Throwing away the topo

I like to get as high as I can as fast as I can....when I backpack in the Sierra Nevada Mts.  So for me I always enter on the East side of the range.  The trails start high and gain altitude quickly.  I try to stay above timberline as much as possible.  It feels better to me.  You can metaphorically throw away the topographic map and use your eye to pick a route or a destination that seems interesting.

This project here and here is suddenly above tree line and no longer do maps work where I'm standing. It's freestyle from here on out.
Stay tuned.

The Dove Tail Joint

Years ago, just when the coffee shop thing was beginning to explode I got a phone call from a friend.  He asked me if I wanted to invest in a coffee shop.  You know the type by now...the comfortable couches, the funky decor, the nice music playing, the hand poured coffee, the food, etc.

I said sure.

There were four investors in total and we were looking at a beautiful location on the corner of Telegraph Ave in Berkeley for it.  Lots of windows, an upstairs, outside sitting as well.  It would be perfect.

One of the early meetings was to come up with a name.  One of the names I came into the meeting with was "The Dovetail Joint".  The other three liked it initially as they were thinking Berkeley, dove, peace and love.  They were discussing it and I said "Actually I was thinking we could tie in the dovetail woodworking joint into the decor and look at this sketch I did of a logo with it".  They looked at me very puzzled.  It turns out they were completely clueless to the dovetail joint being used to hold pieces of wood together.

I was absolutely dumbfounded.  The dovetail is so old in human history I just figured it was in our DNA by now and everyone would automatically know about it.

Nope.  They had never heard of it.  It predates written history.  It's held together every important and unimportant thing since the beginning.  You see it everywhere and yet to them it was the tail of a dove.

Ultimately the name was struck down.  Too druggy they thought, too dive-y.  Not going to tell you the name we (they) picked as it bored me to tears it was so pedestrian.

Past week or so I've been cutting I don't know how many dovetails for drawers for a cabinet I'm making. Using a combination of cutting them by hand and a bit of routing.  Normally I would use the WoodRat to cut them as they make the most hand cut looking dovetails out there by far but I wanted to keep up the hand skills so decided to do them that way.  The WoodRat can cut them with 1 to 9 slope which is unheard of in the machine world.

But these took awhile.  Just now starting to glue them together.  I'll post up finished pics.
Edit. Here's a look at the next phase of this which looks like will take a long long time to complete.

My friend Bill

I had just moved from Vernon, British Columbia in 1979 to go to a commercial photography school in Santa Barbara, Ca and I found a part time job at the White Company.  This was a construction company that was a bit different than most.  The owner mostly hired college kids with no skills and taught them what they needed.  Some of the more skilled jobs though he hired people who knew what they were doing.  I was one of those having done house construction in Montana, Colorado and Canada for almost ten years at the point.  It was called the White Company because the owner, Rick, just loved to buy tools and when he did, he spray painted them all white.

Rick had just landed a big contract to rehab a 25 room mansion in Montecito that had been gutted by fire.  I showed up on my first day and he put me to demo a kitchen, I think as a test, and he drove away.  I was the only person on site.  A few hours later, with me kicking ass to prove my mettle, he shows back up with another person....Bill.  Rick goes in to see what sort of progress I had made and I said to Bill, "Does this company take coffee breaks"?  And Bill, in his slight cowboy accent said "Haven't seen one yet".  I like Bill immediately.

We became best friends on the job and as Bill was also going to the same photography school as I, we had a lot in common through that as well.  We ended up forming a little construction company ourselves during the school years to help with the money.

It turns out we both move to the San Francisco area after school and continued our friendship although he lives on the other side of the bay and over the other side of the Oakland Hills.

I've been wanting to make nocino for awhile and thought this was the year to do it.  If you're not familiar with nocino, it's an Italian invention of steeping green walnuts in alcohol and with the addition of some sugar turns into a nice little digestif.  But that's the thing, the walnuts need to be in the green stage and so it's a narrow window of opportunity that comes around once a year.  I had been pestering Bill about getting me some walnuts as he had grown up on farms and his mother still had some trees left on the family farm.  Starting in mid May I was either emailing or calling him and he would call his mother and she would report back.

Well, they're here.  At least in Hollister, California they are.  It seems Hollister comes later than the rest of California because they are already past green stage elsewhere.  Bill happened to be down in Hollister and picked me a couple hundred of them.

Quartered with a bit of lemon zest and put to rest for the next 40-45 days.

And since I promised you an update on the last beer shoot....The beer I shot was going to be marketed and targeted to the active lifestyle.  Their labels had images of bicyclists, rock climbers and the like.  Low alcohol but still the taste of a craft brewed beer.  Unfortunately it didn't work for them and they folded.  End of story.