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.

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.

We both took Wednesday off from work and went down to San Francisco City Hall to get married. Chuck and Juju were present as our witnesses and photographers. All our pictures from the event are online here. It was a beautiful day and after the ceremony we went to take pictures in The Presidio and have lunch at the Cliff House. After that Ronda and I drove up to Sonoma and spent three nights at the Gaige House. We had a great time just hanging out in our room, which we only left to get mud wraps, massages, and food. (Ronda made some great dining reservations and we went out to eat at Ad Hoc in Yountville, The Girl and the Fig in Sonoma, and The Fig Cafe in Glen Ellen.)

Well, now we're getting back to reality and looking forward to the rest of our lives together.