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I've decided that 3rd gear is my favorite in the truck. Its V6 is decently torquey and it pulls well in 3rd. 1st and 2nd are both a waste.

The Porsche, on the other hand, seems to feel best in 2nd. Same with my Talon, which would spool out best in that gear.

I was thinking this had to do with the balance between the torque bands and the gearing, but I recall the BMW felt really at home in 5th and it had neither a particularly flat torque band nor hyper-short gearing (although it was definitely on the short side).

Yours?

Two coats of poly down, maybe one more to go. I'll see how the finish looks tonight.

We spent most of the day preparing and staining a handful of new furniture pieces we picked up a week or so ago. Actually, staining isn't the right word to use since we're not actually using any color—much like the last time I finished furniture, we're going with a coat of conditioner followed by two coats of clear polyurethane.

Looks good so far. The fumes are pretty wicked, though.

This is our front walkway. It's supposed to be stone surrounded by patches of creeping thyme. So this pile of sand? Seemingly came from nowhere.

Or it was pushed up from beneath by a mole or something.

My folks were in town for the last few days and we took them whale watching on Friday morning.

We only really saw one whale—a Humpback (and reportedly the first of the season spotted in Puget Sound)—and even then only saw a bit of its back as it lurched underwater.

Did get a great shot of this bird, though...I think it's a Great Blue Heron.

Actually, it ran last Tuesday when I finished putting everything back together. Here's a shot of the transmission about to be installed—either for the first or the second time, I don't recall exactly.

There are still a few kinks to work out of the system (notably an electrical system which refuses to recharge the battery) but I can work those out separately.

I've taken the day off to reinstall the clutch on the Porsche.

It took five weeks to get all of the parts together. I'm really excited to make some progress on this.

We bought cat grass a week or so ago and watered it a few times. Much unlike all of the house plants which we would like to grow, it made pretty significant progress.

Oh yeah.

We went camping this weekend with a bunch of friends and had an awesome time all around. It was at Tolt MacDonald park again like last time. The 'camping' part is arguable given that we were in a yurt but it was still a great time.

This is me winning the bocce ball tournament.

Lots of bumblebees around the garden these days.

This is the second incorrect flywheel I've had shipped to my house. I spent a few weeks trying to find a machine shop who would machine down the old flywheel on the left (it was pretty close and nobody thought they could take it down) and now I've spent another few weeks shipping new flywheels all over the place as I figure out what the hell is going on with mine.

They're close but not quite the same.

Yes, that's a shark. It turns out it's really easy to catch shark while fishing in Puget Sound.

A bunch of us went fishing Saturday morning as part of Rich's bachelor send-off, and ended up catching a bunch of flounder and three sharks. This was one of the largest of the three.

P.S. Also, we drank a lot of beers (you can see some empties in the foreground). The EXIF on the photo is in UTC, but you can figure out from the filename that we had already gone through a few brews by 8:45am.

Apparently my recent webhost server upgrade (done to accommodate upgrading to Movable Type 5, which requires updated versions of PHP and MySql) left the home.milkmandan.org subdomain broken. It looks like I'm too lazy to type "home" anymore ("www" is good enough for me) but all of the external links pointing to this site still use it.

So, it's back.

It's the pinnacle of convenience.

One of my office plants has needed a repotting for a while now. I was at the office today and had a chance to bring it home to drop it in a new container ... even though my mode of transport was the bike.

Worked out alright.