A new hope

well clearly this is a regularly updated Blog...and this is not a post promising change.
But I've decided to re-purpose the blog, last night Briony and I opened a bottle of bubbly to celebrate completing our move into the new digs in Vancouver.  We've left the north shore and it's readily available dry aged beef, for the westend's readily available vegan and quality noodles. But I digress, back to the bubbly.

So with an air of conviviality the discussion of house design came up and a proposal was put forward to make a concrete (excuse the pun) start. So it was time to start seeing how our ideas meshed what our requirements were etc, PAPER was drawn on arguments about scale ensued ideas were scraped toys rooms workspaces were conceptualised and things were started.

Which is a very long way of saying that this blog is now going to a place where all our house design ideas (whatever they are) are going to be digitalised. I doubt most of these posts will be of interest to anyone else but every now and then something might go here where we are looking for outside input. Enough preamble, here are the first batch of drawings.

Initial design based on current living room and expanding from there.

Modular design proposal, establish a minimum size for each room and how many rooms  then put them together into a efficient design. Workspace facing away from the equator, rectangular building double entry to work space, laundry and bike repair space?

How big does a bathroom need to be? Must have a real bath! 4m x 2m apparently. Not happy with toilet and sink arrangement though.

3D! ..... aborted/distracted by toy room and overcome by bon homie/bubbles.

Ok now we are getting somewhere, toy/laundry/paraglider maintenance/work-space, slanted ceiling, 4m wall one side adjoining rest of house standard height.

Current question, how do you get fresh/cold air into the bedroom at night without draining all the heat out of the house if the bedroom is a loft? can it be done? We are thinking not and making the (potentially upstairs) bedroom thermally isolatable from the rest of the dwelling.

So it has been a while since I've put anything up here. About a year it seems. In the mean time I've worked two different jobs and failed to complete my thesis.

Here are some photos taken from my office at the last job.

I am really going to miss the view

BM part one

So burning man....its defiantly a thing. We survived, in part because we had a huge RV, in part because we were paranoid/terrified and thus put in a lot of preparation, in part because it's not actually quite as bad as we imagined and a big part was because we had a fairly mild year. I mean it rained heavily on Monday morning.

This probably should be a what did we learn post, but I think I am going to save that for later. I am just going to stick up a few of my favorite pictures of us in a sort of before and after kind of thing. But really its more like early in the week and later in the week.

Before.

Pre-dinner mood, first day of traveling

Early!

Just parked at will-call

Earlyish...

Later...

and we got a few dust storms towards the end

Survived!

Briony standing by our address pole, the decorative sign post had been souvenired

After.

Oregon sand dunes, two days post BM.

Bang

In other news, More Fireworks! Got a couple that I am happy with. Turns out there is this thing called the Honda celebration of light where three international teams compete to put on the best fireworks display set to music. Each display goes for about 25 mins, one team per night. This year it was the USA, France and Japan competing (or rather companies from each of those nations) with Japan taking the prize.

So we saw a few types I'd not seen before, including love hearts from the French and some lovely waterfall like effects from the Japanese, none of which I managed to capture effectively :)

Destruction

So things have been a little busy here, We went out to dinner one night and came back to find our apartment full of firefighters. Seems one of our cats had managed to turn on a tap and the sink hadn't been able to keep up with the flow.

We now have a bit of a hole in our flooring, downstairs has some water damage. Briony is gearing up to argue diminished culpability due to sink malfunction and I am just dreading the bill.

...and we're back!

Online again.
I'm a bit unhappy with the quality of the photos I am getting at the moment, but a combination of guilt (lack of posting) and persuasion (Briony) has me putting this one up.
The view from our new apartment, pardon the sky/seam artifacts.


I have just learnt that you should take your panorama shots from left to right as the file numbering then works in your favor.

Life in General

So I think there are going to have to be a few text based posts :( Paul has given me an assignment that would be easy for me to relate by text or speech but I am having a bit of trouble capturing it with an image. So Paul, I'm working on it.

We've been getting a bit of riding in, had two rides with Briony on Mt Fromme, we found a fun little trail called Espresso that makes me think I can actually ride a bike, and I've been rapidly getting better at steep rocky switchbacks; 'cause its safer to ride them than walk them. I'm really not exaggerating...much. Weather permitting we are off to Whistler this weekend.
http://connect.garmin.com/activity/532728227
http://connect.garmin.com/activity/531396231   (As you can see by the heart rate, I. am. not. fit.)

Got a new boardgame, Terra Mystica, so much wood. It's a fun euro game that plays reasonably quickly with a nice amount of asymmetry and beautiful components. Not found anyone to play with yet, but we aren't being very social at the moment while we get set up.

Went paragliding the other day, had four flights, logged a little over two hours of flight time. Caught a few thermals, caught quite a bit of turbulence, went on an under-prepared cross country flight.

The XC was arranged while shuttling to the top with one of the tandem pilots, "Get high enough to fly over that little peak and you will be fine to make it on glide, aim for the roundest hill and follow Kevin into landing." Turns out the landing was here.

The landing

I thought it was somewhere here,

not the landing

The problem is that top down it is clear which hill is round and which is a ridge, in profile from launch the closer round hill appears quite conical and has a lot of vertical features while the ridge behind it appears to be a lovely round dome, so I was aiming at the wrong place.
And I came down here

my landing

I was a bit low and knew I wasn't going to make the ridge line and had to pick a landing, I would have preferred to land here

My flight path preferred landing

but from the air it looked like freshly sprouted crop field and I really didn't want to deal with landing in that and the resultant damage/farmer grief, so I scraped over some powerlines (I would guess I had 15-20m vertical clearance but I was still closer than I wanted to be) and landed crosswind, which I ran off for my best landing of the day. So a lack of updating my flight plan with my current situation and then sticking to it left me in a situation where I was forced to land now rather than choosing to land. So I would have made the landing if I'd headed in the right direction I was trying to get get to that southern ridgeline to get some lift. I flew too far north of the river bank and missed all the thermals/lift generated by the mudflats, I was flying in the water affected air. The thing to do is follow the river bank (right above it) and then make a line for this hill

the "roundest" hill

which apparently produces some real lift then land in the field in lovely laminar wind.