Vasquez Rocks and Yerba Buena Backbone Trail

Los Angeles is not the first place that comes to mind when I think of great hiking. Hanna and I headed down to visit her parents in La Crescenta; their home backing up nicely to the San Gabriel Mountains. We visited Vasquez Rocks in the San Gabriels for a 5 mile hike. Vasquez Rocks has been featured in quite a few movies including Star Trek and features a unique geology that sets it apart from other parks in the basin like Joshua Tree and Anza Borrego.

Vasquez Rocks, San Gabriel Mountains


We also hiked the beautiful Backbone Trail in the Santa Monica mountains near Ventura. The hike was 6.5 miles with unique rock formations and occasional ocean views. The peak of Mt. Allen is 3,111 ft in elevation and marks the highest point in the Santa Monicas. We chose the Yerba Buena Canyon Road for our return trip, which takes you down to the beach near Ventura.

This hike was actually a back-up plan, we had reservations to take a ferry to the Channel Islands, however strong wind and waves caused the ferry company to cancel all outgoing trips. We tried to book a trip to Catalina Island and was warned they had outgoing ferries however ferries returning to San Pedro from the Island were in danger of being cancelled. Next time.

Backbone Trail in the Santa Monica Mountains:


(Balance Rock in upper left corner of picture)


Thousands of lady bugs






Hanna's Volvo turbo hitting a mileage milestone on the way home, in Wasco, of all places.

why facebook is bad

I had a conversation with friends this weekend at the Asparagus Festival, and that conversation started with me asking the question, “what have you two been up to?” Their response was, “well, you know, you’ve seen it all on facebook!” And there you have the reason why I very rarely use facebook, it cheapens friendships and the physical time you spend together with friends. I think people feel their stories have already been told online, so why bother to get together in person and share it again? I love feeling intrigued about what my friends and family have been up to and it keeps me excited about seeing them in person. I found when I used facebook that same level of excitement and intrigue was not there.

I have a similar issue maintaining this blog—I want to update it often enough that people bother to check it, but I am also very selective about what I share. You’ll read plenty about some of the projects I am working on, home improvement, things I am thinking about, plans for the future, along with some random photos here and there, but I want to leave the fun stuff for sharing in person. That said, I do love to share teaser photos and I have no plans stop barraging you with those. And one thing I must clarify, I think it's pretty neat to read about someone's amazing trip while they're on it, but I find it much more interesting to read a detailed blog entry than a 1-line facebook post. When I have time on a trip to jot down some notes (usually the case with my trips to Canada), I enjoy knowing my friends are following along and reading about the trip in more detail than I would probably ever provide in person. If this cheapens the experience for you, let me know, but I like the thought of an electronic diary/blog I can look at in the future. I can't say I would do the same with 1-line facebook posts.

Speaking of cheapening the experience, let's talk about birthday wishes. It used to be that the only way to wish a person ‘Happy Birthday’ was to physically be with a person. Then it evolved to cards via mail, then telephone and finally email. Now it is evolving to text messages. As impersonal as the last two are, at least people remembered it was your birthday and thought enough about you to recognize your day. Now, even the effort to remember is not needed as facebook does it for you. I think facebook sort-of cheapens the whole birthday experience, but that’s just me.

There are other things about facebook that annoy me but I will leave those to the words of Mark Granovetter in his book "The Strength of Weak Ties:"
"Now, with Facebook and similar applications, we have reached a stage where it isn’t just about ‘having friends’ but ‘appearing to be friends’ not just to ourselves but to others in the network. Such applications then work against us. They reduce what could have possibly grown to strong ties to weak ties because little effort is made beyond connecting over applications like Facebook – it is just that easy. The sadder thing would be if existing friendships become reduced because instead of making the effort to meet up and really talk and spend time together, we put that off because being able to connect over Facebook deceives us by making us feel that the existing state of the friendship is healthy and that amount of interaction is sufficient. Weak ties help spread information to individuals that are not accessible via strong ties. The problem to me is that while Facebook becomes an effective tool to manage those connections with people that are weak ties, it also creates the danger of making more ties weak."

You will still find me post on facebook on a rare occasion, but it’s more likely going to be some funny piece of nonsense that made me laugh on my way to the grocery store. Oh, and next time I post a vacation photo, it will have a fat watermark so my photos aren’t stolen* and sold to photostock!! *-and I must clarify here, to say photos are ‘stolen’ on facebook is totally inaccurate—in the terms and conditions of your facebook account you have agreed that Facebook Inc. has exclusive rights to anything you post—your words, pictures and data sent through any application used through their site. I get a kick out of people's anger when they find a photo of themselves with their friends being used in a marketing piece or hanging on the wall in a model home...It is legal for them to sell your photos to photo databases, which in turn sell your photos to companies for marketing.

I will leave you with this funny piece of facebook commentary:

Video

What's this? It is looking like a video is being produced; utilizing what I described to the team as a scary big camera, a scary oversized microphone and studio lighting everywhere. A cel-phone sized camcorder would have felt less intimidating.

This is a good opportunity to use the photos to reveal the results of my winter projects. In the top photo you will note some new red paint on the walls, new moulding and a fresh coat of white satin paint on the baseboards, you can just barely make out my new black window sills, new curtains that the film crew used to block the natural light, and a little glimpse of new door hardware--oil rubbed bronze door knobs, door strikes and hinges.

Crew setting up:






I love this pic...and check out the cool lighting effect they did on the wall and wine rack behind me:


I am nearly finished with my winter 'light remodel,' and that's just in time for the nice weather we have coming over the next few days. I will share more about the video in 6+ months when it's done.

Before, with light diffuser removed and stud and can locations marked:


Five hours later we had the old ceiling lightbox torn down and the fixtures installed and wired. A sheetrock guy will come and repair the sheetrock under the old fixture.


You can see that the new lights have a warmer color than the fluorescents they replaced, which is an old trick used to make food look better. A guy can use all the help he can get!

I converted the bathrooms and hallway to LED recessed as well. The previous fixtures looked like large mushrooms hanging from the ceiling. The new recessed look:


I use a Blueline Powercost Monitor, which shows how much energy my home is using. Not counting my power-sucking spa, the monitor shows my house used (before the upgrade) a baseload minimum of 300 watts of electricity, mainly from electronics on standby. Turning on my kitchen, bathroom and hallway lights alone would raise my baseload to 700 watts. I can have all of those rooms running full blast now and the monitor shows less than 100 watts above baseload, or basically the same consumption as just one 100 watt lightbulb.

Up next, the living room.

Lighting Upgrades in Progress

To the casual observer, not much has changed inside my house since my last post one month ago. I have not turned down any opportunities for fun and somehow the projects are incapable of finishing themselves on their own. No biggie. While no one project is fully complete, a lot is happening. The window mouldings and new drapery are complete in the living areas. These improvements made a big difference in the look and feel of the house. Window trim and drapery in the three bedrooms are on hold for now—it makes more sense for me to paint bedrooms 2 and 3 first so I don’t have to carefully mask around freshly painted trim and I (most likely someone else) can coordinate drapery with room colors.

The newly installed window trim and fresh satin paint made the baseboards look unfinished, so I began the process of painting all of the baseboards in the house. I replaced some of the existing door trim as there were two areas of the house where the trim was dented down low, most likely from the child of the previous owners. Since I was already fixing everything else it made sense to fill the dents in the sheetrock and retexture the walls in the damaged areas. The portion of the walls below the belt trim is complete with the exception of paint and I am planning a color change there.

Above the belt trim I filled nail holes, did some light retexturing and Hanna graciously volunteered to do the painting. The previous owners left behind the paints they used, so not only do I have the existing paint, I also have the color codes so I can have additional cans mixed. The trim is all painted with the exception of the main bathroom and hallway to the bedrooms.

The electrical work is moving forward, however the project goal involved kitchen and living room lighting, none of which has been touched yet. I have an electrical contractor friend helping me and he often gets stuck working long hours. While waiting for my contractor friend to become available I decided to start on my own in other areas of the house, using the knowledge I gained from helping him install recessed lighting and new electrical outlets in his ‘man cave.’

The two bathrooms had existing 6” recessed lights, however twelve years ago when my home was constructed, fluorescent fixtures still utilized magnetic ballasts with a separate starter to get the bulb going. When you flick the switch there was a two second delay before anything happened, then another couple of seconds of flickering before you actually got light. (See first picture.) Newer designs are much quicker and use electronic ballasts. Regardless, I hate fluorescent light and it’s not dimmable, so I went LED.

Here's what I removed...under the cone and trim ring, a magnetic-ballasted fixture:


The 6” cans in the bathrooms were designed for fluorescent and not IC-rated to contact insulation in the attic, so I swapped the cans out for the nice Title-24 energy efficient cans that are air-tight to reduce heating losses through the can and rated for insulation contact so my existing attic insulation can keep doing its job. I had to venture into the attic, disconnect the wiring and remove the brackets that brace the old recessed can between studs. This leaves you with a hole in the ceiling. The new recessed cans I installed are called remodel cans and are designed to be installed after the home has already been built and sheetrock is installed. Using the existing wiring, I made the connections to the housing and pushed the recessed can into the hole, with the unit supported by four clips that hold the can in place against the sheetrock. To keep it sealed I caulked the interface between the sheetrock and the can and installed the LED module. The two bathrooms now have instant-on light and a very pleasing amount and color of light. Unlike an incandescent recessed can light, there is no ugly and heat and air conditioning-wasting gap between the trim and the bulb, it’s all one piece.

Here is the new light engine. Obviously all you see is the flush-mounted white trim ring and recessed light.


While I was at it I replaced the light fixtures in the hallway. They were standard non-recessed hallway lights. I removed those fixtures, cut 6” holes in the sheetrock to accommodate the recessed can and wired them up. The hallway is now on a 3-way dimmer so you can turn the lights on and off from either end and they can be dimmed. It’s great being able to crank them up for cleaning and dim them down for ambiance. The dimmer switches illuminate when the lights are off so you can find the switch at night; brilliant. I had originally installed compact fluorescents (CFL) in those fixtures however I swapped back to incandescent because I hated the light from CFLs. The new LED fixtures are 10 watts each, so I went from 120 watts (two 60W bulbs) down to just 20 watts. And that’s at full brightness, I seem to like the look at 30%, so I think all of the hallway lighting is pulling around 6 watts.

Here the 'business end" of the new IC-rated, air-tight hallway lights, from the attic, obviously:


When my electrician friend is available we will complete the project we set-out for, converting the kitchen lights from six fluorescent tubes to LED can lights. There will be six of those. We are adding two more can lights to the living room. By the time we’re done my house will be full-LED except for the porch lights and bedrooms where I prefer non-overhead lighting.

No other big projects planned; I have plenty of existing projects to keep me busy for a while.

Part I of the interior updates

Having received a really nice compound sliding miter saw for Christmas, I put it to use right away doing some trim and moulding work in my house. Most newer homes have no window trim at all, just a bull-nosed sheetrock surround. My house already had quite a bit of colonial-style trim around the doors and on the mid-point of the walls, so I carried that same moulding onto the window surrounds and painted them satin white. The window sill and stool (part below the sill) are made from a nice grade of poplar, the stool painted satin white and the sill is satin black. The color combo seems a little strange, however the black sills match the color and style of my black photo frames and my wine rack and bookshelves in the dining room, and they match my entertainment center and artwork in the living room. I chose to spray the mouldings and sills rather than hand-paint them for a brushstroke-free look.

Installing the sills the proper way meant the sheetrock at the bottom of the window had to be removed, which was easier than I had expected. Score the sheetrock with a utility knife and break it away. If the goal was to litter my house in sheetrock dust, then the project was an overwhelming success. Timing is good though because next month's project will involve cutting yet more sheetrock. My shop vac is probably getting a little angry with me though--it has been instrumental in removal of all of the construction garbage and it's powerful enough that it will suck up a screwdriver, a center punch, a putty knife AND a container of wood putty in one swoop before you can even figure out where those items went.

The compound miter saw really made this project easy and I borrowed my father's pancake compressor and brad nailer for a professional finish. The brad nailer is a blast to use too. I also borrowed his router to round the corners of the sills, but we thought the non-routed square edges of the moulding looked more modern and matched my furniture better. My father spent the day with me showing me how the process is done and I was able to complete the rest of the windows with no problems and not even one wasted board. I usually go by the "measure once and screw up a bunch of times" method but decided the "measure twice, cut once" was more appropriate when working with expensive material.

This project required a lot of detail work. There is definitely an art to caulking--which smooths the transition from the moulding to the walls and from the sheetrock corners to the window panes. I have probably laid a mile of caulking at this point--one line to cover your 45-degree miters where the mouldings meet at the top, one line around the inside and outside of each moulding (X4 per window), a bead around the window itself and another between the sill and the window.

The window project created an opportunity for me to clean up all of the old paint on the window frames and recaulk each window, so it all looks brand new now. My Aunt, who is an interior designer, will be here in a week and is excited to help pick out some nicer valences for my existing wood blinds and some window treatments to finish it all off. After painting the window trim I realized that the baseboard moulding in my house is completely unpainted. The previous owners put in new flooring right before I moved in, so no doubt they were in the process of losing the home and just put up the moulding in a primed state; but it took me over a year to notice. So now I have moved on to recaulking and painting the baseboard moulding the same satin white as the window trim. I have only done the living room and dining room to-date; I will move onto the bedrooms perhaps next week.

Looking back at 2010

The holiday season came and went so quickly, I cannot believe it is over. I found myself in the holiday spirit much more than ever before and I rode it for all it was worth--the tree, lights and decorations were up before Dec 1, I hosted a Christmas party at my home, followed by an early Christmas the week before the actual holiday with my mom and her husband (who were leaving for a long trip to the Dominican Republic), as well as my sister and brother in law, then a Christmas eve celebration here as well with my sister and brother in law--we have always done our gift exchanges on Christmas eve, followed by our main presents and stockings on Christmas day, so we decided this year should be no different. We followed up with a Christmas day celebration at my father's home near Oakdale, with a prime rib dinner and a timely power outage that lasted about three hours--how ironic since my dad and his wife are both retired PG&E employees. I attended a half dozen other holiday parties in addition, so it was a very fun and busy month.

Santa brought me additional means for the home improvement I enjoy so much by way of a new compound miter saw for trim, moulding and custom cabinet work and Home Depot gift certificates that will certainly be used sooner rather than later. I am starting to feel embarrassed that one of my spare bedrooms still has two pink accent walls, and that's after a year and a half of living here. Painting work is in the plans this winter.

I learned some really good techniques for painting. In order to produce sharp lines at ceiling interfaces or areas where two paint colors come together, follow this technique--let's say your east-facing wall is eggshell white and you want your north-facing wall to be green. Lay your painter's tape down on the white wall, right to the wall corner. If you follow the normal technique of starting with the green paint, it will certainly bleed under the tape and it will be visible on the white wall. Instead, paint a strip of the *white* paint on the wall you want to be green. Wait for it to dry. That paint just bled white into the white area and filled all of the voids in the tape. Now paint your green over it and you'll have a perfect transition from white to green with no bleeding. My father used this technique in his RV garage and it looks amazing.





When I no longer have pink bedrooms to contend with, I think some stripes in my garage could make a fun winter project.

2010 was a great year for me. My recovery is coming along well and I have been able to do everything I have attempted. Extended hikes, home improvement/manual labor, mountain biking, kayaking, waterskiing and cliff diving (just kidding). My limitations will be ball sports that require a flick of the wrist, like throwing a ball or playing tennis (ball sports were never my interest anyway, and if I really wanted to I can learn to play left-handed), and two other activities that come to mind are those where you fall repeatedly on hard surfaces like rollerblading and iceskating...never did much of those either. I'll be up skiing in the coming weeks and I'll wear my old brace to protect my wrist during falls. Being able to return to more of a normal life has been great.

I managed quite a bit of travel and vacation in 2010 as well. A week in Death Valley, some time in Pt. Reyes, Lake Tahoe, several camping trips in the Sierras, a couple four wheeling trips, wine tasting, a boat trip to Canada with a seaplane ride home and of course an amazing trip to Italy, France, Switzerland and the Island of Corsica. I got to spend some really good quality time with friends and family and made new friends that I feel very fortunate to have in my life. I look forward to things that come in 2011.