Editing a door...

As part of our project to make our house extra-comfortable and nice for its new owner (that is to say, catching up on deferred maintenance), I'm fixing the screen door to our screen porch.

The door was installed by a cheapskate who used a lousy door handle/latch and didn't drill it properly. Here's the way the latch hole looks - notice how it's off center. It's also drilled at an angle.

The door latch/handle was a very cheap item with a mechanism that worked at one time, but failed pretty quickly. I have no idea how it ever worked at all. So one aspect of fixing the screen door was replacing the cheap doorknob/latch with a nice high-quality Schlage door handle and latch.

Here's the latch hole as seen through the handle hole. You can see more easily here that the latch hole wasn't drilled properly. In the picture here, I've already cut the hole for the handle.

The problem here is that because there's already a hole, which is the wrong size, if I try to drill a bigger hole, the old hole is going to guide the drill, and I'm going to wind up with a big disaster.

The correct way to solve this problem is to invest in a door boring jig. I can't stress enough how utterly great a jig like this would be. However, at $300, I'd be better off just buying a new door with the holes pre-drilled, because I'm only doing one door.

So I decided to try some advice I found on the internet, and make a cheap jig out of a piece of 2x4 scrap. In the picture here you can see the jig, which I've screwed to the door. The door boring jig clamps to the door, but I didn't want to build a jig that complex - this one took me about a minute to make.

It turns out that the drill bucks like a bronco when you try to use this jig. The drill bit I used is a real 7/8" drill bit that's 7/8" in diameter along its entire length, not one of those horrible paddle drills that have a little spade at the end that's flat. The problem with spade drills is that they're flimsy and difficult to control.

Unfortunately, with this jig, even my nicer drill bit was very hard to control. Because I hadn't driven the screws holding the jig in very far, the jig came right off the door. Not good.

So I drove the screws all the way in. The drill still bucked in the hole; what I finally did that worked was to start the drill with just a little bit in the jig, and then push it into the hole. This meant that it didn't take as big a bite when it hit the boring surface, and so it didn't buck as much. It was still pretty jumpy.

However, the latch hole came out nicely, pretty much where I wanted it. It wasn't perfect, like It would have been with the $300 jig, but it was close enough. The wooden jig prevented the drill from following the old hole, which was the main thing. People usually drill these holes by eye, and they come out okay. Back in the day you'd drill it with a brace and bit, which is a lot easier to control, owing to the lack of a motor. You'd still need a jig, though, if you were re-drilling a new hole over an old one.

I'll show you how I put in the mortise, not because I'm an expert, but just because you don't see a lot of pictures of carpentry work in progress on the internet, so I think even though I'm an amateur, pictures like this are still useful.

I marked the mortise by putting the latch into the hole and marking the outline of the faceplate with a pencil. I then cut along this mark with a Dremel tool. They usually tell you to use a pen-knife to do this, and in the hands of an expert, that's probably the right thing to do, but Dremel tools are less likely to puncture an artery if you slip (although they're still dangerous).

Here's what it looked like after I used the dremel, but before I used the chisel. The bare wood you see to the south is where I accidentally scraped the paint off while marking the door - i didn't chisel that part.

Unfortunately, I had trouble getting the iPhone to focus...

Here's what the mortise looked like when I was done. The trick to getting a good clean mortise is to go slowly and check frequently. Otherwise you could wind up going too deep.

By the way, if you operate the chisel by hand, be careful to keep the hand that's holding the door far enough away from the chisel that if you slip, you don't cut your other hand with the chisel. You can cut a tendon this way, which would be really bad. If you operate the chisel with a hammer, this isn't a big problem, because neither hand is in harm's way.

And here's what it looks like with the latch in place. I'm pretty happy with it - this is about the fifth mortise I've ever cut, and it looks pretty good. You can see where I slipped with the Dremel, which is a bummer, and there's a tiny bit of a gap above the mortise that I'll have to fill with wood putty before I repaint, but I'm not going to beat myself up about it.

The really embarrassing mistake I made on this job was to cut the hole for the door handle too big. I have no idea how I did this - I used the hole saw that I thought the documentation specified. I can only assume that I misread the documentation somehow. Sigh. Fortunately, the handle is held firmly in place by the cover plates, which are big enough to cover up my mistake, so it looks fine and works fine. Measure twice, cut once.

Death and Reconciliation

When I was a kid, I had a fairly rocky relationship with my parents, like most kids. My mother was the strict disciplinarian. My father would occasionally get really pissed off at me, but if I let him cool off he'd usually forgive and forget, so it was always better to get in trouble on his watch.

In my twenties, I carried a lot of baggage from my childhood - things that bugged me about my parents, reasons why they weren't the best parents ever, useless crap like that. Consequently, I would do things to punish them, and I would hold grudges. I even avoided my grandmother for a while because of something she allowed to happen, but that wasn't really her fault.

When I was about 28, I was living in San Francisco above a bookstore I quite liked called A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for books. They used to have book signings on a regular basis. I would go down and meet the authors and get books signed - I got one signed by Jon Carroll, for example. Sometimes I would buy books I might not have considered because I was curious to meet the author and wanted to have some idea of what they'd written first.

So it was that I bought a book about death. Not about what happens afterwards, mind you, but about how to think about life in the context of death. It was a very good book - the author told a lot of moving stories both from his own personal experience, and also from the experiences of people he'd talked to. He runs a number of hospices around the world, so this is a topic with which he has a great deal of experience.

The key point he made in his book that really connected for me is that everybody we know and love is dying. We pretend it's not so, because we love them, and we don't want them to die. And we ourselves are also dying, but of course that's also a difficult thing to face. Nevertheless, every time we say goodbye to a loved one, that may be the last time we say goodbye, whether because they die before we see them again, or because we die before we see them again.

It's not a fun thing to contemplate, but it's important to contemplate. Thinking this way, I decided that I needed to stop holding things against the people I loved, particularly my parents. At the time they were in reasonable health, but life doesn't come with any guarantees. Furthermore, I often have a bit of an involuntary brush with death when I get on an airplane, because the lack of control and the general freakiness of being in an environment where a serious failure, even though it's extremely unlikely, would almost certainly be fatal, reminds me of my place in the world: that I am mortal.

So I stopped holding grudges. I tried always to leave them without anything unsaid, without failing to express my love for them. I tried to stop saying unkind things to them. I tried to learn how to control my temper, which was pretty vicious.

I can't say that I was magically transformed into a good person overnight, but looking back on my behavior towards them in my twenties, the word that I think most aptly describes it is "asshole." Letting go of that behavior was a very pleasing thing for me, and I hope it was pleasing for them as well. Certainly our relationship improved.

I've been reminded of this time in my life because I was recently asked what I would do if I were in retreat, and were called to the bedside of a dying parent. This is a really terrible question. I've had to make decisions like it twice in my life - once when my aunt Mary died, and once when my father had a heart attack. Mary was already dead, and the question was whether I should rush to the funeral, or come out the next week to help with the aftermath. It was an easy choice, because either option was a good option.

In my father's case, the question was whether or not to get on an airplane that night, damn the cost, in hopes of seeing him before he had another heart attack if he should have one, or to assume he wasn't going to have one and just come out as soon as reasonably possible, without undertaking extreme expenditures. The decision made itself because he had another heart attack before we'd even decided, and went into surgery. So he wasn't going to be awake anyway if we flew out that night, and I don't think we could have anyway.

But the reason it's a terrible question is not because of the terrible choice I would have to make. It's because if we live our lives with the expectation that we will have some kind of deathbed reconciliation, we are kidding ourselves. Of all the people I've loved who have died, not one of them paid me the courtesy of waiting until I could get to their bedside.

My great grandfather died while I was fifteen hundred miles away, when I was either seven or twelve - I no longer remember which, but for some reason am convinced it was one of those numbers. My great grandmother died a few years later, the same way. These people were dear to me, but I was so young that I didn't know how to react - I cried, but I didn't really know what I was crying about. I was sad that they were gone, but didn't have any unfinished business with them.

My grandfather on my mother's side had a heart attack and died, and I was again 1500 miles away. It wasn't unexpected, but it wasn't expected either - he'd had a heart condition from childhood. He made a big difference to me in my life, and I never got to say goodbye, or to tell him how much I appreciated him.

My father's father died of an aneurysm while I was in California. Even the people who were in the house with him didn't get to say goodbye, because it was so sudden. It was really heartbreaking - it was so unexpected. As far as we'd known, he'd been in good health, and nobody anticipated that we'd lose him like that. He too made a big difference in my life, and I flatter myself that I learned some of his good qualities, and he went without me ever getting to say goodbye either. I think he knew I loved him, at least.

My mother had a stroke when she was visiting me out in California. One minute she was okay, the next she couldn't use half her body anymore, and she'd lost a lot of mental acuity. She's still my mom, and she's gotten back some of what she lost, but she still has trouble getting around and doesn't have the use of one hand. But at least she's here and I still have a chance with her.

My mother's brother died of a heart attack in his fifties, completely unexpectedly. I had a strained relationship with him, and I don't think there's much I could have done to mend it, but I was sorry to see him go, and sorry to see how his passing felt for my mother and my grandmother and her sisters.

My grandmother on my father's side passed away quietly in a nursing home. I made a point of going down to visit her in Florida as much as I could, and I think she appreciated that, but she always seemed so alone down there. It wasn't something I could do anything about without moving there, and I didn't want to move there. If I'd been any good at writing letters, that might have made a difference, but it's a habit I never acquired - I was too stubbornly attached to the future of communications—email—and focused on getting her to change instead of changing. But she got to meet Andrea, and she seemed happy for what was going on in the lives of her descendants, and she lived on her own terms, and I'm happy for that.

My aunt Mary died just as suddenly as her brother. It was an awful way to go, not that there's any good way. She was a bit eccentric, and that colored our relationship. I didn't visit her as much as I would have liked, because I had so many other people scattered about whom I needed to visit.

My grandmother on my mother's side died pretty unexpectedly, but she was quite old by then. I spoke with her before she passed, and we had what, in my life, would be the closest thing I can imagine to a deathbed reconciliation, mostly because she felt guilty about some things she'd said to me in the very difficult times after Mary passed. When I heard the news that she'd died, I was very glad we'd had that conversation, and I hope it eased her mind in some way.

I read the book I spoke of earlier, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, after my father's father died, but before the other events I've related that followed. There have been a lot of hard goodbyes since then. The older my parents get, the more it breaks my heart to say goodbye to them when Andrea and I leave for Arizona, or wherever's next. But I've at least tried to live by the attitude I learned from the book. When my father had his heart attack and his triple bypass, and we didn't know if he'd wake up again, it was pretty heart-rending, but when I tried to think if we had any unreconciled differences, I couldn't come up with any. We'd just had a nice visit for my parent's fiftieth anniversary.

So the point, if there is one, to this long rambling diatribe, is that I don't think deathbed goodbyes are something to plan on. If they happen, that's great, but what matters is what comes before, during the times when we are together, and as healthy as we can manage, and can enjoy each other's company without the grim spectre of death overshadowing our time together. The things that I regret are visits unvisited, not deathbeds unreached. The things that I take comfort in are the times we've had together, and for loved ones still present, the times we might still have.

The Long and Winding Road...

The Tikit tricked me again - I went out for a short ride and wound up up on Anklam Road and El Camino de la Oeste.
It's wily that way.It knew I would have a good time.It was right.

15.4 miles, I have no idea how long.

BTW, this is a trend - the other day, the weather was blustery, and the Tikit lured me out for a ride in the flood control area down by the Kino Sports Park (I'd just gone out to return some NetFlix videos). Later on it lured me out again, for a ride up to Borders, followed by a stop at the nice Yogurt place.

20 miles, wasn't keeping track of time.

What strange new adventures will the Tikit lure me out on next?

You know you want to...

We drove out to DM today, and so the Tikit was in the back of the Prius. I didn't have to pack it as tightly as I did last weekend, so it looks pretty relaxed in the trunk, and I though to take some pictures.





Of course, the Tikit was just sitting there eyeing me coyly, as if to say "you know you want to go for a ride, big boy." What was I going to do? So I took it out and rode it up to Fort Bowie. I ran into a ranger up there, who though the Tikit was pretty cool, and we talked about National Parks we had in common for a while. The decent from Fort Bowie is very steep at first, but it levels out a bit and becomes very nice. Of course it's very, very short - it's probably a mile from the trailer to the fort. But it was a nice ride. My iPhone ran out of juice, so I couldn't take any pictures. Guess I'll have to go up again...

2 miles, 30 minutes, including yakking.

Yesterday I went for a ride down Aviation Highway, south on Alvernon (next time I'll take Palo Verde) and back across on Ajo and back up on Park. It was a pretty nice ten-mile ride - enough to get my metabolism up, but not demanding, so I could do it every day. I went that way kind of randomly, so I didn't actually plan the route, and missed out on a couple of great opportunities for bike paths. The route under I-10 there is not particularly great, although there was almost no traffic on Ajo, so it was fine. But it turns out that there's a drainage channel that runs all through that area, and there's a bike path along and in some cases *in* the drainage channel, so that you can completely bypass all that stuff. It looks pretty cool - I will try it next time.

11 miles, less then an hour.

My favorite ride?

I went up Gates Pass. Again. Today it was partly cloudy, and the clouds were in the west, so I left well before sunset and did most of the ride in sunlight. I did get zapped for about fifteen minutes when the clouds broke briefly, but mostly it worked out. The big plus to going so early is that it's much, much prettier.



This is looking east along Kinney from the first place I stopped in the park, maybe a mile up the road from the Drexel Fire District fire station and the Circle K there.



You see these cacti all over the place at certain elevations. They're completely nonexistent out at Diamond Mountain, and also in Tucson proper, but go maybe 100 feet uphill or ten miles south and suddenly they're everywhere. From the car window they look fuzzy and cuddly, but once you get closer to them you realize that they are a little too clingy to be the easiest of friends.



This is shot toward the sunset from the same rest stop.



This is a long shot of Gates Pass from the intersection of Gates Pass Road and Kinney Road. It's always chancy to identify mountains and passes from a distance, but I'm pretty sure the pass is in fact the low point you see among the peaks.



This is shot down the road a piece from the intersection of Gates Pass Road and Kinney Road. The sun was just beginning to cross the horizon, and this is kind of the classic "Sunset from Gates Pass" image, with the saguaro on the left with fruit on it.



This is from the same location, looking up the road instead of down.



If you look at a map of Gates Pass Road, you'll see two major switchbacks - one is the pass itself, and the other is about a quarter mile below the pass, where the climbing gets really intense. I stopped there to get another sunset shot, and also took this shot looking back at the mountain in Tucson Mountain Park (I assume it's called Tucson Mountain, but don't know that for a fact).



This is looking up toward the pass at the mountain to the left of the pass. A very typical Arizona mountain view.



And here's what the sunset looked like from there. The sun is all the way behind a sharp peak off on the horizon, but it's still very bright.



Here I'm just below the pass at pretty much the last safe pullout, taking one last picture of the valley. What you're seeing off in the distance is first Tucson Mountain County Park, and then some mostly undeveloped land, and off in the distance the Tohono O'Odam reservation.



And here is the obligatory shot up at the very last of the climb to gates pass. The camera is level here - this isn't exaggerated either by camera tricks or simply by perspective.

25.4 miles round trip, and around two hours, but I don't really know. And yes, this does seem to be my favorite ride in Tucson at the moment. But it felt pretty easy this time, so who knows how long that will last - I may have to add in the McCain loop soon. By the way, if you click on the pictures you get bigger versions...

A change of pace: Mission San Xavier del Bac

I'm a little bored with Gates Pass for the moment, so last night I decided to try a run down to Mission San Xavier del Bac and back. This is about a third of the famous Shootout ride, and in fact reading about the Shootout is what gave me the idea.

The bad news is that the mission is really not very far out of town, so most of the ride is in town, just getting there. I decided to do a straight shot down Mission Boulevard, which goes almost all the way down to the mission. I can't say much good about the in-town part of this ride - the shoulder is striped, but narrow, probably no more than 18" wide the whole way. It seemed relatively clean. Traffic was heavy, but not chaotic.

The last three miles are in the Tohono O'Odham nation, and I was a little concerned about that part of the ride because apparently there is a bit of bad blood between some local residents and the riders of the Shootout. But for whatever reason, as I crossed the border into Tohono O'Odham land, I felt kind of like I was coming home - maybe it reminded me a bit of the farm in Oklahoma, I don't know.

The road there is really narrow, and has a lot of traffic, but for whatever reason I felt fairly comfortable riding there - all the cars gave me a wide berth, and the traffic thinned out the farther south I got. Still, this is not an ideal route, and you can cut east and take neighborhood streets at least for the first two miles, so that might be prudent, and I will try it next time I do this ride. Of course, if you're going for speed and distance, you probably want to stay on Mission and just be careful.

The road to the mission takes you to a little town center there, with lots of speed bumps. I saw quite a few big mastiffs, but none of them approached me. The mission is a lovely and unusual structure, which I've seen from a distance many times, but never from up close.

The little community that surrounds the mission is quite small, and it was behind me very quickly as I followed San Xavier road towards I-19. The road crosses an arroyo and arrows through some rural farmland before reaching the highway. This section of the road is quite pretty, in a very Sonoran-desert way. There's one section where the road crosses a low spot and all you can see around you, other than a few houses a half mile ahead, are cacti and scrub.

The road continues into south Tucson, where it turns into Sixth Avenue as it crosses Los Reales. Sixth Avenue wasn't bad at first, but got progressively worse as I went further north toward the intersection with Nogales Highway. It may be better to cut west at Los Reales and head north on 12th to Bilby, then cut east again and head north on Liberty. On the plus side, heading north on Sixth was fast - I was pretty much keeping up with traffic, and got home very quickly. Then Andrea and I ate spaghetti and mainlined the Trueblood disc we had gotten in the mail from Netflix that morning...

Total distance: 20 miles. Time: about 1:45 (guessing). I had to fight a headwind on the way down - that's my excuse...

In the improved coffee karma department...

...it turns out that there is now a place in Tucson where you can get genuinely exquisite coffee. There's this guy with a trailer that's outfitted as a coffee brewing station. Hey, it's Tucson! Much of the best food in Tucson is served out of trailers, or so I suspect. I passed a tamale trailer on the way to Gates Pass the other day that looked like the place to be; I almost stopped, but chickened out. Maybe next time. But I digress.

The owner, Jason, calls his business Cafe VanGo - a suitably Tucsonan riff on a popular cafe naming scheme. The setup is basically just the trailer and a couple of tables under a shaded awning out in the parking lot; despite the theoretical lack of atmosphere, it kind of works, or maybe it's just that the coffee is so good that you see flowers blooming in your peripheral vision.

Because the coffee really is that good. It's at least as good as the coffee I was getting when I was in Austin at Caffe Medici; possibly better. It's as good as the coffee at Everyman Espresso in New York. I don't know of a place that has coffee that good in the Bay Area. I asked for a macchiato, and after a brief secret handshake to indicate that I knew what I was asking for, got a cup of about an ounce and a half of the most exquisite coffee drink known to humankind.

Andrea encouraged me to order a second shot, so I had a breve macchiato, which was even better. He really makes a purist macchiato - the shot was short, and there was just enough milk to mark the coffee - not much weaker than straight espresso. The espresso was bright and citrusy and chocolaty. Bring your own cup if you don't want paper. That's the only thing I could even remotely complain about, and it's not a serious complaint, because I'm happy to bring my own cup, and I will next time.

Oh, one nice thing about Jason was that despite the fact that he won the 2008 Southwest Regional Barista Competition, and despite the fact that he's got an encyclopedic knowledge of coffee, he didn't seem to bring an ounce of attitude to his work. He was very apologetic about asking me if I knew what a macchiato was. He didn't try to tell me what I wanted. He just tried to figure out what I wanted, and then made it, perfectly.

So if you are in Tucson, and love coffee, I really recommend checking out Cafe VanGo. If you're driving through on the highway, make the detour. Bear in mind that he's only open until 3 in the afternoon, though.

BTW, he also has a Clover. I might check that out at some point, just to see how it does.

Oh, there's a good shot of the trailer here: Tucson Foodie Blog: Cafe VanGo