I spent 14 hours working on the kayak today. It has been a long time since I did so much manual labor and my hands and arms are extremely sore. Progress has been rapid and the deck is starting to take shape. Maya continues to be a great help and we are pushing to complete as much of the boat as possible before she leaves to visit her cousins in Minnesota next weekend. Jeanine returned yesterday from her writing retreat to Vermont and was looking very relaxed.

The electronic containment fence which keeps Nala in the yard has a break in the wire which circumscribes her roaming territory. We were not aware that the technician who came earlier in the week had left the system off after he was unable to complete the repairs. It took two days for Nala to figure out she was a free dog and seized the opportunity to roam the neighborhood. Fortunately a friend spotted her and was able to secure her until Kyle was able to retrieve her. She is now secured to the end of a long rope (pictured here although difficult to see) and it is quite obvious to us that she does not appreciate this new arrangement. I have ordered a wireless system which we will test later next week. Hopefully it will work as advertised and we will no longer have to deal with repairing the buried wire on which our current system depends.

Jeanine’s roses are in full bloom giving both us and the local Japanese Beatles great enjoyment.

We received this photo today of Nicolai and SideStix co-founders Sarah and Kerith with their niece. Nico reports that he is having a great time and we are looking forward to more details when he returns. He tried and had success with an adaptive bicycle about which he was quite excited until he learned the price tag was $7,000. Hopefully he will discover more new adaptive technologies and make many connections for the future.

Jeanine left yesterday for the mountains of Vermont to spend a few days working on her writing at the ski cabin of a friend. When she returns on Friday I hope to add one of her photos to this post. Nico arrived safely in Winter Park, Colorado and will be attending the No Barriers Summit with the founders of SideStix. Every couple years the No Barriers Summit brings together adventurers and outdoor enthusiasts as well as scientists and innovators for an outdoor summit for the physically challenged. It combines hands-on clinics, product demonstrations, nature excursions, films, art and music, keynote addresses, leadership exercises and a scientific symposium. Back in Concord, Kyle is busy with his landscaping business and Maya attended dance camp (ballet and jazz). I had a busy day at work but found time for a lunch time walk on which I encountered this very photogenic motorcycle.

I pass through Concord Center twice every work day. On Fridays a large group of parishioners from First Parish march around the flag pole in support of those who suffer due to war. Every other day there is a kook waiving at drivers and holding an Impeach Obama sign. Today, I noticed a wood ladder strapped to the flag pole and looked up to see this painter going about his business. In this day and age of bucket trucks I was very surprised to see such a rudimentary approach to this very dangerous looking job.

Nico leaves tomorrow for Colorado where he is doing a one week internship with SideStix, the company that manufactures his forearm crutches. Nico has been a beta tester for their new crutch designs and has successfully broken every part at one time or another (handle support, articulating foot, cuff retainer, shaft, and handle grip) through his normal (extremely active) use of the crutches. Each time they improve the design until it is, using their phrase, Nico Proof. During a soccer game this weekend, Nico broke the cuff support on one of his crutches rendering it completely unusable. Sending him to Colorado on a competitors crutches was not an option so this evening I devised a very clever repair. I inserted a large headed screw into the crutch shaft, drilled a couple of holes in the retainer (to create little wells) and filled the entire cavity with epoxy. Even though the epoxy does not bind to the retainer material it fills the wells and surrounds the screw to make a very strong mechanical retainer. Hopefully this will be good enough to get him to his destination where the failed component can be replaced.

This evening we enjoyed a family outing to Faneuil Hall where we dined at Quincy Market’s MMMac & Cheese (they use Cavatappi pasta and a yummy blend of cheeses for an out of this world comfort food experience). We also took in a very entertaining street performance by the Red Trousers. Jeanine and Maya can be found in the background admiring this feat of strength and balance which was nothing compared to the humor of these two characters. Earlier in the day I survived the first half of our playoff finals before my injured quad/groin gave out completely. Although I was operating at half speed and could only kick with my left foot, I did contribute to our first goal when I crashed into the keeper on a 50/50 ball which squirted out towards the net. A defender used his hand to stop the ball and we scored on the resulting penalty kick. They equalized shortly before the end of the half knotting the score at 1-1. With 35 minutes left to play one of our players was given a red card (ejected) on a ridiculous call by a control freak referee who had no business officiating a league finals match. We had to finish the match with 10 players to their eleven and with no remaining subs to their 8. It was only a matter of time before they secured the winning goal. A disappointing end to an otherwise brilliant season. Thankfully I now have some time to heal from my accumulated injuries.

Maya and I made great progress on her kayak today. Strips of 1/4 inch plywood are stitched together with narrow steel wires to form the shape of the hull. We drill holes into adjacent panels, Maya threads the wire through the holes and I twist them tight, first with my fingers and then with a set of pliers. My fingertips are raw after several hundred iterations of this tedious procedure. Once the final shape has emerged we go back and adjust the wires until we get a straight keel line and just the right contours. Tomorrow we will epoxy the joints after which the wire stitches will come out. Spending time with Maya on this project is reward enough for the effort and I enjoy watching her problem solving like a true engineer. Both boys also pitched in for a few minutes during a critical step that involved passing several 15 foot strips across my router table.

I modified my home built router table fence in preparation for a beveling operation needed for the kayak project. Half the fun for me in such projects is figuring out how to employ jigs to reduce the amount of manual labor needed or improve the quality of the resulting work. My router table fence mounts to my table saw top using powerful magnets and is equipped with a wood dust/chip collector that couples into my shop dust collection system through the saw.

Using birthday money from her grandmother, Maya had her ears pierced this evening. Jeanine, her friend Sarinnagh, and I accompanied her to the mall where we witnessed this rite of passage. I have been a major proponent of delaying this day until Maya was 30. The thought of drilling holes in otherwise perfect little ears has been contrary to my fatherly instincts. Having watched Maya mature and blossom over recent months I found myself ready to let go and enjoy this milestone in her life.

For her birthday, Maya received a wood kayak kit from her parents. When I returned from work this evening the package was waiting and Maya was anxious to get started. In a role reversal from our last kayak project, I am the assistant to Maya who has taken charge of construction. Expect to see a number of posts chronicling this project which is expected to take 80 hours for construction and 20 hours for finishing.

After work today I kayaked a new 6.2 mile section of the Concord River. The 2 hour upstream paddle took me from Bedford to the Concord Boat house. Jeanine just back from a special mother-daughter(and friend) shopping trip with Maya and Sarinnagh exchanged her car for mine at the put-in point and then picked me up and we loaded the kayak. We then returned to Bedford together where Jeanine switched back into her car and we all went out for dinner at Luigi’s Italian restaurant. It was close to 9PM by the time we were seated and dinner could not come quickly enough for this starving group.

The weather was exceptional today and I took advantage of the conditions to kayak a new stretch of the Concord River after work. I put in off Elise Rd. in Billerica and covered 6.6 miles (starting up river) in 95 minutes yielding a 4mph speed without considering stops for photography. With two more strategically placed put ins I will have covered the entire Concord River, including the last mile which is rated as Class 3+/4 whitewater during the spring runoff. A few years ago the family did a whitewater rafting trip over that section which will long be remembered for the capsize that caused Jeanine to swear off whitewater forever.