Day-trip to Yosemite Valley yesterday, my fingertips are completely SCORCHED. Just looking at my tips, I don't think you could take discernible fingerprints from 5 of my ten fingers.

Nonetheless, Ngoc, Danica and I had a great day on the awesome granite blocks. Nothing historic went down, but projects were definitely established, most notably the Sentinel Traverse, a pumpy v6 that Danica and I were both able to completely link, and which Ngoc was able to link except for the last few trivial moves. The sun was creeping below the valley walls, and we were all spent, but we'll be back to throw ourselves at it again soon. In the meantime, endurance training is my new friend.

Some classic V3's did get dispatched, and Danica quadrupled her list of v3 sends (from 1 to 4 or so). Day trips to Yosemite are well within the realm of doable, and we are already talking about when we can next go back!

Fresh in from the 6 hour drive to the East Side, here are a few of my favorite shots from a stellar weekend of great sends. Among other highlights, John made quick work sending Saigon (V6) at the Peabody Boulders in the first hour of our first day of bouldering. Also noteworthy, I finished off Gleaner (V6) at the Happy Boulders, and Ngoc completely demolished an old project of hers, Son of Claudius Rufus (V5) in terribly anti-climactic style (first burn, sans spotters). Tyler and Matt also were in good form, trading blows and sends out at the Happies. They spent a couple days on the rope too.

great success

Friday evening Ngoc and I kicked things off with some great dinner conversation and and fondue with Nina and the two John's. Highlights include John B breaking out his homemade alcohol still to show off his welding skills, as well as Nina's shortbread cookies with homemade ice cream.

As if one night of culinary antics weren't enough, we made the trek to Sacramento to visit mom and put together our award winning paella. She has leftovers to last her the whole week, we cooked so much. It was also our first trip to visit any of my family as a married couple.

Sunday was one stellar moment after another. After homemade breakfast with mom, we jammed over to my cousin's house for a quick visit and then sped off to Vacaville for some bouldering behind the nut tree. Great hillside basalt scattered around above housing developments...the climbing is really gymnastic and overhung, but holds are positive, sticky, and for the most part pretty big. We also had great company along to show us around. Danica and Jesse were on their way to Folsom to spend some time with their fam, so we interesected half way in Vacaville for a few hours of climbing.



On the way back to town, we stopped by Ngoc's mom's place for some spring rolls and had a great time running around with Ngoc's nephew, Keith Jr.


What a stinking cutie he is.

All in all, one of the most stellar weekends in quite a while.

weekend #1,398

the climbing slump i've been in since before vietnam is now, officially, no more. yesterday's trip to indian rock with ngoc and jfire is partially to blame. the overhanging v4 above the pole, a problem that had previously totally stumped me, went down quickly (Mike, if you're reading this, that v4 would be a quick send for you with the right beta. we should head out there soon), as did the last section of the full traverse that I hadn't linked through yet. now i'll just wait for a cold, sticky winter morning to go back out and put the whole traverse together.

in other news, albatross pub trivia night sunday. uh huh. yeah. well, i can say that we DIDN'T finish in last place, and more than that, we finished AHEAD of our rival team, which had two harvard grads, an attorney, and a Cal student among its members. even though Ngoc, myself and John aren't encyclopedias of random trivia, we still held our own.

no photos this weekend. boo.

Tomales Bay

This past Sunday a small crew of our close friends joined us at Tomales Bay State Park for an oyster-themed belated birthday picnic for Ngoc (sweet 16?). This format is actually sort of an annual outing of ours, and consists of first driving up to Hog Island in Marshall and purchasing a truckload of raw oysters, backtracking through Point Reyes Station with a cheese/wine/salumi stop at Cowgirl, and then finally enjoying it all at TMSP.

This year the weather was better than ever, and the setting is ridiculously good picture fodder. Hope you enjoy:

published

There were no parades, no Soho loft opening parties, no checks in the mail, nothing much to celebrate one of my pictures being "published". I put quotes around that since I use the term quite loosely...

A little less than a month ago I was approached by a content editor for Schmap online city guides. She requested the use of one of my Tilden Park photos in the latest Schmap Berkeley guide. It was very officious: I read and signed their limited use agreement which, unfortunately, plainly stated that monetary compensation was not being offered. But who cares! Someone likes my photos!

You can see my pictures on the Berkeley Schmap guide here. I'm credited as "Planet Groove" in the upper right hand corner!

just in case...

you live in a shell or are in the habit of keeping up 0% with current events, Ngoc and I are back from our honeymoon in Vietnam. check the last post for a link to the gory details.

I'll let the Ngutelo blog do the talking. Here are a few of my 'favs' from the trip:


Hanoi, bridge to Ngoc Son temple


Ha Long Bay

Sunset in Cat Ba Town, Ha Long Bay

Rice fields, Sapa

Hmong girl, Sapa

Imperial Palace, Hue



Chinese lamps, Hoi An

Nha Trang

Reunification Palace, Saigon

Hey all! Ngoc and I are in Vietnam for our honeymoon for the time being. check out all the fun antics here!

This is my Facebook homepage now. WTF??!?!!!11

This past Satuurday Ngoc and I were joined by all of our close friends for our wedding shower at Megan's house in Napa. We had a wonderful time eating delicious food and sampling dozens of bottles of wine! The evening culminated in a 12:30 AM walk to Denny's for the 6 of us who remained, of which I remember very little. The morning after Megan graciously let us de-tox in her living room watching the fresh prince whoop it up in NYC. Here are some candid shots taken at the shower. Thanks to all who could join!



On a different tangent, the v6 "crushing" continues in the gym. unfortunately, not much else is going down. I find myself losing the inspiration to really sit down and siege any problem that I'm not positive I can finish in one session. Not losing motivation, per se, just becoming "soft" in my climbing obsession. I think this is somewhat fueled by the lack of outdoor climbing in our schedules the past few weeks. Not counting Yosemite, it's certainly been a while! Throw some misc. finger pulley pains and scraped knuckles into that mix, along w/ the upcoming wedding plans, and you've got a recipe for climbing complacency.

I think Ngoc is suffering from the same withdrawal symptoms, as we find ourselves talking more and more about our post-wedding climbing plans. We've carefully constructed a year-long list of destinations for every season...Bishop in fall, Vegas in winter, Squamish in spring and summer, not to mention more bouldering in the valley. How convenient, no?

re-inventing the wheel

I'm pretty lucky. lucky to have a fiance who'll wait around in a hardware store for me on a Sunday afternoon, who'll patiently watch TV while I tinker around with my stupid hobbies, and who'll then go on to celebrate with me when I'm able to boil a cup of water with my homemade stove after ignoring her for an hour.

This afternoon and evening I undertook the small project of building a soda can backpacking stove. The whole fiasco was started recently when Ngoc picked up a Mountain Hardware Phantom sleeping bag at the Mountain Hardware friends and family store, who's location is a closely guarded trade secret. This bag is made of clouds, and stuffs into a ridiculously small 15"x5" stuff sack. Think about that! Naturally, I needed to one up her w/ a cool, lightweight gadget of my own. Hence, the stove. This thing runs on pure de-natured alcohol, and weighs in at a mere ounce or two, if that. Here's the rundown of what you'll need to accomplish this feat, in purely ghetto style:

3 aluminum cans of your favorite soda: $2.49 for a 6pack
package of small razor blade: $2.49 for 5
fiberglass insulation material: $1.49 for a 10 ft. roll
1 liter of de-natured alcohol (sold next to paint thinner): $6.99

The alcohol, of course, isn't part of the build process, but you'll need it nonetheless.



The stove is based around pressure build-up of vaporizing de-natured alcohol in an almost completely enclosed cylinder. The vaporization is achieved when the can, filled w/ alcohol, is headed by an outside source. the vaporized alcohol is forced out of small openings in the can and lit to produce jets of flame coming out of the top of the can. 50ml of alcohol produces a ring of jets that last for about 10 minutes!

There is one major pitfall to this design, before you go building your own at home. The holes need to be small...small enough that only vaporized alcohol is getting out of the can, and flames aren't creeping in. If any of the flames manage to race back into the body of the stove, the interior will ignite, and boom, you have a popped can and possibly shrapnel flying in multiple directions (that's an exaggeration, it would be far from lethal w/ the tiny amounts of fuel involved). There are safer variations to the soda can stove that don't carry the risk of igniting pressurized alcohol vapors, but they are much less efficient than the pressurized version.

The stove is constructed by slicing the bottoms off two soda cans, filling one half with fiberglass insulation, and then carefully pressing them together to create an air-tight seal (try stretching the rim of one of the can bottoms by pressing a third can full of soda down tightly into it a few times). I then took a small 1.5" picture frame nail and hammered about 20+ holes into the rim of one of the can bottoms, along w/ a larger hold in the center of the top of the stove for adding fuel to the can. a penny covers the filling hole when the stove is actually lit, to keep flames from entering via the larger filling hole. Viola!

A couple other items come in handy. You will need a metal "dish" of some sort to hold a few drops of alcohol in a basin below the actual stove. The dish is lit first, and the burning alcohol in the dish warms up the stove and throws little licks of flame up the side of the stove, eventually lighting the "jets" in just about 15-20 seconds. the bottom of a tuna can, cut to leave a small rim, works fine. a few dull popping sounds accompany the lighting of the jets, and you are up and running in no time. another handy item is a bend coat-hanger for holding the pot/pan you are going to cook with. In these photos, the coathanger holds the pot much too high above the flame. Ideally, i'd prefer to decrease the distance between pot and stove by at least half.


My goal tonight was to boil a cup of water, and I was able to do so with ease! a cup of water is not a whole lot, and ideally I'd like to be able to boil upwards of 3 cups on a backpacking trip, but note that these initial tests involved 1)no windscreen 2)likely did not push the capacity of the stove in terms of amt of fuel and 3)help the pot about an inch or so higher above the stove than desirable. Keep in mind, the stove needs no circulation of oxygen...those flames are burning purely on de-natured alcohol.

Behold!



By my estimates, I was using about 45ml of alcohol per burn (3 large cap-fulls). This was good for 10 minutes, with max flame lasting through minute 8 or so. a liter of denatured alcohol, or a full nalgene's worth, would be good for 4 hrs of stove time. I think the soda can stove is great for the minimalist weekend or 1-week through-hiker, but not exactly suited for the JMT. Longer trips require a lot of fuel, and that equals weight. on top of that, I wouldn't really trust myself with only one of these in the backcountry, as the whole setup is pretty shoe-string. nonetheless, I could carry a half dozen of these stoves and they would still weigh much less than my 8 oz. Primus Classic Trail.

Here are a few photos from SF Pride this past Sunday. Curiously, Ngoc, myself, Ben T, and Bearmo all had never been before. Overall, fewer outrageous antics, costumes, and cheap food than I had expected, but nonetheless an all-around feel good time.




In other news, I'm addicted to Vietnamese coffees. I had two small cups yesterday morning...enough to get my heart racing and freak me out a little bit. Don't under estimate that shit!!!

I haven't brought up the climbing training progress since my Sad Post a few weeks back even though I said I'd make it a regular "thing". Last week I finished a six week cycle of weighted training on the fingerboard, and this week I begin 3 or 4 weeks of campusing. Contrary to logic, campusing is actually MUCH easier on my fingers than the hangboard...its my elbows and shoulders that take a beating on those elegantly arranged wooden rungs. So much so that it even allows my fingers a chance to recover properly from the sad shape they're in after 6 weeks of weighted hangs.

After 3 or 4 weeks of campusing, the cycle repeats. The general feeling goes something like "start hangboarding, get stronger while feeling progressively more wrecked physically, peak at about week 5 or 6, switch to campusing when the body can't take it anymore, lose half a grade to campusing but recover *somewhat* at the same time." Why campus, you ask? for the skill-building and coordination, at least that's what I tell myself. how else am I going to work on dead-pointing those 4 ft. dyno's I love so much!

in the way of actual results, I haven't pushed into higher grades since last time I wrote about training, but I've become a lot more consistent at the edge of the envelope...what that means is a much much higher success rate on V6's at the gym. I'll take that as proof of improvement, I guess. There were a couple problems that I was shut down on a month ago that I've ended up sending this past week.

This past weekend was blistering hot. a BALMY 95 degrees, as read by my Audi's temp-ometer on the ride back from little Saigon. If you live anywhere near the Bay Area, you know that our spoiled asses can't handle record highs such as these. Ngoc and I slept for 3 hours on our carpeted living room floor, unofficially the coolest place in the apartment, on Friday evening.

We didn't want to let the heat overcome our good spirits, so we organized a little bbq at Great Stoneface Park in North-north Berkeley (our new favorite picnic spot!). J-fire, Ngoc and myself had spent an afternoon here prior, throwing ourselves at the Great Stone Face stand start (V4), the hardest 4 I've ever hopped on. But on Saturday, climbing took a back seat to good company and Maxine (pictured above). Ngoc made a rare appearance in a lovely skirt...if only she truly knew how much I like seeing her in skirts and dresses, she'd be wearing them all the time.

On Sunday, we cooked Paella! It was delicious, but we definitely have a few "tweaks" for our recipe next time we do a paella night (This weekend?!?!). Ngoc is uber scared of pan oil, as you will notice below.