New gas grill. Only took ten years of marriage to finally get one!

The inaugural grilled meat and subsequent enjoyment.

Oh man, summer’s in full swing now. Clear skies, temps in the upper 80s and low 90s for the next few days. I’ve been doing lots of yard work the past couple of weeks, mostly trying to get a small garden up and running in time to get a jump on the nice weather. So far: basil, thyme, chives, cilantro, rosemary, oregano, swiss chard, spinach, tomatoes, and jalapeno peppers in the raised beds. Planning on adding a couple more beds out back. Parko has no interest in gardening and is happy standing in his tiny swimming pool.

I took a break from that though last Friday to go climbing out at Lava Point, probably my favorite Tieton crag at the moment. Here’s a view from the cliff top looking out toward Rimrock Lake and another view along the climbing wall, from Deadheads looking toward Lava Wall.

Led Screamin’ for Rope (5.9), pictured below left, and B Weir of the Dead (5.10a), below right. I’d climbed Screamin’ for Rope before and it was a nice warm up. B Weir was a nice little challenge on lead, mostly for the head games it played with me. Run out a little in the middle of the route with a missing bolt, but I cruised through that fine. I took a longer pause higher up at the roof to get my nerve up to swing out into space with a two handed pull up on some pretty solid hand holds.

From B Weir of the Dead’s anchor we slid over and set up a top rope for Artificial Instemination (5.10a), rapped off, and climbed. Fun route that we thought was going to be trickier than it ended up being.

Lastly I climbed Cherry Garcia (5.9), below left, and Steal Your Face (5.10c), below right. Steal Your Face was my first attempt at a 10c route and maybe shouldn’t have been tried as the last climb of the day, but the start just looked so fun from the ground that I wanted to give it a shot. We set up a top rope from the cliff top. I fell a couple times figuring out the the first fifteen feet of climbing, then cruised through the easier middle portion, and finally through one more difficult move on fried arms near the anchor. Nice feeling of accomplishment to cap the day and left me feeling like a whole another tier of climbs were now available to attempt.

Finally making good progress on getting the house in order. We have carpet from Home Depot going in in a couple weeks, so I took advantage of the currently exposed sub-flooring to shore up a flexing board at the top of the stairs. Turned out to be a previous patch job that had broken due to being poorly supported underneath. I ripped out the old flooring and one step, rebuilt the step with a a 2×10, and reinforced the joists (as Mary made fun of me for going overboard with reinforcements, as usual), then carved out a new top step with some scrap wood I had in the shop. That’s one solid step now! Would’ve been nice to match the fir floors I suppose instead of using pine, but that location should be perpetually covered by carpet, so harm done.

Also got going on redoing the front entryway to fix some poorly done tile work put in by a past owner. The old tile was chintzy looking, undulated, and had terrible spacing between the tiles. The tile work was installed over an old slab foundation. Initially I wanted to chip up the tile and start fresh, but after chiseling away a few tile fragments I realized that it would be significantly easier to go over top of the old tile with new tile.

To do that I needed a good level surface that the new tile would adhere to, so my only option really was to cover the current tile with cement and then tile over the cement. I’ve never worked with self-leveling cement before, so it was a bit of a leap of faith to pour buckets-full of cement onto the floor inside our house. I built a wood barrier between the slab and our wood floors in the dining room to contain the watery cement. It worked really well except for a small gap in the sub floor that ended up draining some of the cement into the basement (you can see the drain marks in the bottom right of the photo below).

Lesson learned. I also learned how short my working window with self-leveling cement is. Pretty much 5-10 minutes to get the cement spread properly and any touching after that leads to weird marks in the drying cement. After the cement dried, I made sure the basement draining issue was shored up and tightened up my retaining wall board with caulk, then put a second coat (half the floor) of cement on to patch things up. Turned out fantastic and I now have a really nice level cement floor ready for tile once I get around to it. Hoping to get the new tile started this week.

It was important to get this cement project done asap, because we had a wood flooring company coming in last week to redo our adjacent wood floors. Below is a picture of our original flooring. It’s kind of tough to see in the photo, but those floors are pretty battered. They’re fir floors which means technically soft woods, but I think they’re at least leaning toward old growth wood which is somewhat more durable. In any case, soft or not, they’re unbelievable cool boards which really deserve to be showcased. Long unbroken wood with interesting grain patterns. We’ll have to try our best to keep the dogs claws from eviscerating them.

Here are shots during (sanded) and after (sealed and finished) of the wood floors. We used Bona Amberseal, to keep more of a natural color to the fir, and Bona Traffic as a top coat and I think it turned out beautifully.

Lots of other side projects going on too. I built and installed a few raised beds for an herb garden, turned over and reseeded a big section of the yard (20’x20′), repainted the front entryway, and rebuilt some of our irrigation plumbing after one of the dogs (probably Parko) broke the PVC pipe underground when he ran into the above-ground spigot.

Also been rock climbing quite bit. Climbed at Royal Columns last Thursday. Free-climbed Western Front (5.3) to set up some neighboring top ropes. Also ticked off: Slacker (5.4), Good Timer (5.4), Mush Maker (5.7), and Level Head (5.6). Nothing difficult obviously, but it’s been a lot of fun just dialing into crack climbing a little. Left: Level Head. Right: Mush Maker.

Lots of stuff in bloom around here right now. Here are some pictures of our cherry trees. We have eleven of them. I’m pretty sure that’s more cherries than we could possibly consume in a year given that we barely dug into the one cherry tree at our last house. At least the birds will be happy with their feast.

The irrigation water turned on last week (canal behind our house was running already a couple weeks ago). I’m not sure why anyone needs to water their lawn in April, but after the recent stretch of warm weather, lots people happily cranked on their sprinklers.

Parko and I went on a run through the Cowiche Canyon uplands yesterday morning. Lots of people and dogs out enjoying the weekend sun. Wildflowers aplenty. Prairie star and balsamroot pictured below. Violet above.

Lots of phlox. Some buckwheat getting close to blooming. A nice view overlooking the valley. Grass widow lingering.

Sold! We signed the closing paperwork yesterday and officially handed over the keys to the house on 74th this morning. We sold for-sale-by-owner and were working with a fairly uncommunicative buyer’s realtor, so were kind of caught by surprise when the title company called us yesterday to come in and sign paperwork. Wasn’t too bad of a move though on short notice, just a couple of car-loads and mattresses on the roof.

Still pretty chaotic over at the new house though. Our new furnace went in on Monday, but isn’t hooked up to gas yet until the city inspector comes out and signs off on it. Just in time to not need to run it at all! It’s a pretty impressive new setup dominating the basement compared to the old furnace with cobbled-together duct work. $5,500 for a new 95% efficient Rheem gas furnace with coil and all new ducts. Sounds like a lot money, but after taking bids from about 8 different contractors and price matching, this was an absurdly good value.

We have a bunch of new carpet on order with Home Depot that should be arriving in the next week or two and also have a wood floor specialist coming out to refinish the living room and dining room fir floors this weekend (hopefully). In the meantime there’s not much motivation to organize our clutter if we’re just going to have to keep moving it out of the way of the flooring crews.