Home of the Inane

so ronda and i are looking for a dog.  i've mainly been looking at petfinder.  ronda has been looking more locally at places like wonder dog rescue, rocket dog rescue, california underdog rescue, and the peninsula spca.  today we went to a rescue event organized by smiley dog rescue to meet a wonderful 4 year old bernese mountain dog named truffle. we're interested in adopting her, but there's another person before us in line. this seems to be a common situation since someone else also beat us to meeting lucky, who is being adopted from hopalong rescue.  well, we'll just have to keep up the search and keep meeting dogs.

it's a phrase that ronda occasionally uses that i particularly like.  the delivery is great since she'll usually use it with a (only partially affected) slur when she catches herself in the middle of a drunken diatribe.  why do i bring this up?  because yesterday i finally got around to measuring the specific gravity of my last remaining keg of home brewed beer, called biere de garde.  i actually brewed this one in feb 2007, so its over a year old.  it's also the strongest beer i've ever brewed at about 10% abv.  this explains why when i get home from work and have two pints to unwind i end up feeling pretty damn good....  and another thing...  i think i need to institute a one pint biere de garde limit.

i've slowly been making invisible progress on my new shelving project.

yesterday i went to macbeath hardwood company and i picked up 38 board feet of rough four quarter soft maple in ten foot long boards of assorted widths for $155.  leading up to this purchase i spent a lot of time researching the terminology related to buying lumber, finding different lumber suppliers near me, and balancing the properties of different the woods and their cost.  i finally settled on soft maple because it looks good and is reasonably cheap.

i've been designing my shelves using google sketchup, if you'd like to take look at how the shelves will look then install sketchup and click here to download my design.  i'm finished with the design itself, but i'm still working on alternate views that can be used as printouts for when i'm in the garage doing the actual construction.  hopefully i'll be able to start milling some of the wood next week.

sat afternoon ronda and i celebrated the arrival of spring in a time honored SF fashion, we went to the zeitgeist for burgers and beer.  we met up with some of ronda's friends there and afterwards went for some martinis at martuni's.

today we did a bunch of random cooking. last weekend we cooked up three pounds of tasty corned beef from marin sun farms (our favorite meat supplier).  we used half the corned beef last weekend for corned beef hash and we finished it off this weekend by making ruben sandwiches.  rye bread, thinly sliced corned beef, thinly sliced swiss cheese, sauerkraut, and home made russian dressing, all cooked up in the panini press.  mmmm...

after the ruben sandwiches for brunch, i tried out a new salsa recipie for papalote salsa.  just in case you're not familiar with papalote, it's an awesome taqueria in the mission, and they serve a salsa that's more addictive than crack.  i have to say the version that i made isn't exactly the same, but it's really freakin good.

i also wanted to make (but never got around to making) some sikil p'ak.  i normally buy little $6 tubs of this stuff at the farmers market from primavera.  the problem is that the little tub never last past two sittings (if it makes it that long). so i did some digging around on the internet and i came up with this recipie for sikil p'ak. i bought all the ingredients and hopefully i'll be able to try it soon.

since i was on a salsa kick, i also created a peppers file as a convenient reference for all my pepper cooking needs.

i also went roasted the second half of a 3 lb lutz beet that i picked up last weekend at the farmers market from tierra vegetables.  i had never heard of or seen a lutz beet before, but tierra is one of my favorite people at the farmers market often times i'll just buy whatever they bring just to try it out.  i roasted the beet by cutting it up into 1" square strips, putting it in a tray with 3/4 cup water and some olive oil, covering it with foil, and sticking it into the oven at 350 F for one and quarter hours.  after that i pulled the skin off and cut it into chunks so that ronda and i can have it later during the week.

ronda and i have been living at our current house for almost two years now, and honestly, we don't have much furniture to prove it. well, i've decided that we need some shelving. so instead of behaving like a normal person and going out and buying a bunch of shelving, or even a normal practical and creative person who would go out and quickly create a bunch of shelving, instead i'm setting out to learn google sketchup so that i can design some shelving. even though the shelving will be pretty simple and basic, i'm hoping to create a detailed model in sketchup that includes all joinery, assembled and exploded views, component lists and measurements, and cut lists for lumber. i've found a really good blog that covers sketchup from a woodworkers perspective, and i'm slowing reading my way through all the old entries.  once i have the design finished i'll be sure to post it here on my website.

well, on Feb 7, 2008 at around 9:30pm my grandmother passed away while sleeping in a hospital in warsaw, poland.  my father, mother, sister, and i all flew out during the preceding week to be with her.  she had stopped eating a few days before i got there so she was very skinny and much more of a fragile woman that the one i remembered visiting 7 months earlier.  she was suffering from an assortment of physical aliments (leukemia, seizures, internal bleeding, etc), but mentally she was very sharp and was in very good spirits.  she recognized all of us and enjoyed talking to us, she would tire pretty easily so we took turns sitting with her throughout the day.  i think she knew exactly what was going on since (aside from talking about going out with us to a restaurant) she was talking about how my father was arranging for a gathering of the pilatowicz clan outside of warsaw (which is exactly what he was doing since she was going to be buried outside warsaw).  she was also very excited by the fact that ronda and i had gotten married late last year and described the pictures of our wedding to me from her memory.  she also somehow got it into her head that ronda was pregnant, so she spent a while talking to me about good names for children.  i wasn't going to correct her.  on the night she died my father and i were at the hospital with her till about 8:30pm.  we left the hospital for the night and shortly after got a call from her doctor.

i've never been through an experience like this before and it was really difficult at times to be with her there in the hospital and see her wasting away and struggling to communicate, but even though it was very difficult i'm glad that i did get to see her again and spend some more time with her.  while there, sometimes i tried to recount to her the good times i had visiting her, but i was unable to think about those times without crying, so usually i had to talk about other random things.  now after the fact i can finally go back and slowly go through those old memories.  in the end, i think it all went as well as something like this can go.  she was always worried about dying alone, but luckily most the family that she cared about was present at the end.

after she passed away arrangements were made for a cremation in a new public cemetery in the town of czestochowa, and from there we took her to be buried with one of her sisters and her mother in the town where she was born.  she was the youngest of all her siblings and at 86 years old she had also lived the longest of them all.  she was a religious woman so there was a mass for her before the funeral and another in warsaw for people that knew her there.  i'm sure that now she's with the god she believed in.

in addition to spending time with grandma, the two week trip also entailed spending lots of time with family, which was really good since these days we only get together once a year for the holidays.  it had actually been over 19 years since my dad, mom, sister, and i were all together in poland.  we also met up with old friends of the family, and and lots extended family.  i met cousins, cousins once removed, and cousins twice removed, some of whom i knew and some of whom i'd never met before.

it was all a very tiring experience and i was very happy to finally get back home.  future trips to poland will be very different without babcia there.  she'll be dearly missed by many.  o'yeah, here are some pictures from the trip that don't really reflect the somber occasion for the visit.

it's finally done.  after 13 months (including a break of about 7 months) i've finally finished my bench.  last week i put the final coat of finish on it.  now i don't really have any need for a bench, but that doesn't really matter.  what matters is that it's done, and now i am using it as a side table to hold my drink while i write this post, and it's doing a great job.  here are some photos of it in different stages of development. now i guess i'll have to find something else to build.

man, i have spent too much time on software upgrades this month. here's the list:

• Upgraded the OS on my home server from snv_38 to snv_72. This upgrade removed support for Apache 2.0, so i had to upgrade from Apache 2.0 to 2.2. The new version of Apache also required that i recompile php.
• Upgraded SpamAssassin on my home server. This required installing a bunch of perl CPAN modules.
• Updated my version of unison to the latest version.
• Upgraded the photo software on my site, Coppermine.
• Upgraded the calendar software on my site, WebCalendar.
• Upgraded the blog software on my site, Movable Type, from 3.x to 4.x. This required changing the database backend from BerkeleyDB to MySQL. This also required installing a bunch of perl CPAN modules
• Updated my music collection to use ID3v2 tags instead of ID3v1 tags. This required installing ID3v2 and id3lib, updating my music management scripts to use ID3v2 and running a batch job to update all my music.

so i finally got around to uploading a bunch of photos. when ronda and i made our wedding bands i forgot to bring my camera, doh! so we took photos with my cellphone. unfortunately to get those photos i needed some special software and a special cable. well, i finally got that junk and uploaded the pictures, so you can see them here. i also uploaded some more random pictures from my cell phone that were taken in 2005. lastly, i uploaded my xmas pictures, my dads xmas pictures, and some pictures from a day trip to big bear to visit friends.

My new years eve was pretty chill. Ronda and I prepared some tasty Omaha steaks (which were a wedding present) for dinner along with potatos, green beans, and cheese cake. We had a bottle of red wine with our dinner and toasted to the new year. We then proceeded to play some video games on our new Wii and watch "The Frightened Woman", a strange 60s flick that involved some interesting sadism, domination, and erotic dancing. After that and a few more toasts we went to bed around 1:30am. The next morning I called my parents at 11:30am to wish them happy new years, the only problem was that they were still sleeping since they were out partying till 5:30am. Turns out they didn't mind me waking them up since they had to get up anyway to start getting ready for the next part that night. It's kinda funny when your parents are partying way more than you are.

I'm pretty sure that's what Ronda said at our wedding, her being giddy and all. While what she said was true, we no longer actually have the rings that we used for the ceremony. That's because the rings that we used for the ceremony were temporary silver rings that didn't actually fit too well. We replaced them last Sunday when we went to a jewelry shop (called Scintillant Studio) in the Mission and spent the day making our real wedding bands.

The proprietor, Adam Clark, made us the temporary rings that we used for our ceremony. We then spent the day together at his studio while us stepped us through the process of creating of our real wedding bands.

Unfortunately i forgot to bring my camera on that day. I did take some pictures with my cell phone that i still don't know how to copy them off the cell phone. Once i figure that out I'll post the pictures. In the meantime I've posted some pictures of the finished rings. (Note that they look a little scuffed up since they've already had a week of wear.)

I got to make Ronda's ring and she made mine. We fabricated them out of 18k white gold, which is basically 18k regular gold mixed with palladium. The process of creating the rings consisted roughly of:

• Melting the gold and creating an ingot.
  
• Annealing the ingot (basically tempering it). This involved heating it with a torch until it was red-hot, letting it cool a bit, dropping it in water, and then pickling it. (Pickling it involved dropping it into a acid bath which would remove any oxidation.)
  
• Hammering the ingot into a roughly square stick.
  
• Running the metal through assorted presses and annealing it occasionally in-between runs. This stretched out the metal and formed it into different shapes. For Ronda's ring we made three square sticks of different thicknesses. For my ring, the shape was one stick that was a half circle.
  
• Cleaning up one end of the metal sticks to make it very flat and smooth, then cutting it to a proper length for the desired ring size, and finally cleaning and smoothing up the other freshly cut end.
  
• Bending the metal sticks into a roughly round shape so that the cleaned up ends were touching each other and pressed together.
  
• Soldering the ends together. To do this we used a small torch and 18k gold leaf solder that had a slightly lower melting point than the gold we were using for the ring. In between each soldering step we had to pickle the ring to remove oxidation.
  
• Hammering the ring into an actually round shape of the correct size.
  
• Using sand paper to flatten out the sides of the rings.
  
• Using sand paper and assorted small grinder attachments to shape and smooth the inside and outside of the rings.
  
• Using a polishing wheel to polish the outside of the rings.
  

So the process for creating Ronda's ring was actually a little more complicated than mine. My ring was a simple band, but for Ronda's ring we wanted to incorporate her grandmothers yellow gold wedding band into the ring. To do this involved some extra steps:

• Resizing grandmothers yellow gold wedding band.
  
• Creating three pieces of white gold. One to go on each side of the yellow gold band and one more to go underneath the yellow gold band to fill in some blank space there.
  
• Lots more sanding and soldering to cleanly join the four metal bands together with no visible gaps.
  

The soldering of Ronda's ring was complicated by the fact that we didn't know exactly what alloys were mixed with the gold in her grandmothers ring and hence we didn't know the exact melting point of the metal. So we had to use a very low temperature solder to join the pieces together. There was at least one close call where i thought i accidently melted the ring, but in the end it all worked out much better than i ever expected. In the photos of Ronda's ring you can see that her grandmother's yellow band very clearly and it came out exactly the way we wanted.

Overall we spent almost seven hours working on the rings and we had a great time doing it. It was a really fun experience and now we've got a great story to tell about our wedding bands. Ronda also gets the added bonus of being reminded about her grandmother whenever she looks at her band.

If you're considering getting married, I'd highly recommend making your own wedding bands. If you're planning on doing this and you're in the bay area, I'd also highly recommend doing it at Scintillant Studio since Adam is a fun and laid back guy who really seemed to enjoy working with us and explaining the details of the entire ring making process. Also, compared to some of the other ring making services I've seen online, he charges very reasonable rates for his time and has no markup on materials.