was able to get the section of wall finished the next day.

As much as I wanted to get going on building the new wall, I derive an intense amount of satisfaction from repairing something that looked so beat up and broken down. If you look closely at the stones, you can see which ones have been on the wall for a long time (the sound sections of wall at both ends of the photo) and the new ones I put in (they don't have any moss or lichen on them and are somewhat dirtier). One thing I really like is that even though I know which parts are which, I still have to look fairly closely to distinguish the sections.

While I was doing the repair, I spent a lot of time pulling roots out of the soil on both sides of the wall. Look to the right in the photo above and you'll see the pile of roots I took out of the ground. Most of that is bittersweet. I can see why the Corps of Engineers used it for erosion control.

While the repair was going on, I had staked out the spot where the trench was to be dug. When I drove East from Lake Forest Park, I brought all the wall building tools I would need; a rock hammer (actually a brick hammer, but I use it mostly for rock), an 800' roll of mason's twine, and a line level (an aluminum cylinder with a level glass inside it and two hooks on top so you can hang it from a line). That all fit in one very small box. I found some stakes in the workshop at the farm and pounded them in where I wanted them to go.

Because the wall was going to be about 24" wide, the lines are about 36" apart; you should have about 6 inches of gravel on either side of the wall for a firm footing. I'm going to write about the building process in another post.

Rockin': Clearing the Old wall and beginning the repair

2009-10-14T13:46:00.000-07:00

Now that I knew I'd be waiting for several days before we had clearance to dig the trench, I began working on repairing the old wall. Before I could do anything else, I would have to clear all of the vegetation off of it. I started at the north end of the wall where a small cherry tree was growing. This is what it looked like at the start:

When you walked around the end of the wall, this was the view to the south. Notice that there is a rather large stump propped up against the wall. I moved that out, and when I noticed what I nice piece of wood it was, I moved it over to the deck beside the Inn:

I started by pruning the low hanging branches of the cherry tree and pulling out all the excess vegetation, piling it up on the west side of the wall (out of view from the street side). Already things were beginning to look better:

This is where I ended on the first day of clearing. Take a look at the end of the wall. Notice how it humps up there right at the end? I did, and it bothered me quite a bit. It would be several days before I would do anything about it though. That's kind of how it goes when doing this kind of work, though; you notice something that's going to need to be addressed and file it away, knowing that you will have to do something about it eventually.

On my second day of clearing I got the whole wall exposed. In the photo above, you can see the larger cherry tree. This is a look at the south end of the wall while I'm standing beside the big tree.

This is what it looked like when standing on the west side near the south corner looking north:

The only part of the wall I didn't clear was on the inside corner. It was loaded with nettles and I wasn't about to tangle with them without a weed whacker. When I stood on the east side of the wall (toward Route 138) and looked north, this was the view I got:

To repair on old stone wall, you first have to locate two sound sections of wall. Once you have those, you can begin taking apart the broken part and laying the stones out so you can see what you have. Building a dry stone wall is a relatively simple process. In essence, you are building two parallel walls that lean in toward each other and filling the center section with smaller, irregular stones. Believe it or not, there are two sound sections of wall in the photo above.

So, I took the wall apart, laid the stones out in a single layer so that I could see them all and then started rebuilding. This picture was taken at the end of the first day (I think) and has a couple of interesting features:

You can see a huge root sticking out of the dirt in front of the wall. That is a bittersweet root. Bittersweet was introduced by the Army Corps of Engineers to control erosion and has become the kudzu of the Northeast. One of its interesting features is that it will continue to grow in thickness through its entire life. My sister, Jane, has seen roots (and branches) as thick as a person's thigh. It is this ability to keep growing like that that helps bittersweet to tear apart a wall stone by stone.

I have laid down a couple of courses of solid stone here. If you look at the top of the wall toward the corner, you can see that all of the capstones are tilted back, toward the corn field. Those would have to be fixed as part of the repair.

Rockin': A Road Trip to Rhode Island and What I Found

2009-10-14T12:28:00.000-07:00

Ok, so the scene is set now. My last day of work at Cisco was July 31st. My next day of work there would be November 3rd. I had three months in front of me and lots of projects to fill it.

August 1st found me in my trusty M Roadster headed east. Three days later I was on the east Coast in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. I arrived at the Inn at about 5 pm. Here's what the Escobar Farmhouse Inn looks like:

When you stand on that gorgeous porch and look to the south this is your view:

The wall is obscured by intense amounts of vegetation, mostly multiflora roses, blackberries, and, most pernicious of all, bittersweet. Standing at the end of the existing wall and looking straight south you get a view of the Jungle there:

What I didn't realize at the time was that I would have the opportunity to change the look of that quite a bit. The lawn directly in front of the Inn is the area I'd be working in. Here's the view before any work started:

I would be building the wall from the end of the old wall all the way over to the empty sign post.

The first step in building a dry stone wall is to prepare a foundation for it. This is relatively simple: dig a trench about 18" - 24" deep and about a foot wider than the wall, then fill that trench with gravel. As in most developed places, before you do any significant digging, you have to contact the authorities that will certify the location of gas, water, electric lines, etc, so that you don't do any damage while digging. Unfortunately, no-one had done that prior to my arrival. As a result, I could not begin working on the new wall for a week. In the meantime, I kept myself busy by clearing and repairing the old wall. Wall repair commenced on August 5 and will be the subject of my next post.

Rockin’: My Latest Project’s Inspiration

2009-10-14T11:45:00.000-07:00

Our family has been holding reunions every other year for at least the last 10 years. We generally alternate between three sites; my sister, Mary’s, house in Esko, Minnesota, my sister, Jane’s, farm in Portsmouth, Rhode Island (Jane is married to Louis, the last dairy farmer on Aquidneck Island (which seems like a nice rural sounding place until you learn that Newport is at the south end of Aquidneck Island)), and our house in Lake Forest Park.

This year family reunion was held at Jane and Louis’ farm. Several years ago they purchased a piece of property across the road from their farmhouse. They use most of the land for a cornfield, but it also contains an old, no longer used church and what used to be the fellowship hall next door to it. The fellowship hall was a deteriorating structure that has been marvelously remade into a four room bed and breakfast with the liberal application of funds. The family spent the week in the B & B this July in a sort of intense focus group. That wasn’t our original intention, that’s just the way it turned out.

Escobar Farmhouse Inn has a feature that I have always wanted in a house, a large, wide, wraparound porch good for sitting sheltered from the sun/rain/whatever New England throws at you. The porch faces Route 138, one of the two main roads running north/south on the island. It is a four lane road that carries an amazing amount of traffic. That traffic results in quite a bit of noise. In talking with my extended family, most of us were bothered by the noise. The majority of traffic noise is actually caused by tire contact with the road, though there is also exhaust noise and various rattles and bangs to contend with as well. Tire noise is generally high frequency, very directed noise. If you could interrupt the path of the noise, things would be much quieter. Properties all up and down Route 138, right across the street and the one directly north of the Inn are all lined with dry stone walls. In fact, the east end of the corn field and part of the Inn’s lawn are bordered by an old stone wall. In consultation with Diane, my ever-enthusiastic and generous spouse, I offered to continue that dry stone wall across the front of the lawn in front of the Inn, a distance of about 70 feet.

Because I had already scheduled my three-month sabbatical from Cisco for August, September, and October, I knew that I would have the time for a project of this magnitude. I knew I’d be here for at least two weeks and that I didn’t want to rent a car for that long, so I decided to combine two of my favorite activities, a road trip and building a stone wall.

Rockin’: An Elaboration on the Name Change

2009-10-14T11:43:00.000-07:00

I originally named my blog based on the things I was interested in. At the time, I didn’t anticipate that my love of dry stone masonry would become a major focus for this writing. As things happen, I have become involved in another stone project and will be spending some time writing about it.

I come by my love of stone work somewhat ancestrally. My maternal grandmother, Johanna Sommariva Cotter, was born in this country, but her immediate ancestors were, on the paternal side, stone masons originally from the region around Belluno, Italy. I didn’t find this out until I began working on my first major stone project, the repair of an 80’ x 20’ slate terrace at a home in Meriden, Connecticut in 1974-1975.

My next two large masonry projects were at our present house in Lake Forest Park. One is a retaining wall; the other is an extension of the front patio and two sets of stairs with inlaid brick.

The retaining wall is a dry stone wall set into the hill to the south of our house assembled out of 32 tons of Eatonville basalt (a beautiful dark gray stone that comes from quarries on the south side of Mount Rainier. The wall is 150’ long and averages 5’ in height. This was very much a family project, as I drafted all four of my children at one time or another to help. It took 4 years of spring/summer/fall weekends to complete, but now looks as though it has always been there and is likely to be there for a long time to come.

When we moved to our home in 1991, the front patio was a 10’ x 20’ concrete pad with four large rhododendron bushes between it and the north side of the house. We replanted the rhodies to the east side of the house (they subsequently died) and were left with a dirt strip between the patio and the house. As the major remodeling inside the house was coming to an end, I asked our contractors to build a set of forms for a path across the north side of the house that would extend beyond the end of the patio and three sets of forms for steps; one connecting the house to the footbridge across MacAleer Creek, the second connecting the back (south) side of the house to the upper lot, and a third, much smaller, set from the roadside mailbox to the lawn leading to the footbridge. All of these forms were filled in with bricks set in sand and laid in a parquet pattern. Over time, some of the treated wood used in the forms has begun to deteriorate (18 years in contact with soil in a rainy, shaded environment seems to be a good useful life to me) and has gradually been replaced, but overall, it is holding up well.

So, now there is some context for the blog’s name change.

Racin': One Lap of America? Not this year.

2009-04-06T13:52:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago on a Thursday, March 19, as I was driving home from work, the Roadster starting running very roughly. Normally a BMW inline 6 cylinder motor is one of the smoothest machines on the planet. That day, it felt more like a 4 cylinder with no balance shafts. As I had two cars sitting in the driveway at home (because neither Diane nor Gwynedd are at home these days), I figured it'd be best to get it into Car Tender as soon as possible so they could diagnose the problem. I delivered it there that evening, figuring that it would be a day or two before they got around to it.

The next Tuesday, March 24, I got the bad news. I had low compression on cylinders 4 and 5. At that news, my heart sank. I couldn't imagine what had caused the problem, but I knew the fix was not going to be cheap. I authorized them to figure out what had gone wrong. A day or two later Russell, one of the owners, called and let me know that they had found the problem. I had a break in the head gasket between cylinders 4 and 5. Here's was things look like:

This is the break between cylinders 4 and 5 as it lay on the mechanics bench at Car Tender. Sorry about the resolution, this was taken with my iPhone.

This photo is centered on cylinder 4 with #3 to the right and #5 to the left. Notice that there are scorch marks between all of the cylinders at the thinnest spot.

This is centered on cylinder 5 with 6 to the left and 4 to the right. Again, there is evidence of scorching between all cylinders.

In a sense I was relieved. This was the least expensive possibility in my mind. Still not cheap, but significantly cheaper than pulling the motor, disassembling it and rebuilding it. He reviewed for me all the checks he had made as he pulled things apart; the head was straight and flat, the block was straight and flat, the head bolts showed no signs of being stretched unnaturally, everything appeared to be in order.

The thing that bothered me most about this is that Car Tender put that head gasket in about 15 months and 21,000 miles ago. Wouldn't you know it, they have a 12 month, 12,000 mile warranty on repairs! They are going to give me a 20% discount, which is nice, but what I really want is two things; one, to understand why this happened so quickly (the first head gasket lasted 155,000 miles), and, two, to fix it so that it doesn't happen again for another 155,000 miles (or more). Right now, all we have are theories; one suspect is the fuel injectors. Perhaps they are running in an almost-lean condition. If that were the case then the cylinders would be running hotter than they should be and that might account for the burn-through and scorching. They're sending the injectors out to be tested today (I think). We'll know more in a day or two.

While they are in there with the top end of the motor disassembled, I asked them to look at the cam chain and tensioners. It's a pretty hefty piece and will usually last a couple hundred thousand miles, but as long as they have almost all the labor done to get at it, they might as well check. They're recommending that I replace it, which makes good sense to me, but also adds $1750 to the bill.

So, my rough running engine is going to end up costing me $4-5,000 to fix in the end (once you add Washington state taxes, etc). That has pretty much put the final nail in the coffin of my One Lap hopes for this year. The last nail before that was when Bill called and left me a voice mail (I had left my phone at home by accident that day) on March 25, letting me know that he would not be able to do One Lap as my co-driver this year. His financial situation had changed for a number of reasons and he couldn't justify the expense of playing with cars at this point. I can certainly understand that and had been expecting to hear that from him. Francis, my son and co-driver for the past six One Laps, who had previously said he wouldn't go this year (which was why Bill was) said that he would do it with me.

When I looked at the finances, I didn't see a way that I could really justify it and still meet all our other financial obligations. Hey, if I win the Megaball lottery this week, I'll go. But first, I'd have to buy a ticket! I am supremely bummed out about not going; but I was also very concerned that it would have been pretty foolish from a financial standpoint this year.

There's always next year, at least, there will be as long as they continue to hold the event. I really wanted to drive Sebring and Daytona this year. Those tracks would have been a blast. Bummer.

Readin': Lucky Bastard

2009-04-01T13:37:00.000-07:00

Lucky Bastard is the title of the latest Charles McCarry novel that I have read. I finished it Monday night. It is the story of Jack Adams, John Fitzgerald Adams, who believes himself to be the bastard child of JFK, conceived while his mother was a single Navy nurse in a hospital in San Francisco. When found to be pregnant, she is discharged from the Navy and then goes back to Ohio, marries a man, and six months later delivers Jack. Jack is orphaned 5 years later when his parents die in a car crash and is raised by his maternal grandparents.

The novel is the story of Jack Adams rise to political power, sponsored by two shadowy agents of the KGB who recruit him during his time at the University of Heidelberg (after they had already arranged his fellowship there after he finished at Columbia). Jack has a manic sex drive and they use that to control him, sort of. The novel is fascinating in its exploration and explanation of recent history in America, from the student unrest of the 60s, through feminism, environmentalism, drugs (where they ultimately come from and who is ultimately sponsoring them) and many other facets of American life as seen through the eyes of one of those two KGB agents. The story is told as a sort of memoir of the complete operation from the point of view of the handler of the case.

McCarry is easy to read; his writing is straightforward and, at the same time, action packed. He shows his characters to great psychological depth, betraying a sympathy for even the least admirable of his characters in their ultimate humanity.

The end of the novel is quite surprising. I certainly will not spoil it here. Though this book had no real connection to any of the Paul Christopher novels beyond one tantilizing hint about a peripheral, though important, character in two of the Christopher novels, The Better Angels and Old Boys, it is well worth the read on its own merits. Highly recommended reading.

Readin': Four by Charles McCarry

2009-03-29T16:16:00.000-07:00

I tend to get on a roll with authors. If I read a first book by one and like it, I will often begin a quest to read everything they have written to date. This is not too hard with most authors, as they generally have written less than 10 books, but when you get to a Robert B. Parker or Isaac Asimov, you are in deep trouble. Mr. Asimov, to my knowledge, still holds the Guiness Book record for most books authored by one man at over 400!

Well, I began that roll with Charles McCarry during Christmas vacation when I read The Miernik Dossier. Since then I have read several in the Paul Christopher series. McCarry started writing in the 1970's, after he was no longer working as a deep-cover agent. He's written both fiction and non-fiction, but I'm only interested in his fiction at this point.

The latest quartet of books that I've read by him are Christopher's Ghosts, Old Boys, The Secret Lovers, and The Better Angels. I am almost halfway through Lucky Bastard, but will not write about that one until I have finished.

Christopher's Ghosts is one of McCarry's latest as it carries a 2007 copyright. The book is split between the years just before WWII in Germany when Paul is in his teens and the 1950s when he is back in Germany and comes into contact with the former SS man who, in part, made his family's life so difficult as 1939 drew closer. The novel reveals Paul's first real love and the part the SS man played in snuffing that out. The novel is psychologically very rich and deep. McCarry writes as well as ever and is a master of description and action.

Old Boys tells the story of Paul Christopher's continued search for his mother. Neither he, nor his father ever stopped believing that Lori Christopher was alive; Hubbard Christopher until his death in the 1950 in Berlin. Though Paul and his mother are a main focus of the novel, neither of them appears in the action until very late in the book. The story is told from the point of view of 4 men who have gone looking for Paul who has been reported dead. The Old Boys meet at his funeral and, at a private gathering afterwards, discover that none of them believes him to be really gone. The novel chronicles their adventures around the world as they search out Paul, and eventually find him with his mother. Very satisfying book and though Lori Christopher's life had an arc like no other, it is still believable. Well worth reading, just not as the first introduction to the world of Paul Christopher as much of the satisfaction of reading comes from seeing men from other novels in new situations and roles.

The Secret Lovers is a book I should have read earlier in the sequence. The novel tells of Paul's marriage to his first wife and of his relentless pursuit of the truth about an operation that caused a death when it should not have. In books I read earlier, there had been references to Paul's first wife. Perhaps I would have understood them more deeply if I had read this one first. Well, there's no going back and I read them in the order I read them. Oh well.

The title of the book works on a couple of levels; first, there are lovers having affairs that are not to be spoken of. In addition, most of the operatives are in love with the idea of secrets that are the truth behind what the rest of the world perceives as 'reality'. It is this love of secrets that sustains them in their lonely, single-minded, and casually violent work.

The Better Angels is also a book I would have been better off reading earlier. One of the Old Boys in Old Boys, central to the plot of that book, revisits an operation that had previously been thought to be successful. A good portion of The Better Angels concerns that operation and its effect on the major players involved; a President, his chief of staff, a major broadcast journalist, the director of the intelligence service and one of his bureau chiefs (brother to the president's chief of staff and one of the central characters in Old Boys). The story is well told, as usual. The twists and turns of the plot follow the lives of the characters through the course of almost 10 years in flashbacks, though the main action of the book takes place during about four months from the nomination of presidential candidates to Election night.

Knowing what I do from statements in Old Boys, I wish I had read The Better Angels and Shelley's Heart before Old Boys. I have not yet read Shelley's Heart, but I'm sure I will eventually. I have no doubt that I will enjoy it.

A reasonable order for reading the Paul Christopher novels in would be: The Miernik Dossier, The Tears of Autumn, The Secret Lovers, The Better Angels, The Last Supper, Second Sight, Shelley's Heart, Old Boys, and Christopher's Ghosts. Actually, any order would probably be fine; the one I have read them in has been pretty good. I guess you just pick up a different set of nuances when you read them in a particular order.

As with Robert Parker novels, I can't see buying these in hardbound editions. Unfortunately, that means that there are some in the series that are not available to me. The first 5 books I read, (Miernik, Tears, Supper, Ghost, and Old Boys) were the only ones available in paperback. As a result I have resorted to my old friend, the King County Public Library. I got The Secret Lovers, The Better Angels, and Lucky Bastard from the KCPL. They are due next Saturday, April 4. I am sure that I will be done with LB by then. Perhaps I will even have written about it!

Life Happens

2009-03-16T13:20:00.000-07:00

Yesterday in the afternoon I was upstairs at the home computer preparing to start a blog post when the power went out. Weather-wise, yesterday offered a little bit of everything; snow in the morning with flakes the size of Oreos, blue skies and sun, vicious wind and rain, sleet. The windstorm in the afternoon was pushing the trees around in pretty amazing fashion.

Because we live in a heavily wooded ravine, we are subject to interruptions of power any time the weather pushes the trees around a good bit; heavy snow or heavy wind being the two biggest pushers. I guess the wind did it this time as the snow only lasted a couple of hours before being chased away by the rain, sun and wind.

So, once the power went out, I disconnected the computer from the power because I didn't want a repeat of frying the video card as happened the last time we lost power. Then I went outside, hooked up and fired up the generator. That Honda generator keeps power going to the refrigerators and freezers, the furnace/water heater, the sump pump, various lights in the house and everything in the living room.

All that explanation is my way of saying why I didn't do another Readin': post yesterday. I won't get it done tonight either, but hope to get back to it in a day or two.

Readin': Robert Parker's Stone-flavored popcorn

2009-03-14T15:58:00.000-07:00

I've been steadily reading these days, but haven't written anything up in quite a while. As a result I have a backlog of eight books to write about. As several of them can logically be grouped together, I'll do those as groups and get to the singles separately.

Robert B. Parker has been a favorite writer of mine for a long time. His most famous works are the Spenser series (35 books so far). This series was the basis for the Spenser: For Hire television show. He's also got two newer series out as well; one featuring Sunny Randall, a former-cop, now private investigator based in Boston (6 books), the other is centered on Jesse Stone, police chief of Paradise, Massachusetts, a small town north of Boston (7 books).

Parker writes great dialog, perhaps the best I have read. He sets the stage for a conversation and then lets it play out over the course of the next several pages. The art of his books is in the way he allows most of the action to flow from the dialog. It's really well done and the voices of his characters are quite specific and unique. You would never mistake one character for another, even in the midst of a dialog that runs several pages. Because these books are so heavily dialog-based they read extremely quickly. Most of his novels run about 270-280 pages in paperback. If I start one in the early evening, I can be finished with it before bedtime. That's why I refer to them as "popcorn". They are light, generally satisfying, and highly addictive.

High Profile and Stranger in Paradise are the two Jesse Stone novels that I have finished most recently. In High Profile he tells the story of two murders that happen in Paradise that are connected by much more than they appear to be on the surface. A nationally known talk show host is found hung from a tree in a public park. He had not been killed there, but shot somewhere else and then displayed there to be found. The body of his personal assistant, now 10 weeks pregnant with his child, is discovered in a Dumpster behind one of the cafes in Paradise.

Jesse Stone is a former baseball player, former L.A. cop, and alcoholic. His ex-wife, with whom his is deeply enmeshed, is a Boston television personality who has followed him East from L.A.. He is also quite smart, deeply observant, and capable of molding his small-town police force into a something much more than anyone could expect it to be. With a thriving cast of characters in the department, creative possibilities for dialog abound. He is able to do the investigative work and make the connections that allow the complex case to be solved (of course, he is. What would be the point of the book if he didn't solve the case in his alloted 280 pages?).

Jesse is regularly seeing a shrink named Dix to help him figure out both his drinking and his complex relationship with his ex-wife. As a result of that work, Jesse is quite perceptive about human nature and accepting of its wild vagaries. It also allows him to see the depth in the case in front of him and not be distracted by the surface details. With his insight, he is able to get to the bottom of a case that he should not, in the normal turn of events, been able to figure out.

Stranger in Paradise brings Jesse together in an uneasy alliance with a character from one of his earlier novels. Wilson Crowmartie, Crow to almost everyone in the book, is a contract killer who describes himself as an Apache warrior. For all anyone knows, he may well be. He is, for sure, an amazing 'man of action'; highly capable and able to master his fears in a way that lets him operate in very dangerous situations. Jesse wants to arrest him for his actions the last time he was in town, when he ended up getting away with $10 million. Crow has come to town on a contract to return a teenaged girl to her south Florida-gangster father and dispose of the mother. He does not want to do either of those things; fighting/killing women is unworthy of an Apache warrior. He knows that, having found the mother and daughter and reported that to the father, his contract obligates him to finish up. He doesn't and needs Jesse's help to pull off saving them both.

In the meanwhile, the daughter has gotten hooked up with a Hispanic gang in a nearby town and that presents complications. The gang makes contact with the father and takes and executes the contract on the mother. Between Crow and Jesse, they are able to bring the father and gang together in one place and either kill or arrest most of the bad guys. In addition, they manage to extort $1 million from the father and set up a trust fund for the daughter so that she can build a life of her own. There's quite a bit of moral ambiguity for both Crow and Jesse in working together which adds a depth to the book that is quite interesting.

As usual, both novels were one-night reads; one right after the other. I refuse to buy Parker novels in hardbound editions. They read so quickly, it seems wasteful to buy them in anything but paperback. He is, fortunately, quite prolific, so there are usually either a Spenser, Randall, or Stone novel appearing in paperback every 4 - 6 months. With 13 other books to his credit beyond these three series, Robert B. Parker is a very busy man at what he does. Having 61 books to his credit would seem to be enough for almost any author. I enjoy his work immensely, having read all of each series and most, though not all, of the other books besides. Stay well, Robert B., I'd like to keep reading your work.

OK, that's two down and six to go. Three of them are Charles McCarry Paul Christoper novels. Two of them are travel writing focusing on elephants in India by Mark Shand. The last one is a book about working in a restaurant kitchen by Bill Buford given to me by my brother the chef. I will tackle some of them in my next posts. No more this afternoon, I'm leaving soon to go to the state girls' 3A high school basketball finals in Tacoma with my brother and niece (who goes to one of the schools in the final, Kennedy). Bye for now, I expect I'll write more tomorrow.

Raisin' Fish: Please Release Me.

2009-03-08T16:57:00.000-07:00

Having seen how close the fry were two weeks ago, I was pretty sure that they would be ready to go this weekend. Before I could let them go, though, I had to confirm that they were ready. This involves a visual inspection of some fish so you can see that their bellies are sealed up. In order to do that, I had to go to Petco to get a new dip net; somehow my old one got a big hole in it after 10 years and I haven't seen it all season anyway, so it was time for a replacement.

Once I got down to the incubator around 11:45 Saturday morning, I opened the lid to see what I could see. The little guys looked really good.

As a coho fry changes from being an alevin, it starts to build the muscles that will become its body. These start to grow from the spine and gradually get bigger and thicker, eventually growing around the shrinking yolk sac that they are subsisting on (which is also turning into their digestive tract). When the two sides of the fish are closed up, or are within 1 mm of closing, they are ready to be released. Keeping them in the incubator for any longer is not good for them; they'll be overcrowded and with their food source gone and not that much food available in the water cycling through the barrel, they will start to prey on one another. So I dipped my new net into the water and pulled out a handful of fry for closer inspection. This is what I saw:

As you can see, their bellies are all closed up. They are ready to go. By this time, lots more of the curious fellows were rising up to the top of the incubator to get a look at what was going on. This seems like a lot of fish; really though, it isn't. Wait 'til you see how many fish were actually there.

I could have released them right then, but I didn't. It was mid-day with several hours of light left. In years passed, I have generally released the fish in the early morning. This was mostly due to convenience; I have a job to get to and I usually don't get home until dark or soon after, not the best time for spending an hour or so beside McAleer Creek. I wanted to be around to see them go and Claire and I were going to be leaving to go to the UW basketball game in just a few minutes. The game would end around 4:30, so we could get home around 5 and release them with about an hour of daylight left. This would allow most of them to get into the creek during the night, safe from most predators. I love how the fish look at this point; their fins and tails are very delicate looking and are a lovely shade of red. These guys want to go, NOW.

On our way home from the game it started to snow. It was just a small flurry, but by the time we got home there was a coating atop the incubator.

I pulled the top off the incubator. This is the last time the incubator will have the screen on it until next winter just after I put the new 'eyed' eggs into the barrel.

Once the exit screen is removed, water starts to flow more quickly through the incubator. The fry notice the change in the current and begin to rise up out of the bottom.

Within a couple of minutes, there are significantly more fish than you thought the barrel would hold.

Coho salmon fry, like most other fish, orient themselves locally by facing into the current. This makes it easier for them to breathe (they just have to open their mouth) and eat (they just have to open their mouth and swallow). In a sense, you can get a good idea of the currents in the water by looking at how they are oriented. They're like iron filings responding to the forces generated by a magnet.

Because it was getting darker I began to use the flash on my camera. That's why the coloring of the fish changes (and you can see a bright spot on the water, probably a reflection of the flash).

The fry seem almost schizophrenic; on the one hand, they want to get out into the creek, on the other, they seem to resist the pull of the current. Most of them are already strong enough swimmers that they are able to resist the current generated at the mouth of the exit pipe.

The ones who face into the current can swim against it fine. The ones at an angle to the current entering the exit pipe get sucked down and out.

Once out of the exit pipe, the fry begin to collect along the sides of the creek. They are too small to resist the flow of the creek anywhere near the middle, so they automatically head for the sides and begin to accumulate in the nooks and crannies. The local salmon gurus encourage people to leave the sides of creeks running through their property in a natural state; this gives the young fry lots of habitat in which to hide. As you can see, they blend in pretty well with the sand and gravel at the bottom of the creek. These little guys are hiding beneath a cedar tree growing right alongside the incubator exit pipe.

They take advantage of any small space and begin to congregate there. Parts of the creek that run through my front yard are lined with broken slabs of concrete; old sidewalks or driveways that are now serving another purpose. They control erosion along the bank, but because of their irregular nature, they also provide hiding places for baby fish. Look closely and you will see several fry in this picture.

So, as dusk turned to full dark, we put the lid back on the incubator and allowed all those thousands of fry to slide quietly into the night.

This afternoon, Sunday, March 8, I went down to the incubator to check on the progress of the release. It's a process that happens over time; alot of the fish go out in the first hour or so, but many of them stay in the incubator for quite a while longer. I knew that there would still be fry in the barrel this afternoon and I was not disappointed in that.

On first inspection, it doesn't seem there are that many. Two things have happened; first, there are nowhere near as many as there were yesterday, but second, the fry have been in relative darkness with the lid on the incubator. When I removed the lid, they dove for the bottom and their hiding places.

Once they settled down a bit, they came rising up to check things out.

I watched them for a little while and saw that there are probably a couple hundred fish still in the incubator. Most of them will leave its safety over the next week. I can pretty much guarantee that when I look inside in a couple of weeks, there will still be fish in there. Some of those guys like it in there and with 60,000+ of their brothers and sisters now having vacated the premises, there's more room to move around and probably enough food to go around.

The water is running clean and clear. One thing I noticed in the picture above is the little bits of algae floating in the water. The fry will eat that for a while and then eventually graduate to eating little bugs in the water. With so few fish, there seems to be more than enough food in there for the time being. Because there is very little insect life in the barrel, the fry will have to go out to the creek for food at some point in the future. They're welcome to hang around for as long as they need to.

This has been a relatively successful year. Out of the 70,000 'eyed' eggs we put into the incubator on December 10, probably 64-65,000 of them have grown to the fry stage and most of them have been released into McAleer Creek.

Coho salmon overwinter in their birth creek. That means that they are born in the winter of one year (like 2008/09), but will stay in the creek for a full year and leave the next spring (2010). Those that survive that long will be about 6 - 9" long and ready to go out through Lake Washington, the Mountlake cut, Lake Union and the Ship Canal, through the Ballard Locks, and out into Puget Sound. Those that make it through that gauntlet will head up to the Gulf of Alaska for a couple of years and return in 2013 or 2014. Less than 1% are likely to return. If 1% did, then 640 or 650 fish would be swimming up McAleer Creek. That would be a noticeable improvement on what we have today.

I'll keep doing this as long as the State Department of Fisheries continues to give me eggs. It's fun. I enjoy playing in the water and I like having a positive effect on the environment. Even if very few fish come back, there are a lot of other animals that are happy; kingfishers, great blue herons, Dolly Varden trout, seals, sea lions, orcas. Though I have now been doing this for 10 of the last 11 years, I never tire of the mysteries of growth and life contained in that black barrel; my wild salmon incubator.

Hoop: It's Lonely at the Top, but that's OK

2009-03-08T15:03:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon, Claire and I went to a college basketball movie. In it, the home team was playing its last game of the regular season on Senior day against its long time rivals. The outcome of the game would determine the championship of the league. Only, this movie was real. UW faced WSU at 2:30 yesterday. If UW won, they would be the sole champions of the Pac-10 for the first time in 56 years. Yes, that's right, the last time they won it outright was with aBob Houbregs-led team in 1953.

Photo taken by Jon Lock/The Seattle Times

Well, they did it in convincing and, by now, traditional UW Huskies fashion. Several of their regular high scorers, Isaiah Thomas and Jon Brockmann among them, did not chip in their regular contributions. As has been the case all year long, other players, notably Venoy Overton, Quincy Pondexter, Darnell Gant, and Justin Holiday, made up for the difference. Jon Brockman had his standard, solid game on the boards, taking down 18 rebounds. However he only scored 7 points, well below his average. That didn't matter too much though, as he was the presence we needed in the middle and Pondexter (16), Gant (6) and Holiday(4) took care of putting in the points. There have been games in the past where those three contributed in the single digits, not 1/3 of the team's point total.

I.T. also had an off day offensively, but Dentmon (12) and, more importantly, Overton (14) picked up the slack. J.D. is always reliable, but Venoy can be really streaky. He plays great defense, but doesn't always make such a substantial contribution on offense. Yesterday, he did and we needed every bit of it.

The game was pretty close the whole way with the Huskies usually in the lead, but generally by no more than 4 or 5 points. At halftime, they led the Cougars 30-25. The Cougs were able to trim it to 1 point with 11 minutes to go, but the Huskies battled back and kept the game just out of reach. With 2:22 left they were ahead by 4 and kept it there the rest of the way, stretching it out just a little to finish with 67 to Washington State's 60. A great win and a great season so far.

At one point in the second half, sunlight began streaming in the windows at the Huskies end of the floor and lit up the crowd in the upper half of the bowl. The lighting effect looked like it had been designed in Hollywood. It was very cool.

The Huskies will begin the Pac-10 tournament in Los Angeles on Thursday against either Stanford or Oregon State, both teams they have beaten in the past. Of course, you can say that about most teams in the Pac-10; the only one they didn't beat was Cal. Next Sunday is the NCAA Selection Sunday. Can't wait to see where UW ends up and how far they get in the Big Dance.

Hoops: One Toasted Redhawk, Comin' Right Up!

2009-03-04T13:48:00.000-08:00

Last night, UW played Seattle University at Hec Ed. This was a make up game for the Lehigh game that was cancelled during the Christmas snowstorms (December 23). It was a reasonably good game with a predictable result; SU got hammered by 27 with the final score UW 87 - Seattle U 60.

One of my seat neighbors characterized the game as a lose-lose proposition for UW; if we lost, we'd lose face (and NCAA tournament placement?) big time, if we won by less than 20, it would be a disgrace. So, the outcome was the only one that wouldn't diminish our prospects in any way.

The Huskies played their usual brand of in-your-face, ball-denial defense and the SU guards had a tough time getting their offense to run. For the first couple of minutes, it looked like they might be able to make a game of it, though I was thinking in the back of my mind that it was just the adrenaline rush working and when that wore out, the Redhawks were done for. After battling to a 4-4 tie in the first couple of minutes (UW had a tough time with their 2-3 and 1-3-1 zones for a little while), the initial rush wore out and the onslaught started.

It seemed that we stole the ball practically at will. Our defense was definitely the engine that was making our offense go. On top of that, when we did get into a half court set, we were able to get the ball in to Jon Brockman or Matthew Bryan-Amaning seemingly at will. Brockman converted a lot of those, scoring 16 points before he went out with about 9 minutes left to play. MBA, on the other hand, couldn't seem to find the bucket last night, scoring only two points on foul shots (and he was 2 for 4 there!). He did contribute on defense, swatting numerous shots away and rebounding ferociously.

Everyone on the Huskies played, with the exception of Tyreese Bresheers (who is on the roster, but I have not seen him play all year). Everyone who played, scored. Artem Wallace came in with 9:46 to go; he scored 8. Joe Wolfinger came in at 6:20; he scored 7 (a deuce, a three, and two foul shots (2-2). Hell, even Scott Suggs scored!

The last 10 minutes were pretty much garbage time. The cushion was 25-30 points and it stayed pretty much that way with the teams trading buckets from one end to the other.

The only negative thing I can say about SU is the incredibly dirty play I saw coming from their junior guard from Hillsboro, Oregon, Chris Gweth. He knocked Isaiah Thomas to the floor from behind on a layup that he had no chance of blocking. He undercut Quincy Pondexter as he went up for a bucket, causing him to come down hard on the back of his shoulders/neck/head. A touch more wrong angle there and they would have had to carry out a paralyzed or dead - (Dale Earnhardt died from the same sort of basal skull fracture) player. I'm surprised that the Huskies didn't single him out for revenge. It certainly would have sucked to have two of our starters taken out by a backup player; our chances of advancing in the Pac-10 or NCAA tournaments would be much lower without either of those guys, especially I.T..

Hoops: UW men solidly #1 in Pac-10 standings

2009-02-27T13:51:00.000-08:00

Last night's game between the UW Huskies and the Arizona State Sun Devils was awesome. The #1 and #2 teams, respectively in the Pac-10, UW (11-4) and ASU (10-4) were set for a real showdown. I went to the game with an old friend from Aldus days, John. He had been a student at UW many years ago back when, as he said it, "there will still columns in Hec Ed." He said he had never heard a louder crowd in that arena and I have to agree with him. The atmosphere was loud, noisy, and rockin'.

UW came out with a stifling defense that let ASU know what they were going to be in for all night. ASU's big guns, Jeff Pendergraph, and James Harden, were certainly the major firepower for the team. At one point in the 1st half ASU had 36 points. Between them Harden and Pendergraph had 30 of them, 15 each. In the second half, Lorenzo Romar adjusted the Huskies defense into a major-league, ball-denial effort against Harden and it worked. He only scored 4 more points to finish with 19. Pendergraph was very good, banging inside with Brockman and getting the better of him for the most part, finishing with 24.

The game was perhaps the most poorly officiated Pac-10 game I had ever witnessed and John concurred with me on that. That being said, it should never have gone into overtime. Unfortunately, some sloppy passing on the Huskies' part led to them giving away the lead in the waning minutes of the 2nd half and then coming back to tie it. At one point, Justin Dentmon missed receiving a pass right in front of Coach Romar. As the ball sailed out of bounds, I thought Lorenzo was going to grab Dentmon by the neck and strangle him!

In the end, our foul shooting, both percentage wise (24-31, 77.4%) and overall (we shot 31, they shot 12), made the difference, especially in OT. We ended up winning the game 73-70 with our last 5 points coming from the free throw stripe. Thank God we've improved from dead last in D1 in foul shooting percentage, otherwise we might have let this one slip away.

I wish I could go to tomorrow's game at Hec Ed against Arizona, but I have to run a retreat for a non-profit I'm the Board president for from 9-3 and the game tips off at noon. It would look bad for the Prez to bug out with 4 hours left in a 6 hour retreat. So far, I've tried to give the tickets away to 6 different people without any success. In the middle of writing that last sentence I took a call from the 7th guy I offered the tickets to, no dice there either. During this week, the Seattle Times called this "the hottest sports ticket in town". You can't prove that by me; though, trying to give away the tickets on short notice for a mid-day Saturday game makes the timing kinda tough.

As it stands, UW is now 12-4 in Pac-10 play, ASU is 10-5 and in second place. We have three more home games; Arizona tomorrow, Seattle U on Tuesday, and then WSU on Saturday to end the season. After that, it's Pac-10 and then NCAA tournament time. Barring a major meltdown, I feel reasonably certain that we're going to get an NCAA bid. If we don't, no-one in the Pac-10 will, that's for sure.

Racin': Skip Barber Day 3

2009-02-22T11:39:00.000-08:00

Well, day 3 at Skip Barber was a week ago, so it's about time that I got back to writing it up. I brought my camera to the track all three days, but I took very few pictures. In fact the only ones I took were early Saturday morning on Day 2. You'll have to content yourself with my word pictures; threadbare as they are.

Days 1 & 2 were similar in their weather patterns. Each morning was cool and wet, then during the day the sun came out and the wind came up and dried the track off. By the time we were out there to do exercises of one sort or another, the track was dry. Here's what it looked like before class started. This is the view of the track from the front steps of the Skip Barber facility. The Yokohama bridge is on the straight between Turns 3 & 4, both 90 degree right handers.

You can see that the sun was fighting through and the wind was starting to blow the overnight clouds away.

This is Bill, my co-driver on One Lap of America this year and a good friend for the past couple of years. We worked on the 21st Century School Initiative in Mississippi and Louisiana for Cisco from November 2005 through January 2007. Bill actually worked longer at both ends of the project, but that was the extent of my Cisco fellowship.

Finally, here's my early morning similing face outside of Turn 3. You can see the apex cone on the inside of the turn. The turn in cone is further back up track and the track out cone is just outside the frame to the left. You can see the track surface of the front straight flowing downhill to the left behind Turn 3. This was the scene of our deep-braking, trail-braking exercise on Saturday.

Sunday's weather was totally different from Friday and Saturday's. It rained during the night, then rained all morning and all afternoon. Our curriculum was to practice race starts in the morning, followed by some unrestricted lapping of the track, lunch, and then more lapping in the afternoon. The track stayed quite wet all day; the rain would let up for a bit, but then come back, making sure that the track surface never dried at all. Driving open-topped, roll-caged Miatas with fabric covered racing buckets was a somewhat soggy affair.

We were scheduled to practice two double-file rolling starts and then a single-file restart, so that if we did want to go racing, the procedures would not be totally unfamiliar. Before we practiced the starts though, they had us do some lapping to get a feel for the track surface today. I had been in a silver MX-5 Miata for both Friday and Saturday. When it got a bit wet inside and the wet got to any of the electrical connections, it would show a 'battery' light on the instrument panel. Sunday was very wet; when I got in and started up, I had the battery light and several others illuminated as well. That should have been my first hint that trouble was coming. The car started ok and then I took it out onto the track accelerating gently as the motor, gearbox, tires etc (as well as the driver) were all cold. As it began to warm a bit, I pressed further, the Miata would not follow. It would not run past 3,000 rpm (and those cars make very little power below about 5,000). Pretty soon, I had an embarrassing procession of cars behind me running up the hill to the Corkscrew. I hate slowing other folks down. This one, though, was totally out of my control. After dropping down into the Corksrew and then negotiating Turns 9 & 10, I pulled into the pits. Lucky for me Skip Barber has lots of Miatas. They gave me a shiny red one and then all was right with the world.

We were scheduled to run our race starts on the front straight after making the sharp left of Turn 11. Because there were a couple of small rivers coming across the front straight, things were a bit dicey. The whole weekend we had been sharing the track with the SB Formula racing school, little 1,400 lb open wheel cars with 2 liter Dodge Neon motors and 5 speed transmissions in them. In the lapping session they were doing just before we went out to do our practice starts, one of the formula cars hit the water coming across the straight without being terribly straight himself, aquaplaned and spun. He hit the wall twice knocking both rear wheels and most of his body work off in the process. As a result of the conditions and the time it took to clean things up, we only got one side by side start and then a single file restart. It was kinda fun; once the whole field came off Turn 11, they gave us the green flag and then it was pedal to the metal time. I started in 5th (left side, third row) out of 8 cars and ended up third by the end of the front straight. Once we got over the hill, we slowed down and ran single file around the course until another pace car picked us up between Turns 4 & 5. We followed that around and then, coming off Turn 11 again, we did a single file restart. Because the cars are so remarkably similar in power and setup, the likelihood of making a pass on a restart all comes down to someone making a mistake. No-one in front of me did.

After that we had lots of lapping for the rest of the day. At every track I've ever been to school at, the first thing they teach you is 'the line'; the theoretically most efficient, fastest way around the race track. They did that for us on Friday and Saturday. The line at Laguna Seca was already pretty familiar to me from video games, but it was immensely gratifying to be able to run it in reality and have it been way more fun than any video game.

When it rains, the only thing you can be sure of is the 'the line' is likely to be the slowest, most slippery way around the track. That's because race cars tend to fill in the racing surface with bits of tire rubber, oil, coolant, etc all along the line. The surface off line is where all the grip is when it's wet out, though you do have to be savvy enough to watch for puddles etc. As our lead instructor, Rene, said, "Driving in the rain is a search for grip. Go wherever you find it." It is also a great exercise in car control.

In the process of 'finding the grip' you often find sections of less grip than you thought. This leads to a pretty wiggly car at speed; you have to be comfortable with a certain amount of understeer, oversteer and general dancing around on the razor's edge of traction. It was actually great fun. We only had one student put his car off (and make use of his insurance) during the entire day, so I'd say that was pretty successful.

During the last session of the day, I got waved onto the track a couple of cars behind Bill. I was able to make my way past those two cars and began to come up on Bill. I thought it would be great fun to pass him before the end of the session. Alas, Bill saw me coming and had other thoughts on the matter. In fact, he told me that that was the last thing in the world he wanted to happen at that moment. We probably ran 4 or 5 laps of Laguna Seca without me getting any closer than a couple of car lengths. I figured that if I kept behind him, he'd begin watching his mirrors and eventually make a mistake. He didn't oblige.

I have to say that that session was the most fun of the weekend. First, because we had a clear track for most of the time and could wiggle around there to our hearts' content. Second, and much more important for me, I had the chance to see that Bill has good car control and won't fold under pressure. That bodes well for our One Lap adventure.

Now I just have to get him some time in the Roadster before One Lap starts. Driving an unfamiliar track with one reconnaissance lap is hard enough; doing it in a car you've never driven before would be suicide. I've spent the last week looking for track events on the West coast were we can run. I'll post about it once I get something lined up.

Raisin' Fish: Saturday Afternoon lookin' at fish fry

2009-02-21T15:58:00.000-08:00

When I posted two weeks ago about the incubator, there were still enough alevin in the tray to dissuade me from cleaning out the trays. At that time, I figured giving them another couple of weeks would do the trick. It did.

This afternoon I went down to the incubator intent on cleaning out the trays and preparing for the next stage of the fishes' growth. The most encouraging sign was the sheer amount of water coming out of the incubator's exit pipe.

I pulled the top off the incubator and this is what I saw:

The clumps of greenish-brown matter are gluey deposits made up of dead eggs, egg shells, silt and clay particles. When you stir up the water the silt and egg shells, which are pretty light, get released and drift out the exit pipe. I stirred up the top tray a couple times, let the water clear, and then brought the tray close to the surface. Sitting on the tray were three or four late hatching alevin. Here's what one of them looked like:

I was pretty surprised that there were any alevin at all. Usually, they would all be hatched out and have matured to their next stage, fry, by now. The few alevin that were in there had hatched only recently. My aim would be to keep them in the incubator if I could by tilting the tray and letting them slide over the lip and down into the barrel. While I was looking for more alevin, I noticed my first coho salmon fry of the season:

There are probably 65,000 - 69,000 salmon fry in the barrel right now. That little guy is one of the adventurous ones. It's hard to tell exactly how many are there, but I'll show you how I estimated that.

Once I rescued as many of the alevin and fry as I could from the tray, I took the tray into McAleer creek and washed off as much of the gunk on those clumps of eggs as I could. This is what the tray with its dead eggs looks like after that.

It looks to me like there are 200-300 dead eggs there. The other two trays looked about the same. So, if I take the high estimate of 300 and multiply by 3, I get about 900 - 1,000. So, my high estimate for hatch rate would be 69,000/70,000, about a 98% hatch rate which is pretty darn good, if I do say so myself.

My plan was to clean the top two trays, then pull the bottom tray and replace it with one of the clean ones. If you don't do that, the bag of plastic media floats to the surface and makes it hard for the fry to find anyplace to swim. I pulled the third tray and replaced it with a clean one. Once that was done, I cleaned out the clarifier a bit. When I looked back into the incubator, I was not terribly surprised to see that quite a few fry had begun to migrate into the upper part of the incubator. These explorers are almost done growing. Here's a closeup look at one of them:

He's just resting on the big U-shaped piece of piping that I use for an exit screen. There are literally hundreds of tiny holes drilled into that pipe. I know this because I drilled all of them. The fry is almost done growing and will be ready for release within a month. Look closely and you can see that its belly is still absorbing part of its yolk sac; its got a reddish bulge right there in its middle. I love their little red tails and fins. The fry are really delicate looking and in reality they are pretty delicate. If I let them go right now, many of them would not survive the next week. If I keep them for another month, they'll be much tougher and ready to live in the wild. Most of them will become food for something else, but that's why I raise so many. If I get a 1% return, then 700 fish will be migrating up McAleer Creek. I haven't seen that many fish returning yet, so my return rate must be significantly less than 1%. Seems depressing, but it isn't, really. Even if very few of the fish return, they are still enriching the food chain all along the way. Dolly Varden trout in Lake Washington, kingfishers, great blue heron, frogs, other salmon, otters, seals, and orcas will all have meals compliments of yours truly. I say, "Have a great dinner." Putting fish back into the water is what it's all about. Building up the biosystem is my aim; that and getting a chance to play in the water!

This one is waiting on the exit pipe, close to his eventual route to Lake Washington and the sea. Hang on little fella', you're not quite ready to go yet. Your time will come soon enough.

Racin': Skip Barber Days 1 & 2

2009-02-14T19:11:00.000-08:00

Last night, I felt tired and a bit disgusted and so I went to bed early without posting (sorry to all of my readers (all one or two of you) out there)). Bill and I had finished the first day of the Skip Barber 3 day school and, while the exercises we did were valid, I didn't feel like I was getting my money's worth out of it. We did a bunch of autocrossing in the morning and that was ok for getting a feel of the Miata's and what they were likely to do. In the afternoon, we started lapping Laguna Seca after we had had a van ride around the track.

The Miata is a fairly neutral, tossable car. The SB examples are in Miata Cup trim, more or less. They have the interiors stripped down, racing seats, a full roll cage, a cold air intake and header, straight through exhaust w/SuperTrapp muffler (and probably some software mods to go with that), racing pads in the brakes (though the brake calipers and rotors are stock) and perhaps some suspension mods (don't know for sure). They go pretty well for having only 175-200 hp.

On Friday afternoon we started using the 'stop box' technique. This involves driving around the track for one lap and then stopping near the start/finish line to get feedback from the instructors who were stationed at various spots around the track. On the one hand, I was thrilled to be driving on Laguna Seca after only having run it on one video game or another. On the other hand, we were only doing a lap at a time and they were having us keep our rev limits, first at 3800, then 4000 rpm. In addition, we were working on heel-and-toe downshifting. So, I went away from Friday a bit disappointed.

Today, made all the difference in the world. I don't remember what we did in the morning, but the afternoon was certainly worth the price of admission. We did a deep braking exercise leading to a trail-braking exercise. What they had us do was accellerate from a standing start through the first 3 gears. We had to accellerate all the way to a cone that was much closer to the first apex of Turn 2 than I had ever been before. The only thing that got me even close to believing that I could make the stop was the first half of the exercise. We entered the track, drove all the way around it, came around Turn 11 (the sharpest corner on the track), accelerated to a cone placed in the middle of the track and then hammered the brakes. When I saw how fast the car stopped, I began to believe that I might be able to do this.

This has been my main weakness in working on the track all these years. I have never really trusted just how well the car is capable of stopping. When I came to SB this morning, I told one of the instructors this and then we went right out and did the one exercise that would help me begin to trust that. Coming over the hill on the front straight at Laguna Seca, hitting the apex of Turn 1 blind and then starting down hill toward Turn 2, ccelerating to the top of third gear,and then waiting what seemed an impossibly long time before braking. Having just come from the panic stop I had done at the other end of the straight, I knew the car could do it, so I put my faith in the car and the intructors and it worked out.

I know I'm going to have to work on this a bunch more tomorrow, but it was definitely worth coming, if only just for this.

Racin': Skip Barber School is tomorrow. Yippee!!!

2009-02-12T22:35:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I left work a bit early and drove to Portland and stayed with some old friends of ours. I wanted to get a bit of a jump on today's drive. Thank God I did, because today's drive was long enough as it is.

I left Portland at 6:05 this morning. It was 31 degrees and all of the windows in the Audi needed to be scraped before I could get going (which is why I didn't get off at 6:00 as I had wanted to - and if you didn't know it before, now you know just how anal-retentive OCD-like I am about time.) I got to the hotel in Monterey at 5:05 this evening, just about 11 hours exactly after starting and 729 miles away. I didn't do much else but drive for that whole 11 hours; just took a bit of time to put gas in the car, pee a couple of times, and buy one grande Americano at the Starbucks right near my second gas stop about 50 miles east of San Francisco.

Tomorrow, we start Skip Barber's 3-day Mazdaspeed Racing school at Laguna Seca Raceway. This should be pretty exciting. I don't feel much like writing right now, I hope I'll add more tomorrow. I've brought my camera and will be taking pictures. Winter in this part of Cali is very pretty; everything is green and lush. By summertime it is all dead and brown/golden.

Readin': The Last Supper

2009-02-09T18:48:00.000-08:00

Charles McCarry's spy novel The Last Supper is another of his works centered on the life of Paul Christopher, his main character. In this one, we get a fuller look at his family life; his father, the writer/spy, his mother the German aristocrat he met at her family's home on Rugen, an island in the Baltic Sea. McCarry shows us their first meeting, courtship and life together in a series of deft portraits.

Though the work is mainly about Paul, we get to meet others of his extended family; cousins, uncles, aunts, and hear stories of some of his more remote Hubbard family ancestors. Most of the family seems tied up in the early days of what they called 'the Outfit', the organization later known as the CIA. That history starts in the days leading up to WW II and we see glimpses of action in a variety of locales.

What is emerging for me, having now finished three of these books, is a much richer portrait of Paul Christopher. I may eventually go back and re-read The Miernik Dossier to pick up things I may not have grasped on first reading. It is an intricate portrait of a man whose behavior seems simple and straightforward to himself, but is incredibly strange to those around him. Paul's devotion is to The Truth, whatever that may be in the situation in which he finds himself. Others have a wide variety of motivations, few of them relating to truth, if any at all. I've come to admire Paul in ways I never thought I would. I'd love the chance to meet him, hang out with him. I realize that seems strange. He is, after all, a fictional character. But McCarry's writing has shown an infinitely complex man who seems so very human to me. I'm going to have to continue reading these stories, if only to learn more about Paul.

This is some of the best fictional writing I have come across in a long time. I have already started on the next book Christopher's Ghosts and will be reporting on that in time. The Last Supper is a really good book, but I would not recommend it as the first Paul Christopher novel you read. It is, however, highly recommended.

Raisin' Fish: A report mid-way through the process

2009-02-07T15:20:00.000-08:00

So, here it is, Saturday, February 7. The eggs have been in the incubator for a couple days short of two months now. I figured it'd be good to take a look at what was going on in there. The water has been flowing strong and well, except for a couple of occasions when the flow was somewhat slowed down. On both those occasions we were able to get things flowing freely. Once I did it, opening up the inlet somewhat and purging air bubbles from the pipes; the second time, Francis did pretty much the same thing.

I had a general idea what I would be seeing once I took the cover off the incubator. Because the outlet filter slows the water flowing through the incubator quite a bit, things inside get loaded up with silt. The first thing I did then, was to stir the water up with my hand to dislodge as much of that silt as possible. In addition to the silt, there is the organic detritus of the empty egg casings that clutter things up and give the silt a place to rest.

This is what the water looks like as the silt and egg casings are being flushed out of the top of the incubator. You can see the outlet pipe (without the filter screen on it) in the upper right and the silt particles rushing out. If you look closely at the picture, you can see little white patches all over the place. Those are egg casings that are very light and are getting flushed out with the silt.

Once a bunch of that silt had been moved out, I lowered the water level in the incubator temporarily. At first, I thought that I would remove two of the egg trays, leaving the third one in the incubator to keep the bag of plastic media from floating to the surface. In the past, I have taken out all of the egg trays and then watched as the bag of plastic media floated to the surface. Experience has taught me to leave one tray at the bottom. I wanted to remove the trays because they had clumps of eggs on them that had not hatched and those clumps were having two negative effects on the incubator. First, they were starting to rot and having that in the incubator can't be that good for the alevin/fry. Second they slow the water flow down and allow more silt to accumulate in the barrel.

When I lowered the water level, I saw that in addition to the egg clumps (the brownish lumps in the tray) that there were still alevin in the tray. Normally, once the alevin hatch, then squiggle down through the gaps in the tray to the plastic media underneath. If you look carefully at the photo above, you can see at least four alevin. They are the things that look most like salmon eggs in the middle of the picture. Look closely and you can see their eyes, body and tail. Alevin are very fragile. Even brushing against them can kill them at this stage. Because I want as many live fish to survive as possible, I decided to leave the trays in place for another couple of weeks until all of the alevin retreat to the bottom of the barrel.

After I had closed up the incubator, I dropped the cleanout pipe on the clarifier (the blue barrel). This would allow the clarifier to flush out some of the stuff it had accumulated in the past two months. The water/sediment mixture gushing from the pipe had, at first, a dense, dark brown flow which eventually changed to a greyish-brown as time went on.

You can see just how much sediment was trapped in the clarifier. Most of it is sand, some of it is silt. Soil is composed of three types of particles; sand, silt, and clay and then however much organic matter is in the soil. If you were to take a beaker of water and dump in a handful of soil, stir it thoroughly and then watch it for the next several minutes you would see a couple of things. In the first 30 seconds or so, all of the sand particles would fall to the bottom, over the next hour or two all of the silt would drop out of suspension, leaving a fine haze of clay particles in the water. If you had the patience to wait several days, the water would eventually be completely clear and all of the clay particles would have dropped out of suspension as well. The reason they deposit in that order is size and weight, the biggest ones are sand, the smallest ones are clay and those are 80,000 times smaller than the sand grains.

Given that behavior, you can see that the clarifier is mostly filled with sand and a little silt. The incubator gets much more silt. The clay particles pretty much get flushed through the system. As you can see, the clarifier is working. If it wasn't there, all of that sand would get trapped in the bottom of the incubator and eventually cause it to stop flowing because the outlet holes are all the way at the bottom of the barrel and would get blocked first.

So, my mid-season report says that thing are going fine at the McAleer Creek Salmon Circus. It'll be some time in April, a couple of months from now, before we are ready to release. Between now and then, we'll probably look into the barrel a couple more times. Stay tuned.

Racin': Signed up for the Skip Barber Three day Mazdaspeed Racing School

2009-02-02T22:16:00.000-08:00

I have driven Laguna Seca Raceway in various driving games now for a couple of years. It has always been a dream of mine to do it live and in person. As of today, that possibility exists in solid form. This morning I signed up for the 3-day Mazdaspeed Racing School to be held at Laguna Seca raceway February 13-15. I'm going there with Bill who's going to be my co-driver in One Lap of America this year.

I am so excited I can hardly stand it. There are a number of road racing tracks that are famous throughout the United States; Watkins Glen, Road America, Road Atlanta, Sebring, Daytona, Sears Point, VIR (Virginia International Raceway) and Laguna Seca are usually mentioned in the first round. I have driven a couple of them; Watkins Glen, Road America, VIR, and Sears Point. This year I'll get to do a couple more; Sebring, Daytona, and Laguna Seca.

The school is an intensive experience meant to prepare drivers to go racing in the Mazda MX-5 (Miata) Cup. The cars that we will be driving are Miata Cup cars; about 200 hp and 2500 lbs, so a decent power to weight ratio, but also excellent handling. I don't think that I want to do wheel-to-wheel racing. I enjoy watching it, but don't fancy spending the kind of money it takes to do it. Racing is as expensive as you want to make it and generally more expensive than you want it to be in terms of dollars, time and energy. I like doing One Lap and will surely write about it as I blog along here, but I sincerely doubt that I'll ever go racing with a pack of cars on the track.

So, why am I doing this quite expensive school. Mostly because I want to transfer the lessons I learn both to my street driving and to my One Lap track work. If you work seriously at car control, you pick up habits that will keep you alive longer on the street (your awareness of your car and its relation to traffic is that much more finely tuned and further reaching) and make you faster and smoother on the track. One of the things they teach you in any of these schools it to look and plan as far ahead as you can. Don't look just at the car in front of you; look all the way down the track. Think about the turns coming up; how do you need to set up the car now to sucessfully and smoothly negotiate the turns later. You can do that on the street as well. Broadening and lengthening you situational awareness on the street can definitely keep you out of accidents and help to smooth out the flow of traffic.

Plus, I get to drive one of my dream tracks. One of the most famous corners in North America, the Corkscrew, is part of the track at Laguna Seca. To get to it, you climb a long hill. At the top, just after a kink, there is a 90 degree left that drops quickly downhill (much more quickly than the one you just came up) and bends very quickly into a high speed right hand corner. That's the way it looks in the video games. I can't wait to find out how it feels. Won't have to wait too long for that; a week from Friday in fact.

Yee hah!

Readin': The Sharing Knife, Volume Three, Passage

2009-02-02T21:54:00.000-08:00

Lois McMaster Bujold has continued her series well. Volume Three of her Sharing Knife series continues with the book Passage which I've just finished. Yes, yes, I know; I still haven't written about the other three or four books I've read before this. I'll get to it, I promise.

Anyways . . .

Passage picks up the story of Dag and Fawn just after they've left the Lakewalker camp and return to Fawn's family's farm. They spend a couple of weeks there and then set out for the river. Dag has promised to take Fawn down the river to the sea as a honeymoon of sorts. They do that and it forms the backbone of the story, but there are many interesting characters involved and lots of growing done by lots of folks.

I like the way Bujold writes. Her characters are deep and their troubles are real, human troubles, even if it is all written about in a totally fantasized world. Orson Scott Card once said that speculative fiction (his words) was the only place where authors could honestly write philosophical social commentary these days (or something to that effect). That comment put me in mind of the original Star Trek TV series, that did pretty much the same thing, cloaking the problems of the world in the guise of 'aliens' and then letting the stories play out.

Bujold writes of two cultures that coexist somewhat symbiotically, but are walled off from each other by suspicion, myth, and misunderstanding. Dag and Fawn, one from each culture, have been grudgingly accepted by her culture (though Dag ends up having to prove himself over and over), though not at all by his. Between the two of them, they see the necessity, as do some of Dag's contemporaries, for the two cultures to learn about and accept each other. It's a fascinating story and touches on the themes of cultural interpenetration in a way that is easier to bear because it it happening in an 'imaginery' world.

A good book and a good continuation of the series. Book Four, Horizon, is now out in hardcover (it came out last week), so I'll either have to get it from the library, or wait a year to read it in paperback. I can't see buying books like this in hardcover for the most part, they read so quickly that it seems a waste of money. My frugal nature wars with my desire to continue the story; I'm guessing my library card will get a workout one day soon.

Readin': The School of Essential Ingredients

2009-01-28T14:13:00.000-08:00

What a wonderful book!

Last night I ventured out to Third Place Books to pick up the second book in the Philip Hamilton series (which I have not yet written about, but I will, soon. I hope) and to see if there were any others from the Sharing Knife series or anything from Elizabeth Bear (author of the Jenny Casey trilogy and Carnival (which I have finished but not yet written about)). I was able to pick up the Hamilton book, Passage, the third volume in the Sharing Knife series, and another Elizabeth Bear book (don't remember the title and don't have it nearby at the moment). What I had not expected was that I would come away with another book entirely.

As I go to the entrace of Third Place Books, I noticed the usual display for coming author events. Right there in the middle was a poster for Erica Bauermeister's reading this coming Thursday supporting her first novel, The School of Essential Ingredients. I rarely buy hard cover books, except as presents. I made an exception in this case. I have been friends with Erica's husband, Ben, since 1988 when I worked in the Tech Support organization at Aldus. In addition, my brother, Tom, taught at the school where Ben and Erica's two kids were educated. After reading the flyleaf, I figured it would be worth the read. How right I was.

The School of Essential Ingredients tells the story of a once-a-month cooking class held at Lillian's, which is both the name of the restaurant and the name of the proprietor/chef of the restaurant where the classes are held in the kitchen. The story is told through the experiences of each of the participants in the class, flipping back and forth between the present (in the cooking class) and the past (what memories the cooking class is calling out of them). The book positively glows; the prose is absolutely gorgeous. To me, the most amazing work she does is in her descriptions of smells and what they evoke. Each of the people in the class, starting with the teacher, is given a chapter.

Another aspect of the book that I loved was its deeply positive, hopeful attitude toward each of the characters. They are all revealed in the complexity that each of us human beings possess, but it is done in such a gentle, strength-based (as my social worker wife is so fond of saying) way. Each character reveals themselves in many ways, but is also revealed through the eyes of the other characters as well.

I started the book as soon as I got home and finished it before going to bed last night. It's not that long a book (237 pages, I think), but the story is well paced and the writing is so exquisite that I couldn't put it down. Well, I could have, but I chose not to do so.

If you know someone who loves to cook and loves to read, please give them a copy of this book. They will thank you for it. And, oh, by the way, read it yourself before you hand it over. It is that good.

Very highly recommended.

Back in Business on my desktop machine at home

2009-01-25T15:58:00.000-08:00

Well, I got my home desktop computer (an ancient Dell Dimension 8200) back up and running today. Yay!

As you may remember reading, we had the power go out during the night a couple of weeks ago. I was too lazy to get out of bed at midnight and unplug this machine. I paid for that laziness because, a couple of hours later the power came back on and when it did, my video card got fried. The screen display was all confused with random blocks of color showing all over the screen when it should have been just the black and white Dell startup screen. It got worse from there.

Well, being the cheapskate that I am, I tried to get an old video card from any one of a couple of buddies at work. After two weeks, I got two video cards from Josh, but neither of them did the trick. So this afternoon, I made the 25 mile trek to Fry's Electronics in Renton and picked up a new video card (nVidia e-GeForce 6200, 256MB, AGP bus) for $59.99. Brought it back home and, two hours after starting out for Renton from Lake Forest Park, I am working at my machine upstairs.

This is the machine that has the software for my Canon camera, so I should be able to start having posts with pictures again soon.

Hoops: UW men now Number 1 in the Pac-10

2009-01-24T17:00:00.000-08:00

Today's game at Hec Ed was awesome. All of the guys that needed to come up big did, our second half defense was really good, our foul shooting was above 80% and we never backed down from UCLA. Result: Washington 86 - UCLA 75.

The first half was a scramble. UCLA put us down 7-1 at the start, but we fought back and then kept within a couple of points for the rest of the half, finishing with 38 to their 39. Second half was a different story. We clamped down on defense, shot reasonably well, and kept getting to the foul line ( by my count we were 36 for 42, 85.7%) Jon Brockman had 18, Venoy Overton had 10, Isaiah Thomas had 23, Justin Dentmon had 16 (including 10 of 10 from the foul line), and Quincy Pondexter had 10.

This game had a ton of pressure to it going in; UW was tied for first with UCLA and both teams wanted the win. I was pleased to see how well controlled UW was in their aggression. They started tough and stayed tough the whole way.

On the other hand, this had to be one of the most poorly officiated games I have seen in quite a while. That in itself is saying something as Pac-10 refs are not known for the quality of their calls. I guess the thing that bothers me most is the inconsistency of the calls; they were letting UCLA hammer us unmercifully down low and wouldn't call a thing, then on the other end they called some of the most ticky-tack fouls. In addition, they missed some really simple travelling calls. Now, I'm not one who thinks that refs should call everything they see; but when a violation results in a competitive advantage for one team, it should be called. Didn't happen that often today.

In any case, it was a satisfying win and Washington now sits alone atop the Pac-10 basketball standings after sharing that position with UCLA and Cal for the past week. Cal lost to Oregon State on Thursday and you now know what happened to UCLA.

On another topic entirely, I have finished four books since I wrote last. I am not going to write about that now, but I do have stuff to write one of these days. My main excuse is that my home computer is on the fritz. A couple of weeks ago we lost power in the middle of the night for about 2 hours. When it came back on, I think it fried the video card. Since that time I have tried to get a replacement from some of my friends at work so that I could troubleshoot the problem. Josh gave me two old video cards last night and I tried one this morning. No Go, unfortunately. One card was a PCI card, the other was some other bus structure (don't know what it's called). My monitor does not have a standard VGA 15 pin connection, but one of those square, digital ones. Unfortunately the PCI card that fits in the machine doesn't have that connection. Guess I'm going to have to go pick up a cheap video card at Best Buy or something.

For the time being, I can write from my wife, Diane's, MacBook Pro.

Hoops: You can't spell Suck without USC

2009-01-23T13:56:00.000-08:00

After last night's game at Hec Ed (and Cal's loss to Oregon State of all teams!), the Huskies find themselves tied for 1st place in the Pac-10 with UCLA. Guess who we play tomorrow afternoon? You got it right in one; UCLA. At the end of the game we will either be in 2nd (possibly tied, though, who knows, maybe Oregon will beat Cal as well) if we lose, or 1st if we win. Yeehah!

The game was a wierd one; lots of typically poor Pac-10 officiating. Plenty of bad calls on both sides, so I guess it balances out. But it did seem to me that alot more fouls were called on USC than UW. They did have 3 guys foul out and no-one on UW fouled out. That being said, USC was a very impressive team; they are big (their 5 starters were 6'5", 6'7", 6'7", 6'9", and 6'9"), fast, and highly athletic. I don't have the stats on it, but they seemed to be blocking an amazing number of our shots and changing quite a few others.

Jon Brockman had an abysmal offensive night; he scored 4 points, all from the foul line on 4 of 6 shooting. He did pull down 13 rebounds, so that was good and he was, as usual, a solid presence in the middle. He just couldn't buy a bucket to save his life last night. Quincy Pondexter and Justin Dentmon kept us in it to begin with. MBA (Matthew Bryan-Amaning) and Isaiah Thomas also gave us a bunch of points. At the end it turned into a foul shooting contest and we won it. By my count we were 32-40 (80% is way better than we usually shot last year when we were the worst foul shooting team in D1). Dentmon, MBA, and Pondexter were perfect from the line; all 8 misses were from Isaiah and Jon.

Overall, it was an exciting game to watch and we came away with the win; UW 78, USC 73.

The other big excitement last night was the pre-game ceremony. They retired Brandon Roy's #3 jersey. That's only the second number retirement in Husky history; the other being Bob Houbregs from the 50s. I brought along my camera to get some shots of the ceremony and was rudely awakened to a UW rule when I got to the doors of Hec Edmundson pavilion. Cameras are allowed inside only if you have a media pass. With 20 minutes left to go before the ceremony started, I had to hoof it all the way back to my truck parked in the University Village parking lot to store the camera bag safely and then return to the arena. I made it with a couple of minutes to spare, but I was mightily pissed off. If they are going to have a rule like that, the least they could do is let you know by posting the rule somewhere. Nope, learn from experience. Sorry, dude.

On the other hand, the ceremony was pretty cool. Brandon Roy got the noisiest ovation I have ever heard at Hec Ed and it went on for a long time too. Very cool guy. He is an example of the positive effect good parenting and coaching can have in your life. When he was a UW freshman, he was a punk. Went into the NBA draft, found out he wasn't going to get drafted, pulled out, screwed around in school. His dad took him in hand and had him working at the Port of Seattle on the docks (where he worked) as long as he wasn't in school. Once he got back to school a little humbler and harder working, Lorenzo Romar guided his athletic becoming over the next three years. NBA Rookie of the Year, NBA All Star, leading his team as point guard. Not a bad end to the story and it isn't even close to over

Tomorrow's game against UCLA will be crucial. My son, Walter, will be going with me. Should be a good time.

Readin': The Tears of Autumn

2009-01-14T14:15:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading one of the best spy novels I have ever read. Now, I don't mean that to seem more praise than it is. I don't generally read spy novels, I'm not all that interested in them, but this one was great on so many levels.

The book is The Tears of Autumn by Charles McCarry. The language of the book is poetic, which seems odd to say, but the main character, Paul Christopher, whose cover is as a journalist, is also a published poet. McCarry writes gracefully and well. The author is described on the back cover as having been "an intelligence officer operating under deep cover in Europe, Africa, and Asia." He uses all of those as settings for this novel and writes of them quite convincingly.

The novel's main thrust is an explanation of the assasination of JFK in November 1963. I'm not going to give the whole plot away, but Americans, Russians, Cubans, and Vietnamese (both North and South) are all mixed up in it. You can be sure that almost nothing you read here will have shown up in The Warren Report, the supposed definitive answer to who killed JFK, but perhaps not why. The Tears of Autumn goes into the 'why' of the assasination, but also covers the who and how as well.

The book is chilling in its exposition of intelligence tradecraft and the underlying motivations of the people who practice it. Apparently there are several Paul Christopher novels. I've read two now, The Miernik Dossier and The Tears of Autumn. You can be sure that I will be looking for more of them as these first two have been first rate. Highly recommended

Hoops: UW 85 Cal 88 in Triple Overtime!

2009-01-12T10:08:00.000-08:00

What a bummer!

Saturday afternoon's game between the UW Huskies and Cal Golden Bears was a bittersweet one. The Huskies had several opportunities to win it, but they just didn't put it away. They were up by 11 with 9 and a half minutes left, but they let that slip away and ended up tied at the end of regulation. Each team scored 6 in the first overtime. In the second OT they were up 77-74 with about 10 seconds left. One of Cal's guards drove the lane and made the layin. Unfortunately, Isaiah Thomas fouled him and he made the bucket to tie the game again.

Lots of woulda, coulda, shoulda in the game. John Brockman scored a bunch of points and had a ton of rebounds, but he went 2 for 8 from the stripe (including missing 2 in the 3rd OT). Just one more and we wouldn't have had to go through 3 overtimes! Oh well. You have to give Cal credit. They are a very tough team and their starting guard duo is awesome. Jerome Randle, the point guard, scored 23 before fouling out. Patrick Christoper scored 26 points including 4 3s.

Our starting guards are not slouchs by any stretch of the imagination, either. Thomas scored 22 including some incredible 'circus shot' layins. Justin Dentmon scored 24 and his foul shooting (13-16 by my count) kept us in the game on many occasions. Anytime you get 46 points from your starting guard pair, you're going to do well. Add to that how tough UW is on the boards and you have the makings of a really strong team.

Unfortunately for us, Quincy Pondexter pretty much disappeared in this game. He only had 5 points and he made some crucial turnovers. He did, however provide some good defense, so there are some positives there as well. He is such an enigma to me. One game he'll be on fire; the next he'll disappear. I really trust Lorenzo Romar as a coach, though So I believe that he sees something there that I don't; because, if it were me, he wouldn't be in the starting lineup.

Oh, well. Next week we travel to Eugene on Thursday for Oregon and Corvallis on Saturday for Oregon State. It'd be good if we could win both of those. We'll see.

Readin': The First Law - Last Argument of Kings

2009-01-09T14:06:00.000-08:00

Joe Abercrombie finished up his First Law fantasy trilogy in spectacular fashion. There were several astonishing surprises in this third book, Last Argument of Kings (Louis XIV had that printed on the barrels of his cannons). As usual, there was plenty of fighting and military action, but Abercrombie's truly incredible achievement was how deeply and relentlessly he delved into the mental and emotional lives of so many of his characters.

Who would have ever thought that anyone could come to have sympathy for a ranking member of the Inquisition? Or that that man was capable, given his day job and the daily humiliations his life entailed, of extraordinary sensitivity and kindness? Yet this same man deposed his boss, was threatened with death by a man he had ruined and sent off to prison, and then recruited that same man to be his lieutenant. Directly after the recruitment they go off to torture the old boss for amusement more than anything else. Fascinating stuff, really.

Several of the other characters emerge and grow in surprising fashions. Two become kings; neither one likes it. Another, a commoner, becomes Lord Marshal of the realm. Amazing stuff.

I finished that book during my vacation time between Christmas and New Year's; the company where I work asked all of its North American employees to take that week off. I did so gladly; always willing to be a company man when it works out to my benefit as well!

Of course, I had to make sure that I had other books lined up once Abercrombie's was finished. One of our family traditions is to give everyone an inscribed book as a Christmas gift. This year, I got two spy novels by Charles McCarry; The Miernik Dossier and Tears of Autumn. I finished The Miernik Dossier yesterday. The books were originally published in the mid 1970s and have been reprinted in paperback in the past couple of years. The Miernik Dossier is written in a fascinating style; as though it was assembled from disparate bits of intelligence material gleaned from a wide variety of sources for the benefit of an unnamed audience that wished to have a closer understanding of how intelligence operations worked. Very well done and well worth finding. I have started Tears of Autumn which takes place in 1963 and deals with the assasination of JFK as its central puzzle. I'm not very far into it, but am well hooked by the writing and exposition of the central character, Paul Christopher. Good stuff and well worth reading.

Hoops: UW 84, Stanford 83

2009-01-09T09:50:00.000-08:00

I went to the first home game of the Pac-10 season last night at Hec Edmundson Pavilion. Though it was the 15th game of the season and I've been watching since the beginning of November when they started, it was like the beginning of the real season last night. In all of the games before, even though the Huskies were doing well, there was an attitude that said, "Yeah, well, we're playing hard and all, but this isn't the real test yet."

Now it's the real testing time.

Stanford has a good team. They are much different than they were with the Lopez twins on the floor. I thought the best pre-game quote was Mitch Johnson's, "The biggest difference is that we're missing 14 feet in the middle." The Cardinal are a much faster team and they shoot very well from all over the floor (56% in the first half, 41% in the 2nd). There was no point in the game where they were behind by more than a couple of points and for a good portion of the game they were ahead.

It looked, again, like the Huskies poor performance at the foul line (22 of 34 (64%) by my count) was going to come back and haunt us (Stanford missed only two free throws that I remember), but we made them when we needed to. Jon Brockman, who has been shooting much better free throws this season (he was abysmal last year) seemed to go back to his old ways last night. He only hit 3 of 10. Whatever. We still came out with a win and are now 2-0 in Pac-10 play.

Saturday's afternoon game against Cal will be a tougher test. I can't wait..

Tunes: Rebirth Brass Band live at The Tractor Tavern

2009-01-08T10:11:00.000-08:00

Last night we went to the wilds of Ballard, a formerly Scandanavian enclave in Seattle that is now becoming one of the 'hip' places to live. There are still traces of the 'old' Ballard, but they are just that, traces.

One of them is The Tractor Tavern, just down the street from Hattie's Hat (a bar that has the reputation for serving very strong drinks, or so a 12-step friend of mine told me) in the commercial section of the neighborhood. Rebirth Brass Band from New Orleans was scheduled to play at 9:00 p.m. that night. Given that they are a product of New Orleans, I expected that they would arrive late, start late, and play long and late. We met some friends and ate at Lombardi's on Market Street and then walked down to the Tractor, about 4 blocks. We got there about 8:30 and snagged one of the few tables there, so we had a place to sit when we wanted to.

This is the second time that Rebirth has been at the Tractor. The last time they came, Claire (my Tulane-educated, New Orleans-loving daughter) and I decided to go on the day they were playing. We were sorely disappointed when we were not able to get in as tickets had all been sold out. Totally bummed, we knew we would not make that mistake if they ever came back. This time we bought our tickets a month in advance. A good thing we did, as they sold out again last night.

Rebirth showed up right around 9 o'clock and by 9:20 they were playing.Very surprising that they were so close to on-time. They are the ultimate New Orleans street band. The music is new funk backed by a strong second line rhythm section (bass drum, snare drums, and tuba). The rest of the band was two trombones, a saxaphone and two trumpets. Rebirth was formed in 1983 and has been going strong for 25 years now. They played some of their old favorites (Do What Ya Wanna, The Roof Is On Fire, It's All Over Now, Feel Like Funkin' It Up), but they also played some new stuff. They did a version of Duke Ellington's Caravan that was totally awesome, as well as a tune that teased me because I couldn't identify it, though I knew that I knew it. At any rate, they played for 2 and a half hours, ending right around midnight, which is ok by me as I had to get up for work the next day.

If you get the chance to see them, do so. They are truly superb and are not to be missed. You can get their music at lots of online stores, but the one I prefer to shop at for my N'awlins fix is The Louisiana Music Factory. That way, I know that at least some greater portion of the money will be staying in the NOLA area instead of lining the coffers of Amazon or whomever. This is also the only online place where you an get Ballzack's music.

Raisin' Fish: Not so cold anymore

2009-01-02T19:12:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted in a couple of weeks for a number of reasons. The primary one is that my trusty home computer started acting very flakey. It has two internal hard drives and the secondary one died on me. That caused the entire system to slow down to a painful crawl. I didn't get around to fixing that until this afternoon. All is well now and all the pictures taken over the past few weeks have been transferred and the system is working much better. Now I can post easily again.

Well, we sure went through a cold spell in the Puget Sound region between Christmas and New Years in 2008. We had snow on the ground and on the streets for most of that time. I was pretty worried about the incubator for a while there. After the first day or so of snow the scene down by the creek looked like this:

We ended up with quite a bit more snow than that, but that's one of the only pictures I took of the incubator in the snow this year.

Once the temp started to come up during this past week, all of the snow started to melt and the creek level rose quite a bit. It got high enough to cover the outlet tube of the incubator, which always worries me. Several years ago, we had some flooding in the creek and the water level was above the outlet tube. Unfortunately, at about the same time a good-sized tree branch floating down creek got wedged under the inlet pipe and lifted it up out of the water. By the time the creek level went down enough for me to notice the lack of outflow, all of the salmon in the incubator had died. I felt sick about that for about a week. That's why I get nervous whenever the outlet tube gets covered.

One difference now, though is we are using a much bigger inlet pipe. It is larger (6" vs 3", before), quite a bit heavier (and so more resistant to getting jacked up by a passing tree branch), and we have hammered a couple pieces of rebar into the creek bed and wired the end of the outlet tube down so it won't come up easily.

As I think I mentioned before, the flow rate in the incubator system should ideally be at least 10 gallons/minute. The flow has been considerable less than that lately, but with all of the stuff going on around here (we had 4 fairly large trees come down on the property due to snow. Luckily, none of them did any major property damage, though Francis & Abby's Odyssey minivan does have a dent in the hood that it didn't have before Christmas and the cap on Francis' pickup truck was destroyed when a large branch broke off a second-growth Douglas fir in the upper lot.) I had not had time to check the water line.

The day before yesterday, I spent the afternoon in the creek, starting at the upper end and working my way down to the incubator. First I made sure that there was plenty of water flowing into the inlet pipe (there was). Once that was assured, I started moving down creek and stopping at ever pipe junction. The pipe is 3" ABS plastic pipe, just like the stuff you'd use for a plumbing project in your house. It's mostly 10' lengths that are held together by collars. Those collars have two stainless steel screws on the upward facing side that hold everything together. The pipe is not completely air or water tight, so occasionally there are pockets of air trapped in the system. These pockets have to be bled out so that the pipe can carry as much water as possible. To bleed the system, all I have to do is go to each pipe junction and back one of the screws all the way out. If there is air trapped in that section, the pressure of the water forces it out. It's kinda cool to pull out one of the screws and hear it hissing away. It means things will be getting better in the system. Once all the air bleeds out, water will start to spurt out the hole. At that point you put the screw back in and move downstream to the next junction.

By the time I bled the whole system, a couple of hours had passed and I had improved the water flow significantly. Just from looking at it, I figured it was much more than the needed 10 gpm. To test it, I emptied all of the water from the clarifier and timed how long it took to refill. It's got about 55 gallons capacity and refilled in 3 minutes 20 seconds. That works out to just over 16 gallons per minute! (Imagine the voice of Marv Alpert, veteran broadcaster for the New Your Knicks) Yessss!

That was Tuesday. Since then the waterflow has continued to be strong.

While I was fooling around with the clarifier and incubator, I dropped the water level in the incubator to look at the first tray of eggs. I was very surprised to see that most of the eggs have not yet hatched. I expect that a few have, but the majority have not. Usually by the time they have spent 20 days in the incubator, most of them are hatched. Guess the cold water and air temps are retarding their growth. Nothing I can do about that, really. Just watch and see what happens.

As long as I keep water flowing, they will be fine.

I've done a bunch of reading and will chronicle some of that in the next post or two. I don't feel like writing any more this evening.

Raisin' Fish: Dang it's cold

2008-12-17T16:02:00.000-08:00

Seattle is in the grip of a major cold wave along with most of the northern half of the US. Normally we are sheilded from that by the Japanese current and being at sea level more or less, but not this time. It has been below freezing for several days now.

Water flow through my icubator is stll moving, but not at the rate it was before the cold set in. I hope that I don't end up with any frozen pipes. I shouldn't as long as the water keeps moving. One thing this will do is slow down the maturation process of the eggs/alevin.

The timetable for salmon maturation from egg fertilization through release is fairly well documented and based on what are call "thermal units." One thermal unit is equal to 1 degree above 32 Farenheit for 24 hours. From fertilization to hatch is 750 thermal units; from hatch to release is 1,000 thermal units. I got my eggs early because of two factors; the fall run of coho salmon at Issaquah Creek hatchery was earlier than usual, and the water temperatures there were a bit higher than normal (causing the eggs to reach the 'eyed' stage earlier).

Water is not all that quick to respond to air temperature changes; it generally varies much more slowly than the air above it. I haven't ever measured the water temp in McAleer Creek, but have guessed it to be about 42 degrees (more or less). That gives me about 100-105 days from the time I get eggs in the incubator until I release them. The water going down a degree or even two would only slow that rate by a couple of days at most, so I'm guessing that fish release will still be some time around the end of March 2009.

I watch the outflow from the incubator a couple of times a day. As long as it is still flowing, my babies are going to be happy. So far, they are happy.

Readin': Finish One trilogy, get close on another

2008-12-17T15:32:00.000-08:00

Well, I got the second book of Lois McMaster Bujold's The Sharing Knife series, Legacy finished last week and it was as good as it could be. For a fantasy novel to be at all engaging, the characters have to be based in, and true to, their humanity. Legacy's characters return that in spades; both Dar and Fawn are well drawn and quite complex. The surrounding characters, also fairly well drawn, so a suprising mix of motives, emotions and actions, some of them ever-so-humanly pig-headed. The Beguilement ended with Dar and Fawn having married and headed toward the Lakewalker's encampment. Legacy ends with them on the road again, having found the Lakewalkers nowhere near as hospitable as they had hoped.

What lies in store for them? Don't know, but I am anxious to keep reading. Book Three is not yet out in paperback and I have a basic prejudice against buying books like this in anything but paperback. I can't find my King County Library card at the moment, but when I do, I will reserve the book. Presently the KCL system only has 1 copy and 31 requests for it, but I did notice that they have 15 or more copies on order; including one for our local library branch down at the mall.

Third Place Books came through with Worldwired, the third book in the Jenny Casey trilogy. It was a great read and well worth the time. Jenny is a hugely complex, sympathetically drawn character with a long, military history and a senior non-com's inherent fatalism/cyncism and highly accurate bullshit detector. Lots of surprises, including a major league gunfight in the United Nations General Assembly. It does end suprisingly well. Well worth readying

Raisin' Fish: Loading the Barrel

2008-12-10T20:26:00.000-08:00

By 7:30 this morning, Gwynedd and I were on the road, arriving at Issaquah Salmon Hatchery around 8:15. We headed for the office to sign paperwork first (salmon eggs, especially fertilized ones, are a valuable resource, so you have to carry documentation that you got the eggs in a legitimate fashion).

Once all the signatures were in place we headed out to the room were I have been picking up my eggs for the past 10 years.

There they were, just waiting for us.

The eggs were transferred into a scale so they can be weighed. Earlier the hatchery folks had weighed a sample and knew how many eggs were in a pound (1536, today), so they could figure out how many pounds of eggs to give us. Here the eggs go from the baskets to the scale.

The eggs were poured into the cheescloth bags I had brought with me.

The first year I went to get eggs, I was a rank amateur. I asked the hatchery tech how big a bucket I should bring to carry the eggs home.
To my surprise, he said, "None."
When I asked why, he asked me, "If I taped a bucket over your head and sealed it all up, do you think you could drive all the way home before you ran out of air?"
I said "No."
To which he replied, "Well neither can the fish. They will exhaust all of the oxygen in the water and then suffocate. If you bring breathable cloth bags and keep the eggs moist and out of any drafts, they'll transpire oxygen right out of the air through their egg casings."

As each bag was filled, I took it out to my pickup truck and placed it on the wet towel laid in the back. They were then covered with another towel for the ride home. Here they are resting happily for their ride to Lake Forest Park.

The water was flowing strongly through the incubator this morning, as it had been for the past several days. When I pass by, all I have to do is look at the angle of the water and the amount coming out to judge whether or not we are getting sufficient flow for the fish. The flow you see there is about 11 gallons/minute.

Before placing the eggs into the incubator there was an additional step; soaking the eggs in an iodine/creek water solution for 5 minutes. This soaking decreases the possibility of carrying any micro-organisms from the Issaquah Creek watershed into McAleer Creek's watershed. Here's the first bag of eggs in the solution.

While we were waiting for the eggs, we put the bag of plastic media and the first tray into the incubator.

Now comes one of the coolest parts of the process, pouring the eggs into the trays. The eggs are about the size of small peas and have a smooth, almost liquid consistency to them. They pour into the tray like a bright and spreading pink hill.

It's important to turn the bags inside out very carefully over the incubator, as some eggs invariably stick to the side of the bags. Any one of these little marvels could grow up to feed a seal, an orca, or even one of my blog readers (few as they are). Wouldn't want to miss any!

Now comes the tedious part. You have probably noticed in the pictures that some of the eggs are much lighter in color than the others. Those light, almost white, eggs are dead. Sadly, they don't all make it. An important part of the process, though is to remove the dead ones early on, so that they don't rot and kill any of their brethren (or sistren). You run your hands through the eggs to stir them up a bit and then take the dead ones out one at a time. Time consuming? Yes. Tedious? yes, again. But absolutely necessary to the health of the surviving eggs in the incubator.

Here's what healthy coho salmon eggs at the 'eyed' stage look like. Those two black dots will become the fish's eyes and that white line between the eyes will become the spinal cord of the fish (among other things). Amazing that something so small can eventually grow to be 8-15 lbs and 20-30 inches long.

Here's what a dead egg looks like; all white and opaque instead of translucent and vibrantly colored like the live ones. They even feel different; the live ones are resilient and kind of bouncy, the dead ones are hard and stiff.

As we picked the dead eggs out, we threw them into the creek. A bunch of them began to accumulate behind one of the rocks in the creek. The smell of the eggs was surely being wafted downstream. I was hoping that some scavenger like a crawdad, or maybe a trout, would come looking for this easy breakfast. If they did come, it was after we were already gone.

We repeated the process twice more; putting down a new empty tray, soaking the eggs in iodine, pouring them in and picking out the dead ones. By 10:30 in the morning, Gwynedd and I had put approximately 70,000 coho salmon eggs into their new home beside McAleer Creek.

Thanks to Gwynedd for taking the pictures. She took many more than this; these were the prettiest ones that told the story.

Raisin' Fish: Running Water

2008-12-09T19:50:00.001-08:00

So, Saturday was a busy day on McAleer Creek. Because I am getting fish tomorrow, I had to get the whole incubator system clean and functioning in one day. This was not as hard as you might think. I have been doing this for 10 years now (this in #11) and I have had a certain amount of practice on all of these activities before.

So, first things first. Here is what the incubator looked like early Saturday morning.

The incubator is on the left; the clarifier is on the right. The piping on the right leads 500' up the creek to the inlet tube. Water flows in at the bottom of the clarifier and then out at the top. It goes into the bottom of the incubator and then out again at the top. Notice that there is no water flowing out of the outlet tube on the incubator. Both the incubator and clarifier have the crud of one season out in the weather goobering up their outsides. The insides are a bit murkier than that.

This is what the inside of the clarifier looked like before I began cleaning anything up. It is a mix of sand, silt and leaves (I had left the top off the clarifier and it is surrounded by trees.

First things first. Getting water flowing through the system will make everything else easier. As I said earlier, the inlet pipe is about 500' up creek from the incubator. It is a 6" diameter pipe with a bunch of holes drilled in it. During the course of the previous year, McAleer Creek had changed its flow pattern a bit, so the inlet pipe wasn't getting any water. The first thing I had to do was fix that. This is what the inlet pipe looked like before I began work.

I modified the creek bed as little as possible (there are all kinds of insects and other critters that live in the gravel/sand/rocks and I wanted to make as small a disturbance as possible), but still managed to get enough water flowing to cover most of the inlet tube. That took almost two hours.

After lunch, I came back out to the incubator and water was flowing through the clarifier. I cleaned that out and then started on the incubator itself. There wasn't much in there; just the stuff at the very bottom, which I'll show you pictures of all cleaned up. The incubator is a 50 gallon plastic drum (the only metal you can use is stainless steel, everything else gives off ions that will be bad for the fish, so we use stainless steel screws to hold the piping together). The water flows in at the bottom into a cross-shaped piece of piping that has holes drilled in the bottom (so that the force of the water is disapated against the bottom of the barrel and rises gently through the other layers). It looks like this:

Don't get too confused by it; it's kinda clean and shiny inside, so there's that wierd curvy reflection on the right hand wall. There's also a clean-out pipe at the bottom and the outlet pipe at the top, both on the left hand side of the barrel.

Next I put down the stainless steel screen that supports everything else.

It is supported by a ring of white plastic and some cross bracing across the diameter.

Next comes a layer of pea gravel about 1" thick.

Before I got started cleaning the incubator, that pea gravel was covered with a layer of silt about 1" thick; a dense mass of yuck that had to be cleaned out mostly by hand. At the end, though, I poured gallons and gallons of water in there and let everything flow out the clean out pipe at the bottom.

On top of the pea gravel I will put a bag of plastic media that look like barrels with a bunch of slots cut out of them. This is one of them:

The whole bag of them looks like this:

As you can see, they don't stack together very well. Once the eggs hatch out, the alevin (what a just-hatched salmon is called) will swim down through the trays and hide out in the media for a couple of months. All of those nooks and crannies are good places for hiding. In the wild they would do this by burrowing into the spaces in the gravel around their nest.

Tomorrow, when I get the eggs, you won't see any of that stuff (and I won't see if for another 3-4 months once the eggs are loaded into the incubator), but you will see the trays that go on top of the bag of little barrels. Here are all five of them stacked in my garage.

Once I got the water flowing through the incubator, it was time to optimize its flow. To support 70,000 eggs/alevin/fry (actually the barrel can hold 125,000 if you can believe that), you need about 10 gallons of cold, well-oxegynated water flowing through the system. The eggs will breathe that oxygen directly from the water; the alevin/fry will breathe it as well once they appear. At the beginning of optimization we were getting about 5 gallons/minute (maybe, I didn't bother to measure it, just estimated it by eye, having seen water flow out of the incubator for the last decade). This is what it looked like (notice how much cleaner and well ordered everything is than in the first picture - I was working hard):

Optimizing means flushing all the gunk out of the lines and then bleeding the air out of the pipes at the high spots. If the pipe fell in a perfectly straight line from the inlet to the clarifier, the bleeding would be unneccessary. But the pipe rises and dips, doing its best to follow the level of the stream, but not completely succeeding. Hence the need to fiddle with it.

Here's a picture of my son, Francis, flushing out one of the pipes.

Notice the cordless drill by his knee? That's what we use to bleed the system. As I said earlier the pipes are held together with stainless steel screws at the junctions of each 10' section. You just unscrew one or both screws and let any air trapped in that section of pipe escape. It's really pretty simple.

While we were walking through the creek we saw a really cool sign. This is it:

Yes, that is a dead salmon head lying in the gravel on the side of McAleer Creek. This is a very good thing for at least two reasons. One, it means we are getting returning fish. Two, once the fish die they begin rotting in place. Their bodies provide fertilizer for the plant life along the stream which feeds the insects that will become the food for their little babies. Circle of life, Indeed.

By the time we were through flushing the pipes it was 3:30. I had to leave to get ready for dinner and a UW men's basketball game (vs Texas Southern, which they won 88 - 52, bringing our record to 6-3), so Francis finished bleeding the system in the dark (sunset is early in December in the Pacific Northwest, it's full dark by 4:30 these days). When I checked the incubator the next morning, we were getting flow of a little better than 10 gallons/minute. We are ready.

Tomorrow is the big day. My daughter, Gwynedd, is accompanying me and will be taking pictures, so I'll give you the complete pictorial rundown of loading fish into the barrel either tomorrow or Thursday night. We leave for Issaquah Hatchery around 7:30 tomorrow morning. I know it seems silly, but I am tremendously excited. I really like doing this project; it gives me a sense of participation in the natural world that is significantly more intense than just watching it all from my windows.

The First Law: Book Two - Before They Are Hanged . . . and a few corrections

2008-12-05T12:56:00.000-08:00

Before They Are Hanged is a great book in the second-book-in-a-trilogy genre. It takes all of the major characters' stories and moves them along in interesting ways, provides many of its own suprises both in character development and plot twists, and leaves you wanting that third book right now. Laura will finish it soon enough and then I'll get back to that.

In the meantime, I have some corrections to make. The Lois McMaster Bujold books are another trilogy, not a two-volume set as I originally thought. In addition, the title of the series is The Sharing Knife and the title of the first volume is Beguilement. Now that I have cleared up my own confusion, I can tell you a bit about the books. The two main characters, Dag Redwing Hickory, a Lakewalker on patrol, and Fawn Bluefield, a farmer girl running away from her family and an unintended pregnancy, meet on the road in perilous circumstances. Fawn saves Dag; Dag saves Fawn; Dag nurses Fawn back to health. Dag takes Fawn back to her family but not before falling in love with her. Once at her family's farm, it becomes clear to him that they will marry and they do. Beguilement ends with them leaving the farm after the wedding and heading for the Lakewalker encampment and an uncertain welcome and future.

Legacy, the second book in the trilogy, opens where Beguilement leaves off. I'm about a third of the way into it at the moment. The couple have arrived at the Lakewalker encampment and conflict ensues. Lakewalkers are forbidden to marry farmers and Dag has done just that. There will be a reckoning, but it has not yet happened. Bujold is a great writer; her characters are fully drawn and both their actions and there inner lives are portrayed with empathy and telling detail. The story is eminently readable. Good stuff.

When I went to Third Place Books the other night, they didn't have a copy of Worldwired, so I ordered it. I hope it will be in by the time I finish Legacy. In any case, I doubt that I'll be doing all that much reading this weekend as I need to get the incubator on line before Wednesday morning.

Raisin' Fish: Getting Ready to Receive

2008-12-03T13:38:00.000-08:00

I just got off the phone with Darren at the Issaquah Hatchery, one of the many fish hatcheries run by the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife. In cooperation with WSDFW and the Mid-Sound Fisheries Enhancement group I have been raising coho salmon in my front yard for the past 10 years. During that time I have incubated 630,000 coho salmon eggs.

I suppose a bit of explanation is in order.

I live on about 1.4 acres of land about a mile from Lake Washington in Lake Forest Park, Washington. McAleer Creek, which runs from Lake Ballinger to Lake Washington (perhaps 5 miles in all), runs right through my front yard. Back when my oldest daughter was in 6th grade, I met a local oncologist (father of one of Claire's classmates) who incubated wild salmon at his vacation house over in Hood Canal. He got me set up with the Mid-Sound folks who bought me the incubator once they saw the water supply I have all year round. Since that time I have been raising about 70,000 fish per year and releasing them into McAleer Creek. During that 10 years, there was only one year when I did not raise fish. That was the year I spent living and working in Mississippi (and that's a whole different story).

I have always liked raising fish and have had an acquarium whenever I could. While I was teaching school in Astoria, Oregon (1975-1988), I always dreamed of raising salmon in the classroom. Many of my students' parents where involved in fishing, so I wanted them to have an appreciation for the beauty and complexity of the whole process. I was never able to get anything set up during that time for a whole variety of reasons. A couple of years after we moved to Seattle, I stumbled on this opportunity and have been doing it ever since. Frankly, I love playing around in the water and this gives me a chance to do that and perhaps do my bit to enhance the viability of salmon in the Puget Sound basin.

So what's a fish incubator look like? It looks like a black plastic 55-gallon drum with some piping sticking into and out of it. Inside it there is space for trays to hold fish eggs and some plastic media that the young alevin can hide in (no worries, you are likely to read more about fish biology as we go along). I have a schematic drawing of one on one of my computers. I'll try to post it one of these days or draw a new one if I can't find it. Standing next to the incubator is another plastic drum (a bright blue one) that I use as a clarifier. The water flows into the clarifier at the bottom and then I take it out of the top of the clarifier and feed it into the bottom of the incubator. It flows up through the incubator and out the top via a pipe and screen arrangement. The water is fed into the clarifier via about 500 ft of 3" plastic pipe. The pipe leads far enough upstream that gravity makes sure that the water flows all year long.

With a setup like this, simplest is best. The fewer things there are to go wrong, the more likely it is that the fish will survive. If I were to use an electric pump to take water out of McAleer Creek, then I'd have to be sure that the pump would operate 24/7 for about 3 1/2 months during the winter. Unfortunately, that is the time when we have our most violent storms, and, because we live in a heavily wooded ravine, the power sometimes goes out when a tree falls across the lines. If I used a gas powered pump, in addition to the obnoxious noise, I'd also have to make sure that it never ran out of fuel for the entire time and that the motor would stand that kind of long term duty. So, I use a bunch more pipe, but gravity is fairly reliable (and significantly cheaper than electricity or gasoline to boot).

Because I will be playing host to 70,000 coho salmon eggs starting on Wednesday, December 10, I have to get the incubator up and running this weekend. Sometime during the summer the stream changed course slightly and left my inlet tube 500 feet upcreek dry. I'm going to have to get that fixed this weekend. While I'm at it, I'll take a bunch of pictures so that you can see what this is all about. I'll post them when I write up the maintenance/repair of the incubator sometime this weekend.

New Music: Take 1

2008-12-02T09:35:00.000-08:00

I went to Silver Platters in Seattle (a bit more costly, but I'd rather support a local, independent music store than a chain like WalMart or Best Buy) in search of 4 CDs last week and found all of them. In addition I bought 2 more by artists I have been following for several years now.

They are:
Call Me Crazy - Lee Ann Womack
Ear Food - The Roy Hargrove Quintet
I Am . . . Sasha Fierce - Beyonce
Hurricane - Grace Jones
Little Honey - Lucinda Williams
Gossip In The Grain - Ray La Montagne

The first four were the ones I went looking for; the last two I picked up on the spur of the moment because I have their other work and have liked it.

I must say that my two favorites are not-quite-polar opposites; Call Me Crazy and Hurricane with the former being at the top of my playlist these days. I have never been a major league country music fan and have never bought a Lee Ann Womack album before, but I must say, I am astounded by this CD. Lee Ann has an amazing voice; plenty of vocal range and the ability to tell a story with just the tone of voice. The first song on the disc is amazing; a contemporary production that shows why so many people love what Nashville has been producing for the past 50 years. The sound is clean, the musicianship is impecable, Lee Ann's voice is plaintive, resigned, and ever-so-slightly disgusted. The lyrics contain the album title and showcase a dry, sly wit.

. . .
They're probably closing down,
Saying no more alcohol
I'll bet you're in a bar
'Cause I'm always your last
Call me crazy
But I think maybe
We've had our last call . . .

Amazing album all the way through. Highly Recommended.

Grace Jones' Hurricane ? Why? Because it is her first recording in 19 years and I have always been fascinated by her warrior woman persona. The CD is not likely to be a best seller, but I like it quite well. The first track, This Is, has a driving beat and some inventive wordplay in it; Corporate Cannibal comes in as my second favorite track at the moment. Great contemporary R&B, but certainly not the mainstream.

I have a story of a personal encounter with Ray La Montagne, but will save that for a future post.

The First Law: Book One: The Blade Itself

2008-12-01T14:14:00.000-08:00

Joe Abercrombie is a new writer out of England who keeps bread on the table by being a free lance film editor of documentaries and live music. He has written his initial set of books, The First Law. The Blade Itself, the first installment in the trilogy, is an amazing work. Set in a medieval sort of world, it has everything a good fantasy novel/series should have; great characters (and who would have thought that you could end up having sympathy for an Inquisitor, but that's how good his characters are), lots of action, plenty of sword fighting, even some love interest.

His characters are great: Inquisitor Glotka, formerly a well-born, dashing cavalry hero and sword fighter who spent two years in a hellish prison that converted him into the pain-drenched wreck that his is now; Logen Nine-Fingers, a Northern barbarian in the finest tradition, a killer that is also human and a philosopher in his own way; Bayaz, First of the Magi, an old wizard who comes back to the kingdom he helped create and upsets its apple cart in surprising ways, and Jezal dan Luthar, a captain in the King's Own, a self-satisfied son of a noble family who cares most about drinking, fleecing his pals at cards and who hopes to win the yearly fencing Contest and attain glory so he can be 'an important man.' Abercrombie draws us into each of these characters' world in a way that is fully realized and fascinating. I ended up having sympathy for all of them and hope for all of them as the first book drew to a close. Those are not the only memorable characters in the book; there are plenty more, but those four are the major players in The Blade Itself.

The book opens with "The End" and then literally rushes into a cliffhanger beginning with Logen. Eventually, each of the other major characters is brought out in the open and given their time on the stage. Abercrombie does a skillful job of pacing and plotting, switching back and forth between characters, filling in gaps in each story, showing what is going on in the world in a panoramic, yet particular way.

I finished the first book in the trilogy relatively quickly (3 or 4 days) and have just started the second book, Before They Are Hanged. The author has already picked up the loose threads left at the end of Book One and is busy weaving them into a great story. Good stuff and highly recommended.

In between finishing The Blade Itself and starting Before They Are Hanged, I read The Sharing Knife, the first of two volumes entitled The Beguilement by Lois McMaster Bujold. Bujold draws great characters and has won more that her share of Hugo and Nebula awards, sometimes for the same book. She writes stories that are mostly fantasy, but, as with Abercrombie, they are peopled by fully realized and recognizably human characters. Often, as is the case here, the main character is a woman. In this case, Fawn Bluefield is one of the two main characters and a sympathetically drawn one. At the start of the novel she is running away from her farmer family to make a different life for herself. She falls in with Dar, a Lakewalker and has an extremely perilous encounter with a malice, an elemental evil spirit in that world. Dar is fifty-five and, even though he is, like all Lakewalkers, sensitive to the emotional realities of those around him, he is emotionally as well as physically crippled. He lost his left hand in an earlier battle against a malice (when he also lost his first wife) and has been a Lakewalker on patrol longer than anyone else in the world at that point. The Sharing Knife ends with Dar and Fawn married (marriages between Lakewalkers and farmers are not just strongly frowned upon, but practically non-existent) and just about to enter Dar's home encampment. Can't wait to continue this one.

So there you have it; as often happens, I am in the middle of reading several stories at once. I'm hoping to get to Third Place Books after work today so that I can pick up Worldwired (so that I can finish what I started with Hammered and Scardown) and the second book of The Beguilement (don't remember the title of that one at the moment). Those two books will be next on the list after I finish Before They Are Hanged.

I have also gotten a bunch of new music, some of it quite good. I will leave that for another post.

On another note

2008-11-20T16:27:00.000-08:00

My wife, Diane, and youngest daughter, Gwynedd, come home today. I'll be picking them up at SeaTac airport in another 5 hours. Don't think I'll be doing much reading (or blogging) for the next couple of days.

They've been living in Jerusalem and working in Bethlehem, Palestine for the past three months. Diane is the transition director of an acute day treatment facility/school for traumatized children there, the Holy Child Program. Gwynedd has been working at the school as a general go-fer/PE teacher. Haven't seen either of them since August.

It'll be good to have them home for awhile. They plan to head back to the Middle East in January, but all of the major holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, Gwynedd's birthday) fall between now and then, so a good time will be had by us. Not grammatical, but accurate.

Finished One . . . Start Another

2008-11-20T16:14:00.000-08:00

I finished Scardown at lunch time today. A good and satisfying read; the story is full of space-opera type action, but it is much more complex than that. There are several characters that you really begin to care about; when they're hurting, you hurt along with them. Good stuff.

A coworker handed me the first two novels in The First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself, and Before They Are Hanged. I don't read all that much fantasy (though now that I think of it; The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever by Donaldson, LeGuin's Wizard of Earthsea series, McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series, all of Rowling's Harry Potter books, Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series (before I lost patience with him in book 6), C.S. Lewis's Narnia and Perelandra series, and several others all reside in my library, so I can't say I don't read fantasy). I guess I should amend that. I don't read much fantasy compared to the amount of science fiction and mystery stories I read. There, that says it better.

Anyway . . .

The Blade Itself starts out "The End" and then plunges right into a fight and a cliffhanger. I am a sucker for books that begin well and this one does, in spades. I'm about twenty pages into it, but I can already tell that I'm hooked as the first two major characters are sufficiently complex and compelling to keep me reading all by themselves. Good stuff.

Well . . . . Hello!

2008-11-19T14:01:00.000-08:00

So, yes, I am joining the blogosphere.

What will this be about? Just as the title says in it's own way; books, cars, raising coho salmon on McAleer Creek in Lake Forest Park, and music.

Yes, it is an odd set of topics, but there you go. That's what I'm interested in, so that's what I'm going to be writing about. Likely, there will be other topics that intrude. Oh, my God. I left out basketball! How could that have happened? (I actually went back and fixed the title, I think) I have been playing, watching, or coaching basketball since I was nine. And I haven't been nine for a really long time.

OK, so what am I reading currently? Scardown by Elizabeth Bear, the second novel in her Jenny Casey trilogy (at least I think it's a trilogy at this point). Set in the not too distant future (2060's) when global warming's effects are being felt with a vengeance, the first AIs are being 'born', the US is in the shitter, and the Canadians are the world's police force for hire. Geniveve Marie Casey is a fifty-year old former Canadian Master Warrant Sargeant who has gone back to her native country after living in the North End of Hartford, Connecticut for several years (that's why I was initially attracted to the book; I student taught English at Hartford Public High School in 1974, not quite the North End, but close enough to have a good sense of the geography she's writing about. And my momma was born in Hartford and lived on Sigourney Street for her first three years). She is a combat veteran/hero who was given a nanoprocessor-controlled nervous system and left arm after surviving a nasty incident. She is self medicating and generally falling apart when she is yanked back to Canada via her nasty assassin older sister, Barbara. She gets drafted into Canada's starship flight program and befriends/works with and AI that is the ghost of Richard Feynman. I will not give away the whole plot, you can certainly read the book for that. I do like it though. Hammered is the first book in the series; Worldwired is promised as the conclusion. I'll have to make my way to Third Place Books to pick it up fairly soon now.

So, what am I listening to and liking, these days: Orchestra Baobab's Made in Dakar; Randy Newman's Harps and Angels; Irma Thomas' Simply Grand; Ballzack's Yeah Indeed; and Charlie Haden Family & Friends' Ramblin' Boy. Yes, my tastes are somewhat diverse, but what you'll hear about from me mostly is jazz, blues, rhythm & blues, some rap and hip hop, rock & roll, a bit of country and some pop music. I've been buying music since I was 12 when I first got a job delivering newspapers in Meriden, Connecticut and have been buying ever since. Between my wife and I we have 800+ vinyl albums and 600+ CDs. They mostly fit into those genres above, but some do not (like the Gregorian chant, classical music, and comedy albums to name a few).

Not much car related stuff going on these days. The track driving season is over and it's time for winter maintenance. I've got a 2000 BMW M Roadster that is significantly modified from stock. My son, Francis, and I picked it up at the factory in Spartanburg, South Carolina on May 14, 2000 and drove it home 5,500 miles to Seattle in 11 days on all the two lane roads we could find. I was trying for a Blue Highways (if you've read that book by William Least Heat Moon) sort of trip. Since then I've accumulated 172,994 miles on the odometer. It is my first sports car (though I've wanted one since I read The Red Car when I was 11 or 12) and my daily driver. It has also been my ride in One Lap of America for the past six years. You'll be hearing much more about One Lap over the next several months. In fact, I will be using this blog as my main communications tool during that event which happens at the beginning of May this year.

For now, I've got to fix both windows as their transport mechanisms are all kerfluffle. Also, Francis and I are going to be adding better air ducting to the front brakes (we have had significant issues the past two years with the new big brake kit from Ireland Engineering (I can't believe they have the gall to use the word Engineering in their company name given the crap quality of the kits they produce). In addition, we are going to be giving the trailer some much needed maintenance. We're replacing the complete axle assembly, both tires and the spare tire as well. With 100,000 miles on the trailer and almost no maintenance, it is a wonder it lasted as long as it did before giving us trouble this year. I'll probably talk about that later.

Right now, there's nothing much going on on the salmon raising front, though that is coming up in another month or so. Over the past 10 years I have raised 630,000 fall-run coho salmon in an incubator and relased them into McAleer Creek which runs through my front yard. If I were at home during daylight hours, I might get to see some of the returning fish, but at this time of year it is dark when I go to work and dark when I get back, so the only chance would be on weekends and I haven't seen any lately.

That's enough for now. Little by little you'll get a picture of my crazy life.