Found this at my favorite surplus electronics shop this weekend. Going to gut it and make it into a stereo preamp with the Soviet Missile tubes. Still looking for a few components. The proper resistors and some decent capacitors. I may be able to scrap a few from other existing surplus.

I had bought a transformer for the project, but an considering using the power supply portion of this unit. Its already built to power tubes. The question I have is will it be enough to also supply phantom power?

New Gear

Good-by winter... For now anyway...

This is an April Spring shower in Oregon.

Winter is leaving bringing warmer weather. I will miss snowboarding for the next several months.

But it will be nice to sit on the porch and sip coffee in the morning!

For now one last snowboarding trip this coming sunday 5/03/09.

French Bread!

Ok, I finally got around to making my first loafs of French Bread. It really wasn't to hard.

I was able to make this stuff on the left into actual bread! I thought I was going need butter and egg to coat the top, but the recipe I ended up using was very simple and didn't call for it.

For a long time bread has fascinated me. When I was young my Mum used to take me to a bakery in Mendocino CA. to get a slice of pizza once a month. Walking in to the bakery always smelled great. There were so many delicious things there, but the pizza was what I was most excited about. I still get that warm feeling every time I walk into a bakery. Nothing smells as good as fresh baked bread.

Later in life I realized that a good portion of the population probably didn't have the skills to make bread without buying the ingredients from a grocery store. So I set forth trying to learn the science of bread making.

The thing I find most interesting is the concept of Yeast.

Single Cell organisms that produce gases and makes the flour rise. How someone figured this out over 10,000 years ago is beyond me. But there it is bubbling when warm water is added.


Mixing the flour with the Yeast starter was harder than I thought it was going to be. I think I need to invest in a good mixer.

kneading the bread dough wasn't to hard, but it was messy.
Once again its amazing how the bread dough rises.

It gave Marni and I a chance to catch a movie, but because of that it ended up rising an extra hour.
In the end it looked and tasted just like French bread! Personally it turned out a little heavier than I was expecting. Actually if I stuck it in a bread pan it would have made good sliced bread for sandwiches. I'll have to try making that sometime.

But for now I have solved some of the mysteries bread held for me. Like how do you make flour and Yeast from scratch? Also it turns out people prefer to use sea salt.

So now if things get so bad in the world that we have bread lines in America, I'm confident that we could figure out a way to make our own delicious bread! All done without having to buy things from a grocery store.

You can get sea salt from the Ocean. A 10x10 sqr ft patch of wheat can give you enough flour to make 25-30 loafs of bread. And Yeast can be found on the skin of Organic grapes, or even by boiling potato water and leaving it out for a while so natural Yeast in the air will start to grow in it.

I still have to do some research on that.

After I make my next batch of bread, I plan to learn how to make Pizza Crust! Maybe some corn bread as well as tortes for tacos! To me baking seems like a blast, but oddly I have no desire to learn how to cook.

White out Weekend

Who would have guessed I would be posting more snowboarding photos?

We just had a double weekend of boarding. We rented a condo in Government camp for a night.

Mt. Hood Meadows was just a 20 min drive away. Its nice not having to get up at 5am and drive 70 miles like we normally do. Seems the weekdays are the best time to go. There was hardly anyone there on Monday. So there wasn't much waiting in line to get on a lift. The only down side of the weekend was that there was a major snow storm, so by the end of the day on Sunday the wind was hitting 70mpr at times and they had to close the lifts an hour early. At times we couldn't see where we were going and the wind was blowing us over but we still had a great time.

I had promised myself I would take it easy on my first run. Sometimes if I take a run that is to physically demanding I get a little warn out.

So on my first run I took a less traveled path and ended up getting stuck in an area with waist deep powder and chest high snow drifts. You can see the photo on the left.

If you don't know what its like trying to walk out of that you should try it sometime. When I finally got to an area with enough of a fall line to ride out I was totally exhausted and a little light headed.

As I was walking out others arrived and ended up in the same situation. The guy fallowing my tracks through the snow was a little freaked out. When we got to the top of a near by black diamond run he asked me where we could ride down. I told him right here, he quickly replied "I'm not good enough of a snowboarder to do that. Bummer for him, he had to walk another 50 yards in the snow to a less steep hill. When I finally got back on my board I soon made another mistake and ended up getting stuck again. When I got down to the bottom lift I had already spend most of my super human energy for the day.

The rest of the day went pretty well. Marni rocked her new Rome Mod snowboard. It snowed all day for both days that we were there. So by mid day much of the tracks were already starting to fill in. We are going back tomorrow!

Dramatic fog!

Took these photos early morning the other day. To bad you can see the roof of that ugly building. I know this isn't much of a post, but I thought the fog was worth sharing.