Lucy's 40th birthweek

Since Flag Day 2010 was my 40TH birthday, we decide to have a birthWEEK celebration instead of a birthDAY celebration.  We also needed to vacate our house since there was no power or heat and the weather was cold, so we checked into the Marriott Summit Watch vacation club at the bottom of Main Street in Park City on Friday, amid fresh snow on the mountaintops.  Saturday, we were suppose to do the Deer Valley race, but it got canceled, as you already know from our last post.  We intended to celebrate the big 4-0 a day early on Sunday with a group mountain bike ride followed by beer and cake at Wasatch Brew Pub in Park City, but due to the 80% chance of rain in the forecast and dark skies, we called off the ride.  Drew and I did manage to sneak out early that day and get our first taste of the Mid Mountain trail this year.

After warming our toes in the hot tub back at the resort and opening a few presents in the room we gathered with lots of our very best friends at the brew pub for beer and an insanely delicious chocolate cake from Carlucci's Bakery that Drew had designed especially for his "over the hill" wife.

I guess when you are 40, you deserve two cakes.

But you still have to blow out the candles.



It was a great night and I felt lucky to be able to celebrate with such awesome friends: Doug, John, Jen, Melissa, Scott, Jennie, Joel, Alison, Eric, Erika, Dusty, Rhonda, Andy, Bob, Lyna, Laura, Mike, April, Nancy, Ken, Angela, Ty, Gigi, Kathy, Chris, Bonnie, Jonas, Mark, Kari, Cindy, Craig, Shelly, and of course, my wonderful Drew.

We had to get to bed early though because the actual birth-day held a surprise for me. I was instructed to dress warmly and rise at 5:30 AM. We hunted down some coffee as the sun came up on Park City...

And then I was transported to the launching pad. We were going hot air ballooning!

Part of the excitement was determining where to launch from and watching the flight crew unload and inflate the balloon.

It took about 15 minutes before we and the other 8 passengers could load into the basket, and in no time we were airborne. It was thrilling.

The pilot would turn on the burners to heat the air to make us gain altitude.

We first floated at about 3000 feet above the ground over Swaner Nature Preserve, but then we descended to only 100 feet or so above the Preserve to see if we could view any wildlife. This is the closest we will likely ever get to being able to enter the Preserve.

What I liked best about the ride was floating over many of our favorite mountain bike trails. Here is Glen Wild.

And the trails and another commercial balloon near Round Valley (it really looks round, eh?)

We tried to pose for this picture

But got this video instead



In this video you can see what it was like floating above the trails. The 60,000 BTU propane burners were pretty cool too.



The sprawl is very apparent from the air.

After about an hour, it was time to "aim" for the landing spot. The winds were very calm until just above the ground, where they picked up and caused the basket to tip over on its side during our landing. That was exciting!

So exciting that we needed to take a nap after the balloon ride to get some energy before I could open more presents.

I got so many cool presents from my family and friends, I can't list them here, but I just had to show off my present from Drew. This is the only thing I specifically asked for. Ain't she a beaut!

We also had energy left over to go on a mountain bike ride to our engagement spot.  Nothing better than celebrating my birthday with my most awesome friend and husband.

The rest of birthweek was nice too. I came down to work a couple of days and check on the house. Drew also spent some time at the house but managed to ride a lot. I raced on Wednesday, earning myself a blue ribbon birthday prize, and Thursday we had birthday dinner and dessert at Easy Street in Park City.

I guess the 40 club isn't so bad!

Race Reports: Deer Valley Pedalfest and XC @ Sherwood Hills. Intermountain Cup mountain bike race series races 7 & 8

19th Annual Deer Valley Pedalfest

In honor of my birthweek, and since our house was being ripped to shreds, had no power or heat, and the temps in the valley were down to 45 degrees at night, Drew and I decided to get a hotel up in Park City last week.  This would allow us to sleep in a bit for Saturday's race and take a hot tub after the race.  Since I had never raced the Deer Valley Pedalfest before, I was really looking forward to it.  I also wanted to redeem myself after my dismal performance at Draper. 

Saturday, though, was not a day for racing.  It had rained and snowed on and off all day Friday and at about 8 AM, the skies opened up big time.  The race was postponed until Wednesday.  Instead of racing, we drove down to the valley and went to the gym to race each other on the stationary bikes.  Lame!

By Wednesday, Drew had ridden over 12 hours already this week, so he decided instead to donate his race entry to a future race for me and volunteer to help the race organizer.  It was fun to have him cheering me on at the side of the course.  He also got a ride in on the race course after the race, picking up the course marking flags and signs.  I think he liked being on the race course with no one else around in the rain and cold.   He is a strange man.

On the start line, I was pleased to say goodbye to Erica T as she wheeled up to the Pro Woman category.  Erica has beat me in every race except one this year and it is good that she is challenging herself in the Pro category now.   

Start of the Expert Women and a bunch of other categories.  

Right off the gate is Little Stick, a climb up the very steep service road.  With the weather still really cold (45 degrees and light rain), warm up was essential, but difficult to achieve.  I took off as fast as I could, and somehow, that was fast enough to put me in first place at the top of the climb by a good little distance.  A tight twisty singletrack descent followed, on which I think the other 5 gals gained a little time on me.  By the middle of the second climb, they were probably only 15 seconds behind me.  Uh, oh, time to step on it.  I pushed a little harder, but two of them were still with me on the last descent of the first lap. 

Me coming around for another lap.

On lap #2, I just put my head down and dug deep on Little Stick, which must have put a fair distance on them because I never saw another woman again.  It hurt, but I came across the finish line in first place!  How cool is it for me, a just-turned-40-year old, to beat out the 28-year-old 2nd-place and 21-year-old 3rd-place finishers?  Pretty cool, that's how.

 

 Expert Women podium. Blue ribbon and a $25 gift certificate to White Pine sporting goods store.

Wimmers XC @ Sherwood Hills

With only 3 days between the postponed Deer Valley race and the Sherwood Hills race, and the fact that Sherwood Hills is an hour and a half drive from SLC, I didn't expect a lot of competition, but I was still disappointed to see only 2 other gals on the Expert Women start line with me.   One of the racers was Margaret H, who beat me at the St. George race because she can climb like a maniac. 

SH is a fun maze of narrow singletrack through scrub oak forest, interspersed with some double track sections for passing.  As it was, I never had to pass either of my competitors the whole race 'cause I was out in front from the start!  Somehow, even though I was unable to get to sleep until 4:30 AM on Thursday night, I had it in me to race strong.  I remember on the third lap thinking to myself how much I liked racing, training, and eating right.  I liked how it felt to be able to ride at my maximum level for an hour and a half.  And I especially liked the blue ribbon!   

So goal #3 of a first place finish has been achieved twice in one week.  Now there is only the over all series points to work on.  5 races left...
 

House addition - continued demo and walls

Lots of progress on the addition.  The foundation walls of the new basement room are poured

 and waterproofed.

I also had them install a water supply line exiting the basement below frost level so that I can have irrigation water to my someday-to-be-planted veggie garden.

So the back wall of our house looked like this at the end of last week.

This week started with Rich and Adam taking down the outer layer of brick on the back wall.

It was disturbing how easily the bricks came off.

Then the tricky part.  The fellow in the center of the picture below

is using this giant 36-inch diameter diamond-tipped blade (reportedly worth several thousand dollars)...

to cut through our foundation. It was pretty cool how they first installed anchor bolts and brackets onto the foundation to hold the giant saw.  Then the operator just moved the blade up and down on the brackets to make the cut.

They made vertical cuts all the way through the foundation at several locations.  This left essentially several pillars of support for the back wall.

Saturday, we were able to backfill around the foundation a little.  The operator was an expert with the shovel. Look how close he gets to the vinyl fence and temporary electricity panel.

Our junior readers really enjoy large-equipment action video.  Here you go, Connor, William, and Noah.



Drew and I have been helping out a little bit when an extra hand is needed or with general cleanup.  We spent one morning cleaning concrete off the forms and swabbing them down with a diesel fuel mixture so we could get them out of our driveway.  I have been harvesting the brick from the wall to be reused in the fabeled garden, and Drew helped wrangle the basement window well into place.

So it is that much more satisfying to take in the progress at the end of the day atop our dirt pile.

Since the back wall was soon to come down, I had to move everything out of my closet. I set up some plastic shelving in the foyer, since we are now down to only one very small closet in the house, which is going to make our new room-sized master closet feel like a warehouse!  I took the opportunity to purge unwanted or worn-out clothes.  Had to say good-bye to my favorite slippers.

We both had to work on Monday, so we didn't get to watch the final layer of brick on the back wall coming down. Maybe it is better that way; you don't really want to watch what this next series of pictures shows happening to your house.  Adam, our contractor, was kind enough to take these pictures for us.

So I came home to this.  Yup, that is the stairwell to the basement and my closet.

And below is a large portion of our old foundation crumbled down. We didn't ask for a walk-out basement, but we got one!

Here is a video from the inside.



Yesterday they put up a temporary back wall for the weekend to secure our house and protect it from the thunderstorms in the forecast.  Next week will be even more exciting. Stay tuned!

Race Report: Stan Crane Memorial in Draper. Intermountain Cup mountain bike race series race #6

Drew was able to switch around his schedule and race with me on Memorial Day at the Stan Crane Memorial ICUP race. I think the real reason he moved his schedule around was so he could attend the team barbecue and potluck.

The weather was good this year.  Good enough for Stella to come out of her usual spot in a small box behind the counter at the bike shop.

As for the race, where else can you race your mountain bike within the city limits of a suburb of a major city on really awesome trails?  Utah's got a lot going for it.

 As for the racers, Drew did well, finishing a good solid middle of the large 40+ pack of racers and felt good. Me, not so much.  I finished in 7th place out of 9, behind a couple people that I have been able to beat before.  Could my dismal performance have been due to the two glasses of wine I had the night before, or staying up late two nights prior, or the strange occurrence of a water bottle rolling off the dining room table with no apparent cause to wake me up at 5 AM on race day. Possibly. Or maybe this 39 and 23/24ths year old just can't keep up with the fast girls. We'll see on Saturday.

House addition - demo and foundation

Should we do it or shouldn't we?  This house is great for just us, but when guests come, we get a little crowded. We don't need a bigger house, but it would be so nice to have an open kitchen where we can both cook and be together in our office space and entertain.  Are we going to be here for a long time?  Why not, it is a great neighborhood and we love Utah. But we live on the Wasatch Fault so we'd be doomed in the inevitable earthquake in our brick masonry house.  But that might not happen in our lifetimes and hey, a new home addition would be built to today's earthquake-resistant building standards. 

So goes our thoughts over the past 4 years.  With the down turn in the economy, we thought now just might be the time to find a good contractor and just do it already instead of dreaming our lives away.

So on May 13, we broke ground on a new addition to our house.  We'll be adding onto the back of the house, which will increase the footprint by about 245 feet, but we'll go up a story for a master suite and add a full-height basement.  In the end, we will almost exactly double our living area, which will bring our house to a modest 2400 square feet.  We'll have 2 bathrooms and 3 to 5 bedrooms, depending on what you want to call a bedroom (which would depend on if you feel good about putting your kid in a basement room without an egress window, I guess). There will be plenty of storage and a master closet about the size of our current bedroom.  I'm not kidding; our current bedroom is 10'x13'. It will be so nice.

So here are some pictures of the progress so far.

I didn't get a very good outside "before" picture, but you can at least see the mess we had going on back there.  The deck was a scorcher in the summertime too, since this is the south side of the house.

I put the deck on the online classifieds (love 'em!) and was able to trade the redwood in the deck in exchange for the nice dude's labor to remove it.  I'm glad the wood will be reused.

So then we were down to this for several weeks.

The real work started on May 13.  Our contractor, Adam [Lone Peak Builders] and his father removed the small back room that had once probably been a screened-in porch but had eventually been made into the eat-in kitchen area.  That really opened up the kitchen for a few hours :-).

The next step was to move the power line, which Drew had just buried a few years ago. I wish I had been allowed to operate that little excavator; it looked like fun, but there probably wouldn't be a fence or trees left if I were driving it.

My artist cousin Ruth was staying with us for a couple of days at this time, so she got to be in on some of the excitement and dream big with me on future landscape plans.  It was great to visit with her and show her a little bit of our town.  She'll probably be the last house guest that has to sleep in the basement on a hard futon.

Then it was time to dig for real.  This is the view from our back door while they were digging the basement excavation.

We found a really cool hand-dug well!

It was only seven feet deep, so Utah water well abandonment regulations didn't apply, but I still had the guys backfill with the clayiest soil we had dug out and add water to compact it.

The location will be under our basement slab, so that will surely seal it.  It was a shame to destroy what must have taken the first inhabitants of this house days of hard labor to dig.

So at the end of the day, we had a large excavation in our back yard. About 25 feet by 17 feet by 10 feet deep.  I think they said they hauled off 5 dump trucks of dirt.

The hole was huge.

And so was the pile of dirt stockpiled to be used later as backfill. 

That was a Friday.  It rained a lot that weekend and I was worried we were making a swimming pool, but the ground absorbed it nicely.

The next step was footings, which Drew helped construct.  If you look closely, you can see three different layers of sediment on the far wall of the excavation. The top grayish black 2-3 feet above the electrical conduit is top soil, the next couple of feet is a wonderful loam, and the bottom 1 foot is gravelly loam.  We are very close to the Wasatch Fault, and I suspect the gravel is a fault-related deposit.

The footings set up for a couple of days, and then it was time for walls.

Because our driveway is narrow and new, a big heavy concrete truck would probably crack it.  For this reason, Adam opted to have a concrete pumper truck out on the street that used a gigantic long boom over the house to reach the site.  This video is about a minute long and shows the Alta View concrete operator with a remote control unit on his chest extending the boom on our tree-lined street over our house.  It took quite a while, so I sped up the video by 4x. It is pretty amazing what they can do.



And here is a very short clip of the concrete going into the forms. The guys definitely earned their pay that day; it looked like very hard work.

So we have let the concrete cure over the weekend and this week they'll be framing!